Pinnacle - digital evidence management software for body-worn cameras

Challenge

Pinnacle Response design and manufacture body worn cameras for the security industry. We were tasked with replacing their existing DEMS software with a bespoke but industry-leading platform that also addressed a number of shortcomings in their old software:

• Redaction: Privacy and security is at the core of Pinnacle's business, so being able to redact people and objects from videos should have been an easy task
• Reporting: It was difficult for Pinnacle to know exactly what was going on in their previous solution. Who was using what parts of the system and were customers getting the most out of it
• Responsiveness: Customers today expect a modern, responsive web experience. Their existing software felt old, clunky and far from intuitive
• Support: Pinnacle's support team were overloaded with support tickets, most of which could be solved by implementing better user and account management
• Cloud & On-Premise: The new system had to support on-prem installs for Windows, macOS and Linux, but also maximise the flexibility and scalability of AWS

Approach

A key challenge for this project was delivering within a fixed price whilst maintaining some level of flexibility for the benefit of the customer. This meant finding a way of working that enabled rapid iteration, tight feedback loops and yet kept the project on time and in budget.

We had to somehow define a process that had all the trappings of an agile project (sprints, planning, retrospectives, etc) and yet worked within the constraints of a fixed price. In the end, this was made possible by working hand-in-hand with the client, constantly trading priorities, scope and time so that the overall project could remain within budget.

Communication was excellent. Professional consistency made for a very calm and enjoyable experience for us. At no stage did we have any doubt on the complete success of this rather extensive development project.

From an architectural point of view, the DEMS platform was broken into 3 parts:

• A backend API, deployable in AWS/ECS and customer hardware, built using Kotlin and Spring Boot
• A web application built using TypeScript and Angular
• A TornadoFX and Kotlin desktop application used to upload videos from the body worn cameras to the DEMS system

Outcomes

Pinnacle now have a best in class DEMS platform that works seemlessly with their body worn cameras to make capturing, editing, searching and managing of evidential videos a breeze. At the time of this writing (Feb 2021, ~6 months after release), the cloud version of the product has successfully transcoded and stored over 70TB of video data in production and is processing up to 4000 videos a day.

All key deliverables were met on time, often exceeding expectations. Communication was excellent. Professional consistency made for a very calm and enjoyable experience for us. At no stage did we have any doubt on the complete success of this rather extensive development project.

Colin Stanford - CEO, Pinnacle

The full product specification can be found on Pinnacle's website.