Versaterm Inc. is a Canadian company based in Ottawa, Ontario that develops computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems for police, fire, and other public safety agencies. Former Royal Canadian Mounted Police employees established the company in 1977; the group had previously developed the Canadian Police Information Centre, a national police database. Versaterm and its rival Niche Technologies, also based in Canada, have "cornered much of the market" for records management in North American police forces, according to The Globe and Mail. Despite its dominance, many of its systems have been criticised by officers for their unwieldiness and unreliability, and several police agencies have abandoned their use.
Products
CAD software
Police agencies that have employed Versaterm's CAD system include Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. An inquiry by KXAN News into Austin's use of the system found that several critical hardware and software failures between 2008 and 2010 disabled the system for hours at a time, forcing operators to instead handwrite information when receiving emergency calls.
Portland adopted Versaterm's system in 2011, at a cost of $14.5 million. Officers made hundreds of complaints in the months following the launch; reported problems included "system-wide crashes", incorrect dispatches to calls outside officers' jurisdictions, failures in tracking officers' locations, and issues with the font size and functionality of the user interface. British Columbia, Minneapolis, Portland