Session today regarding specific deals that we have in our pipeline. As the presentation is being webcast, please ask all questions via the microphone that we'll be providing. Also, please note that during the course of today's presentation, we'll make certain forward-looking statements. We now have a safe harbor statement on the screen. For those of you listening on the webcast, it is a presentation that's posted on the Investor Relations site. Please refer to the SEC filings on our website for discussion of certain risk factors that could impact our future results or performance. The company cannot guarantee any future results or performance and undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements that may be made during today's presentation. Now, I'll turn the presentation over to Luke Larson, President of TASER.
Great. Thanks. Corps infantry officer, did 2 tours to Iraq, then went to business school and joined the company. In the last 8 years, we've had an incredible run at the company. I joined as a product manager on the Axon business, and it's been really awesome to see that business grow, and that's what we're gonna talk about today, is the future of the company. Just going over a couple snapshots of the company, and it looks like this is not working. Just maybe get that set up here. So, TASER went... was founded in 1993. We went public in 2001. We've been public for about 15 years. We're in about 95% of law enforcement agencies in the United States.
We've got 500 employees, and what we're really focused on is, we believe every police officer in the world should carry a TASER weapon, have an Axon camera, and have a seat on our Axon platform, and that's what we're gonna talk about here today. So for those of you that have been following TASER for a while, you'll know some of our product evolution, but I wanna talk through some of the phases of where we've come from. So our first products, we were really trying to figure out neuromuscular incapacitation with our TASER weapons, and how do we deliver this effective force through the weapons technology? And the weapons were an amazing success. The next phase of our development, we introduced the TASER Cam product, which we heard back from the market.
They needed to have visibility on these, really sticky use-of-force incidents. Once we put the camera on the product, what we realized is, this is a great, tool to show accountability, but the best way to do that would be not to have it on the bottom of the weapon, but to be on the officer. So we moved the cameras up to our wearable cameras, and this led us to ask, "What do we do with all this digital evidence?" Which was the genesis for Evidence.com, which has morphed into an entire Axon cloud platform that we're gonna talk about here today. So for those of you new to the TASER story, we've got two business segments. We've got a weapons segment and an Axon segment. Our weapons segment is about 83% of our business today.
The Axon segment is 17%, and for those new to the story, we just passed an incredible milestone in Q1. Our Axon bookings surpassed our weapons segment. So in Q1, we did $52.1 million in bookings for our Axon business. Our weapons segment revenue for that quarter was $45.8 million, and that's a key milestone for us because we know revenue trails the bookings. And so what we believe is we've got a business that is, at a minimum, is gonna be equal to our TASER business, and we think it can be much, much larger. One of the other things that we're really proud about at TASER is the management team that we've put together. We've put together just a very impressive team. I'd encourage you to go online and check out these guys' backgrounds. I'm not gonna read them all.
Today, we have several of our Section 16 officers presenting. Rick Smith, our CEO and founder, Josh Isner, our head of global sales, Marcus Womack, who is our general manager for Axon business, and Dan Behrendt, our CFO. We also have some of our other management team with us here today in the back. Doug Klint, who's also a Section 16 officer and our general counsel. Doug is somebody you don't want to be on the other side of a legal engagement with. Bill Pagel, our SVP of operations, in the back there. Bill, if you don't mind waving. Jay Reitz, our VP of software engineering. Darren Steele, our VP of marketing, training, and communications. Glenn Hickman, our VP of hardware engineering. Sid Falk is also on the management team. He's been with us for about a year from McKinsey.
He's currently awaiting his second child, so he couldn't be here with us today. We've got a great agenda lined up. It's really exciting to be here in New York. Had a wonderful run in the park this morning, and with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our CEO and founder, Rick Smith.
Thanks, Luke. Good morning, everyone. It's humbling to see such a big crowd came out to spend the morning with us. At TASER, we are a company that really enjoys doing things that people tell us couldn't be done, starting with operating this remote. Look back at our history. I remember when we first rolled out the TASER, standing in a booth talking to police officers saying, "There's no way we're ever gonna use electric weapons on people here in America." You know, and then I remember in 2006, saying they're the same sort of sentiment. "Cops are never gonna wear cameras. It's Big Brother," right? And then more recently-
... Police will never put their data in the cloud. This is police evidence. We have to protect it ourselves. Well, you know, if you actually compare how we've done against those statements, yeah, they will use electric weapons because it is a far more humane use of force. In fact, we're the predominantly used use of force in North America and growing in other parts of the world dramatically. I think we're also the most prevalent use of force in the United Kingdom now. But we've grown from negligible to now, you know, it's a substantial business, selling over 100,000 weapons a year. Cameras, we're now hearing world leaders, from President Obama to the Prime Minister of France, saying they're gonna put cameras on every police officer.
Now, when you talk to police chiefs, they're telling you it's coming, and it's coming soon, that police will wear cameras as standard-issue equipment. As far as, are they gonna use the cloud or not? Every one of our major city customers, and we're about half of the major cities today, are using Evidence.com, and we've ingested 3,500 TB of information, or 3.5 PB. You can see that growth curve. I'm a big fan of exponential technology, and that is a pretty great example of exponential growth right there, so we're getting a lot of utilization of our cloud platform. Our mission, you've heard us talk before about these first two items, protecting life, we wanna make... We fundamentally use technology to address the social problem of violence, and we do this in three ways.
One, we make weapons that don't kill, or at least are designed not to kill. You can always have the edge case where something bad happens, but much safer weapons. Protecting truth, let's get to the underlying causes of violent behavior. How do we hold people accountable? I'll talk more about how we do that with cameras. This third idea of empowering heroes. What we're talking about there is, we've identified that in every society on Earth, you have a public safety function, people whose job it is to keep community functioning and safe, and that function is vastly underserved by technology. So we see an opportunity to upgrade the tech profile of the global law enforcement community, and that'll have tremendous impact on community safety around the world, and we can build a substantial and highly defensible business in doing so.
All right, so again, put simply, our mission is to make the bullet obsolete. It is ridiculous to me that even today, it is acceptable to blow holes in people with lead balls. That's how we fought the British hundreds of years ago when we were riding horses, and you think about how, you know, communication was with a quill and paper. Technology has changed so many aspects of our lives. We want to bring technology into this space to where when my grandchildren are growing up, I'll be damned if it's still acceptable that you're gonna blow holes in people with lead bullets. We can do better. Electricity is a far more effective and humane approach. We've got, on our technology roadmap, still a long ways to go, but we've made some pretty progress to where we're at today.
So our vision is much bigger than any of the products we're selling today. We're gonna leave a footprint that is world-changing. Now, let me break that down to, from a business focus, our short to mid-term priorities really relate to three items. One, our smart weapons. Now, in our weapons business, we have a fairly mature, highly profitable, cash-generating business, and our philosophy there is to grow profitability. To grow, but grow profitably. In our Axon business, really here, we're in what Geoffrey Moore would call the tornado. We have just crossed the chasm from the early adopters into the main majority of adopters. We're experiencing triple-digit growth rates. But right here, what you'll see is the real value of what we're building is it becomes far more valuable if we capture a dominant market share position. So here, we are not as focused on profitability.
We're absolutely focused on short-term profitability, that is. We're very focused on dominant market share and capturing up as much market share as we can. Then, the third area is internationally. You know, law enforcement around the world face similar challenges that we do here in North America, and we've put a lot of focus on bringing our solutions to the rest of the world. Now, let me touch briefly on the value proposition of each of our sort of three cannonballs I just talked about here. Now, if you think about weapon technology, historically, you have to make a trade-off between safety and effectiveness. Pepper spray, hey, it's really safe, but I could show you video after video, pepper spray causes pain. That works on some people, but on a lot of people, it makes them more violent. You get into things like kicks, punches, baton strikes.
Right? You look at a police officer's belt, this is what they're carrying, or they're using their, their fists, et cetera. With each of these, they become more effective by causing more injury, so safety goes down as effectiveness goes up, and ultimately, you have the most effective weapon, which is a firearm. It's effective because it kills you. Well, that's not very safe to the person on the receiving end. TASER is a game changer in that by using electricity, we can have an extremely high degree of effectiveness in incapacitation and yet an extremely safe weapon with an injury rate that is well under 1%.
Now, not only is this something that creates, sort of this game-changing, capability where it doesn't require injury, we see this create tangible customer benefits with dramatic decreases in police officer injuries, dramatic decreases in injuries to the people they have to subdue, and dramatic decreases in all the costs associated with these things. An injured cop is a very expensive proposition. If someone has a career-ending injury, that agency now, effectively, through their, through either their self-insurance or through their external insurance, is paying for that officer's livelihood for the rest of his life when he can no longer be productive. We eliminate many of those things from ever happening. So that's our Taser weapons. Talking briefly about cameras now, as we move into our Axon segment. There's a very compelling set of data around cameras.
Now, we're seeing study after study come out, clearly showing complaints dropped dramatically. We all expected that. Frankly, I'm a fan of police. I think they get harassed constantly, and they get all sorts of false complaints. That problem nearly goes away. What we were surprised to see was the number of use-of-force incidents that are declining. Turns out, when a cop wears a camera, a police officer without a camera is 2.5 times as likely to be involved in a violent incident as a cop with a camera. Cameras don't just document behavior, they change it. And as a result, for example, in Rialto, they found that just based on the hard costs of complaints going down, they saved $4 for every $1 they spent on the program.
If you include some of the soft costs, because they had 3 people in internal affairs, but when the complaints dropped so dramatically, they could redeploy 2 of those people. They only needed 1 person in internal affairs. If you include those soft savings, their return on investment goes to almost $8 for every $1 they spent in the first year of the program, and that's before you start bringing in things like decreases in litigation costs, where their guilty pleas are going up by something like 20%. Turns out, when you film somebody doing something, it's a whole lot harder for them to fight it later, and litigation, as we all know, is expensive, whether it's commercial litigation or criminal litigation. So we're seeing a very compelling case around body cameras. And then, let me click forward here one more.
In the international space, sort of our third area of focus, we're now—we're starting to see real success in the English-speaking countries around the world. We're now in every police agency in the United Kingdom, although only about 10% of the officers have a TASER, so big opportunity to expand the footprint. In Australia, every agency now has TASERs, and we have at least one or two agencies in Australia that have given TASERS to every officer, so we're starting to see this full deployment catch hold internationally. In the U.K., a few years ago, we had no presence with cameras. We were facing an entrenched local competitor. We've now won the three largest agencies in the U.K. and the British Transport Police. We're now clearly the market leader there. As you know, I've spent some time in France and Italy.
We're gonna talk a little bit later today. France is talking about a nationwide full deployment of body cameras. Now, from there, we're in a come-from-behind situation. There's another entrenched local competitor. Can't tell you how it's gonna turn out yet, but I think we've got a really good shot we would not have had if we weren't investing in putting a team in-country that we now have and me spending some time building relationships there. In Italy, we just got TASERs legalized. It's the largest police force in Europe, around 350,000 officers. We haven't sold a single unit there yet. We're still working through the logistics of how they're gonna do their field trials, but we're off and running. So we see a lot of opportunity. Overall, I'd tell you, the international opportunity is probably around 10x.
We're gonna conservatively scope that down later in the day, but rule... You know, rough rule of thumb, it's a big opportunity. Should be bigger than the U.S. Now, with that, I want to play a quick video showing how we've changed perception of the company in the United Kingdom. These are some of the real thought leaders in UK policing. Let's go and play the video.
This is taxpayers' money, and so it's really important that we had an extensive procurement process, and we feel that Axon TASER has demonstrated the best value for money for us. But just as importantly, for the operational officer, it provides a product that has worked every time. The hardware of the camera is extremely user-friendly. It's robust, it's ideal for policing, and the battery life lasts for an operational tour.
During the course of the trials, there were several intentional shootings. The footage proved to be extremely valuable in the post-incident procedure in supporting the officers and their accounts. The cameras have to be adjustable so that they're pointing in the right direction, because officers take aim in different ways, so that we need to be able to adjust the camera. And also, critical is the battery life as well, because it has to last for at least an eight-hour tour of duty, and it just so happened that Axon ticked all those boxes, so a number of significant forces have decided to partner with Axon.
Now, you heard a lot of talk about the cameras there, and the cameras are important, but it is not what's critical to the long-term success of this business. So I want to help you think about the business the way I think about it. So imagine you go back to someone. You're in the year 1990, and you're standing in a store talking to someone who's looking to buy a camera, and you have to explain to them the difference between just buying this camera or what it would be like if they could have a smartphone with an app like Instagram on it. A quick show of hands, how many people here have used a social application, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera? Okay.
Now, the difference here is, you know, obviously, with a smartphone running one of these apps, you can do everything you can with a camera. You can take pictures, you can print pictures, you can look at your pictures. But now, that's not the entirety of the value you receive. In fact, as you know, I've been traveling for the past year, and I took my family with me, and I've watched my 12-year-old daughter working on Instagram, and it is amazing what this 12-year-old girl can do. Not only can she take pictures, she can apply these filters and digital transformations. She looks like Ansel Adams when she gets done with the sort of artwork and media that she's producing. So you have this new capability to do things with these pictures that are much more rich, for example, than the old experience.
But that's not the big... The big game changer is she can live her social experience through it. She's connected to a community of users. When she met kids in Norway, they're still friends, and they're communicating in real time, and her friends back in Scottsdale. And this very rich multimedia communication that's happening with this community of users that runs on this platform, that is where she gets the value from it, and frankly, that's how the businesses get value, too. We know that Instagram and WhatsApp, these community-based tools, were not acquired or valued based on the software that they wrote. While they wrote great software, frankly, that's not the hardest thing in the world. What they built were communities of highly engaged users that were growing rapidly. That's what is really hard to replicate and is highly defensible.
Now, when I look at how my daughter uses Instagram, and then by comparison, I go to a business meeting, and I'm talking with our police customers, they're having a very different experience. In their work life, the tools they're using are archaic by comparison. Now, in a lot of places, we still do see paper, but you know what? The most forward-leaning public safety agencies in the world aren't using paper, but they effectively are doing the same thing. They're typing in a new medium. So they're still manually creating these written records by typing it on a computer and printing it out, and then somebody else is reading the written word. Nowhere is this near as rich as the communication experience that we all experience in our personal lives....
So that is what we're doing with Axon, is we're building a connected community, a secure, connected community for the global public safety organizations. So yes, we build cameras, and that's an important piece of this. The wearable cameras generate the content, so the user doesn't have to be filming with their hands. We also build a rich suite of mobile apps, and then we tie it all together in the cloud in a way that we are going to transform, and we're doing this. We're transforming a police officer's work life, the same way these social apps have transformed people's social lives. Now, there's a lot of differences as well, right? These social apps monetized by basically paying for advertisements. That's not what we're doing. What we're doing is we're building this community to automate the workflow across the people in that community, and they pay us for that.
These are professional, enterprise-grade applications that sit on top of this community, turning these paper reports into rich multimedia communication that is far more effective. That's why complaints go down. People don't believe this. They don't believe what the officer wrote. They believe this. You can really see what was happening, and it's far more efficient to generate these types of reports and information. So if there's one thing you take away today, my perspective, it would be, cameras are interesting, but it's this ecosystem of connected users. That is the long-term defensible value. Now, to build this out... Sorry, I must be at the very end of the range. You know, I'm just gonna wave and have you click at the back. We good? We'll do it that way. Okay, so building out the Axon business, really, I think of it sort of in four phases.
Number 1, we gotta build the network. You gotta get users on the network. Then we gotta get them using it, heavily. Third phase is we gotta integrate into their workflow, so they're not just using it as an individual, but they're using it across the community of users to do their work. And then the fourth is really layering in advanced analytics and high-value features. All right, so starting first, in terms of building the network, we've been very focused on getting the major cities. So go ahead and click 2 more times for me. We'll build out this slide. As we sit today, we've won over 80% of the agencies, of the major cities that have body cameras are on our platform, and we're at almost half of the major U.S. agencies already on our platform.
So we've got tremendous momentum, and of the segment where they've gone in a different direction, this is fragmented across, I think, three different competitors. So we are, by a pretty big margin, the current market leader. Now, that's in the major cities. Another important element of this community are the prosecutors, because every agency has to share information and evidence to their prosecutor. So last year, we launched our prosecutor platform. We have 20 of the major cities and counties now using Evidence.com for sharing their digital evidence. In fact, the State of Delaware just did a statewide adoption, where statewide, this is how they're moving digital evidence around, on Evidence.com. Then the last one I want to talk about is state patrol. State police are really an important part of this community.
The state patrols typically funnel information from the locals up to the feds and back. We've not done great in the states, in the state patrol level. In fact, as of today, I think we have zero of the state agencies on our platform. Why? Because we didn't have the right hardware product for them. State patrols are very focused on in-car systems. Most of what they do happens in front of their patrol car. We needed to have an in-car system. That's why last year we announced Axon Fleet, disruptively priced at $500, and I can tell you, we have a substantial portion of the state patrols are now in our pipeline, waiting to see Axon Fleet when it launches this summer. So we're. Stay tuned to see our progress there. Now, the second, so that's building the network. You gotta get people on.
That's our number one focus. Then we need to drive utilization, right? We're, we're seeing a lot of utilization already today, as you can see here, a lot of data ingest. Let's move forward, next one, and a second click to build out my slide. Now, we think about now, how do we integrate into their workflows? They're not just using it to store information, but to move it around. Here's just a couple examples. Our RMS and CAD integrator, this is to integrate into an agency's existing record management or computer-aided dispatch. So we can pull their call logs and match that up against their videos and automatically tag all of their data based on another pre-existing system. That reduces labor, officers don't have to tag things twice, and it increases accuracy. Hugely, it's really loved by the big agencies, and it ingrains us into their workflow.
Then, of course, I talked about the prosecutor platform, sharing across the community. Most prosecutors around the country are still using CDs. Right? When was the last time any of you in this room burned an image or a video to a disk to send it to someone? No, we don't do that anymore. You do it on a mobile platform. It's. We don't have to invent a new and different world here. We just have to bring 2016 into law enforcement, and we've built this online platform, and people are jumping on it. Okay, next slide. As we look at things today, this is actually from Europe. One of the major police agencies there did a time study, and they found their officers spend two-thirds of their time on paperwork and one-third of their time on police work.
When I show this in the U.S., I get nods. So I don't have a time study from the U.S., but people agree paperwork is a huge burden. Click forward 1 more. Now, once you're wearing a camera, I can have someone watch your video and probably write 95% of your reports for you. Well, as we all know, you know, machine learning is something that's moving at an accelerating pace exponentially. We are building our system for the world that will exist 10 years from now. So let's... Once we get all this information in the cloud where we can work with it, doesn't take a huge leap to see we don't need a human being to extract all that information.
As time, we can extract more and more of it from machine learning to the point where the operator, the human being, has to spend less time writing about what they did. Because we've got a recording, we just need to extract that information. Can you click one more time? So our vision, we believe we can flip that to where paperwork should be down to a third of police time instead of two-thirds. Obviously, this is a game changer, right? You're effectively doubling any police force by doubling the amount of time their people can spend doing the job that adds value in the community rather than documenting it. Click forward one more. You know, we do take the long view. Sort of for us, short term is five years.
Our objective there is to get everybody a TASER, a camera, and a seat on our platform. 10 years out, I'm really excited about our weapon pipeline. We'll have in 10 years, a weapon that'll go head-to-head with a pistol, and I think it'll hold its own, to where these non-lethal weapons will start to become the primary weapons, not just a secondary weapon in law enforcement. And long term, bullets are gonna be obsolete. The idea of police writing reports is gonna seem quaint, and we're gonna have built a platform that is really providing a technology underpinning for the men and women who go out and do this dangerous job. Okay, flip forward one more. You know, we had this idea... I've showed you these quotes before. You know, we do things that people tell us can't be done.
Click two more times for me. You know, now we hear this idea when—I've started to share this vision with some of our customers, and I hear the same. You know, I sort of hear this new disbelief. "Wait a minute. Police work always has involved paperwork. We've had people try and automate this before." Yep, this is different. Once we've got video of this, we've got the recording of the incident, we know we can start to extract data out of this. It just makes sense, and I look forward to telling you in another five years, the progress we make on this goal. And with that, I'm gonna sit back down, and yeah.
We've got each of the presenters will do maybe just a few questions to Rick on the vision, and then we're gonna do general questions at the end. Opportunity now, any specific questions from the group on the vision for Rick?
Can you just wait until I get the microphone? Any specific questions?
I don't have the slide in front of me here, but I noticed that the effectiveness of the cameras went down in more recent trials. Can you give any theories to why it was something like 80% with Rialto and down to 40% in some of the more recent studies?
Got you. So the question was, in terms of the, effectiveness of the camera? I don't think there's any trend line there. I think we're just seeing, you know, different agencies are getting slightly different results. But you'll see, for example, the use of force that was lower in Rialto was higher in Mesa and other places. So I think, you know, we're seeing sort of a range of outcomes, but all of them are, are pretty significant across both use of force and, and complaints. But I'm not aware of, you know, anything that's systematically different.
Just, drill down or elaborate a bit. I was struck by that last comment of in 10 years, the efficacy of a TASER weapon will be what a gun is today, or... Just give us some, share with us some of that vision.
Sure. Today, in the lab, a TASER is more effective than a bullet. If I hook you up to a TASER device, we can incapacitate you with near 100% certainty. A bullet strike to the head is very effective, but everywhere else, I mean, it's still a gruesome ordeal. But I remember the FBI did a study of shooting incidents, and they found that a kill shot to the heart still takes 14 seconds to stop somebody. So they can still return fire while they bleed out. So while, you'd say you don't take a TASER to a gunfight, I wouldn't take a gun to a gunfight. Don't get in a gunfight. Like, you know, even a gun, you might mortally wound the other guy, but chances are, if they're really motivated, they're gonna be able to fire back.
Now, where we're at today, the TASER, we're a muzzle loader. You know, we're a single-shot device. We're a double shot with the X2. But we're sort of where firearms were a couple of hundred years ago in terms of the multi-shot and delivery capability. Once we've got the effect dialed in on target. Now it's about delivery. How do we more reliably penetrate through clothing? That's one of the, you know, barriers we have to deal with. How do we improve clothing penetration? How do we provide a better multi-shot capability and extend the range? So it's really, you know, the things that we have to solve now are kind of straightforward engineering problems. We figured out the secret sauce of the effect. How do we deliver that effect more reliably on target?
So when I talk about a 10-year time horizon, really, what I'm talking about is multi-shot capability, improving the effectiveness through clothing, and perhaps extending the range to really be sort of in the same area as a pistol. Now, I don't think we're gonna see people like, quote, unquote, "give up their, their guns and only take a TASER," but 10 years from now, I would envision, I think it is reasonable that right now, when you see police going into a building, and they don't know what's inside, they've all got their gun out. And then once they calibrate the situation, they put the gun away, and they take out a TASER.
I think we can flip it to where, in situations of uncertainty, they're gonna have their TASER out, and then only if they know the guy's like, you know, heavily armed, that they would take out their firearms. We're seeing the social dynamics push that direction as well. I mean, police officers now understand shooting and killing someone is a really bad thing for that officer as well. So when you have a gun out, and you're going in, and you now have to make a decision in the blink of an eye, and you're, it's either death or no death, that's a really high bar to have to make that decision and have to live with it.
I mean, Luke, you were just telling me the other night, if you want to share the story from the incident, the event you were at, where the officer's reactions after killing someone.
Yeah. I mean, I think what we're seeing now is in the majority of communities around the country, they're rejecting the premise that they want law enforcement to use lethal force, and there's always gonna be a scenario where, you know, armed subjects, we have to have a counter to that.... Our vision is that counter is a TASER, and it's so much more effective that people would say, "Why would we ever use a lethal weapon?" So we're gonna have Rick hand over the mic here. We'll wrestle for it. And then, we'll do more Q&A at the end. And in terms of logistics, I'll probably just give you the finger nod 'cause this thing isn't working very good. So Rick talked about the vision and where we're headed.
I'm gonna talk about key aspects of our platform and the symbiotic relationship between Axon and our TASER business. Marcus Womack, our General Manager of Axon, is gonna talk about the technology behind the platform, and then Josh Isner is gonna talk about our go-to-market strategy, and Dan is gonna close with the financial aspects. So next slide. So what we're looking at today, I love the saying that if you wanna create a great business, find a really, really big problem. And what is today is we have this very, very big societal unrest. You're reading about it in the news. These are in the headlines. Pick up any newspaper, and you're gonna read about this tension that is happening between public safety and the communities, and this isn't just a U.S. dynamic. This is happening around the globe. This is a universal problem.
Google May Day, and you're gonna see riots in London and Sydney and literally across the globe. So you have this societal tension. On top of that, we have deep, deep inefficiencies, like Rick was talking about, in law enforcement. They're drastically underserved from a technology perspective. One major agency, one of the largest agencies in the country, still uses typewriters to write in reports, which is baffling that a modern-day police agency would still use typewriters. So we've got a huge opportunity here, and what we see is, on top of this, we are riding this exponential technology wave. And so you're probably all familiar with the three phases of computing. We had the mainframe era, the PC era, and now we're living in the mobile and wearables era with cloud.
And when we look at the adoption of cloud, you had your early, you know, consumer adoption with, with the internet and kinda consumer applications. Then you had the adoption in 2000 to 2010 in enterprise with, businesses like Salesforce. In 2010, we were really leading the way with getting government and public safety to use a cloud-based application, Evidence.com. Next slide. And today, we're really, really proud. We've got over a third of the market on the Axon platform, and what I would leave you with today is we don't necessarily need to win every camera deal, although we're very, very, compelling and confident in that space. Our real vision is we wanna get every officer on our platform, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. So we have six key aspects of our platform.
We don't just wanna automate workflows, we wanna transform workflows. We also have this really, really interesting dynamic where we're creating massive, unique data generation. The data that our officers are creating, no one else creates. We wanna enable network effects across agencies. We wanna own the channel in law enforcement. We're creating really, really strong brands, and then we wanna leverage training and development. So this is our Axon platform, and what it consists of is we've got multiple hardware extensions. We've got our wearable video cameras, our Axon Fleet product. We can ingest third-party systems. Our TASER devices are actually connected and part of the Axon cloud ecosystem. And then on the right here, we've got this robust software suite that includes our Evidence.com workflow, our prosecutor platform, and a suite of mobile apps.
What we like to think is the power of the cloud isn't the technology. This technology kind of fades into the background, and what we really do is connect the technology to people. What we're focused on is solving the jobs of our customers, where when they go to work every day, we're leveraging the power of that technology to make their job easier. The first aspect that I'm gonna talk about is transforming workflows. With our system, we didn't just create a point product with the camera, we looked at the entire workflow. I'm gonna give two key examples of that. The first is, how does an agency upload their evidence to Evidence.com? With our cameras, they just dock, and to the user, it's, it just magically uploads to the system. They don't have to spend any time doing anything manually.
We have one agency, one major, major city in the United States, has uploaded over 1 million videos to Evidence.com, and today they only have about 300,000 videos on the system. So instead of just automating that retention schedule, we've created these smart filters where we're leveraging the software to do that work. And to the agency, if they didn't use that system, they would have to have a team full of people manually doing those products. We not only automate the process, we serve that back to them in compelling ways, so we're transforming these workflows for agencies. The next key aspect is this concept of generating, kind of unique customer data.
So if you think about the really, really successful social media apps that Rick was talking about, with Facebook or Instagram, they're creating unique user-generated content, and that's the power of those platforms. We're doing something very similar with our Axon data. We're capturing very, very valuable digital evidence that no one else has. We're getting it from the officer's perspective, and we're creating just massive amounts of data that we can go back in and mine and serve back to our customers in unique ways. The next aspect of the platform is network effects, kind of networking, you know, 101, Metcalfe's Law. Every additional node you add on the network increases the value of the network. So we've really, really invested in creating workflows and features that power network effects. And I'm gonna talk about four key aspects.
The first is internal to the agency, which might not seem necessary, but when you start talking about agencies that are massive in scale, like London Metropolitan Police, NYPD, these agencies that have multiple thousands of users, it's really important that they can share information internally. The next aspect is sharing externally. We allow agencies to share externally with other agencies. So Bay Area Rapid Transit in Northern California, they're connecting with 20 different municipalities along their route, and they're able to share digital evidence through the Evidence.com platform. The next aspect is sharing with district attorneys and our prosecutor platform, and the final one is the capability to share with public disclosure for FOIA requests and others securely.
The next aspect of our platform is owning the channel, and this is something that we think is really, really important, is owning that customer relationship for multiple reasons. The first is we have very, very good customer intimacy, where we can listen to their needs and really drive products that are purpose-built for them. More important than that, we're able to then build that customer relationship and educate the customers on new things that they wouldn't know about. A key example is law enforcement is not going to voluntarily move to the cloud. We've got to educate them on the benefits, and by owning that relationship, we're able to communicate the value that we're creating.
The other thing that we're able to do is also offer them really, really flexible pricing programs that allow them to, you know, pay for for the capability in multiple ways, which I'm gonna talk about a little later. Strong brands is a key aspect of building the platform. The TASER brand is one of the most powerful brands in the world. It's up there with, you know, the Fortune 50 companies in terms of the power of our brand. I was recently in Amsterdam, and we're working on getting a specific license to set up our international office. In one day, literally within two hours, we were able to get an audience with the chief of police for Amsterdam, and we can do that around the world. With the TASER brand, we can get an audience with the most senior officials in policing around the world.
Very, very few companies can do that. What we realized, though, is the TASER brand, when I say TASER, your immediate recall isn't an Axon cloud-connected platform, it's the TASER weapon. So we've almost been too successful with the TASER brand because it's ubiquitously associated with the weapon, and we're really, really proud of that. It's like a, you know, a verb, "Don't tase me, bro," right? But we saw the need to create a new brand, our Axon brand. Axon today, probably not well known in the consumer space. In law enforcement, the majority of law enforcement knows the Axon brand, and we're building the gold standard so when IT professionals look to write that $10 million check, their recall is, "We're going with the Axon cloud-connected platform." The last aspect of the platform that I'm gonna talk about is learning and development.
With our TASER business, we train over 10,000 instructors every year. We've got 30,000 TASER instructors, and that's a phenomenal avenue to create mavens and advocates for not only the products, but the TASER business in general. We see a little bit of synergy with our Axon business, but what we realized is, the users aren't exactly the same, especially the advocates of the new technology. So over the last few years, we're starting to create an Axon network similar to our TASER instructor network, and we've invested heavily in learning and development. This is something that we've not talked a lot about. So with our learning and development platform, we're able to have massive agencies or very small agencies go through a training seminar and get up and live on these systems, and that's a huge competitive advantage.
We're hosting our first Axon user conference this June. We're gonna have over 300 of our existing customers come to Scottsdale and spend 3 days learning about how they can get more value out of the platform. Next slide. So why do we think we can deliver on this vision? Well, the first is capability. We've built extremely capable teams across the globe in Scottsdale, Seattle, Amsterdam, Sydney, and London. And not only have we built great teams, we've executed. If you look at our performance in the last 5 years, we've delivered on these results. The second aspect is conviction. We have conviction that what we're doing is really, really important. I was recently in D.C. for TOP COPS. This week is National Police Week in D.C., and this event was amazing.
They had 10 of the most heroic stories I've ever heard celebrating law enforcement and the very, very difficult job they do, and I'm gonna share one of them with you. A Phoenix police officer, kind of an every man's hero, Philip Atkins is in a marked Tahoe. He responds to a call that a gentleman has his girlfriend by knife out in the middle of the street. He rolls up to the scene, and this guy, Pedro Morales. Pedro Morales is a convicted felon. He's got a tear tattoo. He also has a throat tattoo that says, "Anarchy." And when Philip Atkins, our every man's hero, rolls up, he sees it's not a knife this guy has, it's a 3-foot machete, and he is literally getting ready to stab this lady in the throat.
The officer uses very, you know, quick decision-making, and fires his bullet into Philip's left shoulder. It knocks him back, and his girlfriend is able to flee, and they're now in this kind of Quentin Tarantino standoff, where the guy is waving the machete at him, and Philip Atkins has to decide: Do I take this man's life? And he would be justified in doing so. Philip Atkins says, "I'm not, I'm not gonna shoot you," and they're kind of circling around, and Philip Atkins' partner, John Smith, comes up, and he shoots the gentleman with the TASER, saving the guy's life, saving Philip Atkins from having to take a life, which is extremely, you know, that's a big event for a law enforcement officer that they don't want to do, that leaves lasting effects, and saving this, this guy's girlfriend from seeing, you know, her boyfriend shot.
And so we're really, really passionate about our mission, and that is mapping these technologies to public safety, so we can create safer communities. I'm gonna segue into our Axon- our TASER business. Our Axon business and our TASER business are very symbiotic in that we have the same channel in, and we actually have kind of multiplicative effects across marketing it and, and selling into the two. Next slide. Our TASER business, we're really, really proud of our smart weapons. Our latest generation of TASER weapons have very, very key safety features delivered in. They're the most safe devices we've ever developed. We also have forensic-level accountability, so these are phenomenal products. The customers love the TASER products.
To give you just an example of how much the customers love the TASER products, our customers have an affinity for the TASER brand, similar to Harley-Davidson owner, owner's brand affinity to Harley-Davidson. And our customers will actually get the TASER logo tattooed on their arm because of incidents like this one with Philip Atkins, where the TASER literally got him out of a difficult situation. Next slide. So when we deploy these, we see massive reduction in injuries for officers and suspects. Next slide. And Rick already talked about the reduction for injuries. What that leads to is this really, really big fiscal benefit. And you heard Rahm Emanuel of Chicago actually reference this as one of the reasons that he was pushing to deploy TASERs. This is a case study from Houston. Go back one slide.
You can see after they deployed TASER, they had a 93% reduction in workers' compensation claims. This is extremely compelling for agencies that are looking to deploy TASERs. Next slide. Now, you might be asking, you know, this is a mature market, what's the opportunity? Well, the opportunity is today, only about two-thirds of frontline officers carry TASERs. The officer in Ferguson, Missouri, did not have a TASER. The NYPD officers in the Eric Garner case did not have a TASER. The officers in these high-profile events in Chicago did not have a TASER. And to us, that's baffling. Every police officer in the United States and the world, when they're in these situations, a TASER would better resolve that situation, and we are very, very committed and have conviction to delivering on that, and we think it's a really, really important mission.
So to shift into more of a business aspect, the TASER business, really, really healthy gross margin. For those new to the story, we also have this kind of razor, razor blade, or, vacuum, vacuum bag, type element to our business. We've got this organic recurring revenue with majority cartridges. They, they fire about three cartridges a year, and then we also have some organic recurring, element with batteries, our warranty, and consumables. Next slide. So our opportunity in the U.S., there's about 600,000 frontline patrol officers. Only 400,000 carry TASERs. We think every officer should carry a TASER, and we are very committed to delivering on that. The next big opportunity for us domestically is to shorten the upgrade cycle.
Today, the upgrade cycle is about 8-10 years, and the useful life of a TASER is 5 years. So we are really, really pushing to get these officers to upgrade their weapons sooner. I'm gonna talk later about some compelling offerings that we're providing for agencies to do that. Then the third is, now that we own the direct channel, we have the opportunity to increase the average selling price of every deal with warranties and holsters and other items. So we think there's more opportunity to deliver more value to the customer in each individual sale. Then the last thing I want to talk about an opportunity where we're headed in the future. One of the things that we've learned, becoming a software company, is we could have a connected software service workflow with our TASER device as well.
We're exploring opportunities where we would leverage the power of software to introduce new things like notifications and reporting with our TASER devices, and we think that could be a service line, element as well. I'm gonna talk briefly about our TASER service plans. And what this means is, today, about 88% of our business on the TASER side is book and ship. Somebody buys a TASER, we ship it out to them. You know, it's kind of a one-time transaction. What we'd like to do is move as much of our TASER business as possible over to a service model. And so we've introduced a couple compelling plans, where instead of paying for the TASER upfront, agencies can pay for the device in multi-year installments.
What we see here is this moves from a capital expenditure for the agency, and we now own a line item on their budget. That's really, really important for several reasons. The first, for the agency, these are mission-critical products, so we want them to have the best technology capable. The second is, at the end of that five years, if we already own that budget line item, that means they're probably gonna keep paying in year six and onward and get the next TASER. So we think that's gonna shorten the upgrade cycle. That's our domestic opportunity. In international, we've got a huge opportunity. We think we have a $2.7 billion greenfield opportunity. This reflects the total market opportunity. On the last slide, I was talking about an annual element.
In international, we're really focused on building beachheads, building out the right teams, and building advocacy, and Josh Isner's gonna talk more about that later in his section. Outside of this great public safety business, we also have a consumer business. We just launched a really exciting product called Pulse. It's got a very, very elegant form factor, and we're hearing really, really good reviews. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this, but just wanna highlight that we announced a new product there as well. So to summarize, Rick talked about the vision, I talked about key aspects of our platform and the symbiotic relationship between the Axon and TASER business, and how we can leverage that business in the future to create new products and really grow the platform.
Before I hand it off to Marcus to talk about the technology aspects of the platform, are there any questions from the group? Sir.
Yes. Hi. Just the opportunity with upgrades of people who have weapons of more than 5 years, we know it makes sense, but they don't seem to upgrade when they should. How do you try to encourage more of that?
So I think there's two key elements on that. The first is, we've got to be in front of them. And so in the last five years or so, we've taken the majority of our business direct, and that way, we can go out in front of the customer and educate them on the value of the next generation of products. And the way we think about the business is, we don't wanna just continue to do price increases. We wanna be creating new products that create new value for the customers in compelling ways, and by having that direct channel, we're able to communicate that. The second piece is these pricing programs. We're really, really committed to moving as much of our business as possible over to these service plans, so we can shorten the upgrade cycle.
For the weapon side of the business, how do you view the potential long-term impact in private citizens with your weapons business?
In terms of police using the device or consumer-
No, potentially consumer adoption.
I think it's really, really exciting. I think once you hit a point where the weapon technology that we're developing is more effective than a lethal firearm, we open up a much bigger market.
Just as a follow-up on that, what sort of discussions have you had with the NRA?
We don't take the NRA head-on. We're not anti-gun, just like Elon Musk is not anti... You know, we're not focused on competing. We're focused on building something that's so good, that's so effective, people would just, you know, choose our product because it's better. So we don't like to, you know, compete head-on with the NRA. We're thinking, you know, we think we're in a different category. They're also not somebody you wanna, you know, poke in the eye.
Just on a follow-up on the consumer offering, how are you thinking of distributing this product?
So we've got a small team of about 10 individuals, and in our public safety business, that's a really big effort for us. We've got this small team that's really leveraging distributors and dealers across the country. So we're selling through existing channels rather than investing heavily building up our own distribution channel there. And with that, I'm gonna turn it over to our general manager of our Axon business market, Marcus. Before he starts, I wanna give a quick background on Marcus. So Marcus came to TASER by way of an acquisition that we did about three years ago with a company called Familiar, and he has been a phenomenal driver, and he joined probably six months before Ferguson happened. He said: Hey, I think this is a really exciting business, and you guys have a great mission.
Then, all of a sudden, we had this, you know, massive demand. And so I don't think Marcus has slept much in the last 3 years, but he's built out a team of 80 engineers, and he's done a phenomenal job for us. So with that, I'll turn it over to Marcus.
Great. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here, and thanks for coming. Luke is right. It's—I call it a rocket ship. I'm sitting on the edge of a rocket, and my hair is on fire. You know, it's been a challenge, but it's also been exciting in the same regard. So let's just go on to the next slide. I'll just tell you a little bit about the story of how we got here. My background is in digital media and entertainment. You can sort of ask yourself: What's a guy that's been working on online gaming and music, sort of, how does that relate to law enforcement?...
We sat down with Rick about 45 days before the acquisition happened, at the direction of Hadi Partovi, one of our advisors. You know, Rick just outlined the vision of where TASER was, where the direction of the company was going, because originally, we thought, TASER? Well, you know, are they a technology company? And then really, Rick set the hook, and that was it. And it was the mission, and it was the entrepreneurship of the company, and the people, and the opportunity that really hooked us. And so we've made some bold progress in the last 3 years. Since 2009, as Luke's pointed out, we've gone from 2 products in the Axon product line all the way to 14.
We've got an 80-person hardware and software team, focused on delivering transformative experiences. What really struck me is that, you know, Rick said, "Okay, you haven't worked in law enforcement. Okay, so for the first 90 days, you and the entire team, we're gonna go out, and you're gonna spend 90 days with the customers." We went to customer to customer to customer across the nation, and we spent, you know, days upon end working with... out in the field with officers, back in the with the record staff, you know, sitting in dispatch, taking calls. What I came to appreciate right away about Taser was the empathy that we have for our customers, and that empathy is important for transforming the customer workflow.
And so really, what we're aiming to do is on par with what happened to us ten years ago from a digital media standpoint. You know, I remember the days when it was really complicated for us to sort of drag and drop media files onto our iPods or our, you know, our Creative Zens. Well, right now, we're trying to transform the digital life of the officer, that experience from capture to court. But we're trying to do it in a way with a consumer focus, with a focus on human-centered design, that really sort of gets the technology out of the way and transforms that experience. We call it the consumerization of the enterprise. So taking that great technology that officers have today in their homes and transforming that experience. So...
That's really one of the central points of, like, how we develop our products. Ultimately, our goal is to transform public safety and this entire justice and public safety workflow. Next slide, please. So, you know, when we started this, you know, adventure into building cameras, we quickly realized these edge devices created gigs and gigs of data per officer. Our goal wasn't just to solve the operational needs in the fields with our customers, it was to solve every aspect of how that technology would be introduced into the workflow. So really, our vision was to create a platform that was really capable of driving efficiency and transformation within the agency. The result is we built the most comprehensive solution on the market today.
So from a workflow standpoint, we've created vertically integrated software and devices that work well together, that are purpose-built and actually work for everybody within the agency. So we transformed this workflow, and really what we think we've created is something much larger than just a body-worn camera platform. Next slide, please. So we're on our 5th generation of body camera. So we have a team of dedicated hardware and software engineers that are focused intensely on building next-generation features in these devices. So our engineers, just like I got to spend time in the field, they go out and talk to our customers. They understand, okay, they come up with things like the 30-second buffer. They figure out ways to make the camera last for a full shift.
Yeah, Superintendent Hutchison from the London Metropolitan Police, he called out, battery life for a full operational shift is critically important. So our engineers spend countless hours with our customers, coming up with new feature ideas to actually make sure that the devices are purpose-built and fit for purpose. Next slide, please. So what became really clear, we started a decade ago focusing on cameras. It started with our T-Cams at the base of our TASER weapons. And what became really clear is that our customers kept asking for more, whether it was a camera at the base of the TASER, then it was a body camera. These cameras, actually, the impact couldn't be more clear. So cameras change behavior, whether that be through reduction of use of force, or reduced complaints.
Both Rick and Luke talked about the impact that cameras have. Well, we're seeing that continue to resonate, and now it's resonating within the community with citizens as well, with the demand for cameras being off the charts in some areas. Next slide, please. So we built this great platform, and we recognized it wasn't just, you know, it wasn't just suitable for body cameras, but it was suitable for replacing other aspects and other devices that were in the officer's possession today, whether that be a video camera or a digital camera. How often do you all in your personal lives actually grab a digital camera, where you have to pull the memory card out and actually stick it into your computer to transfer images? It just doesn't happen anymore.
We thought the same, it shouldn't happen for officers in the field as well. So we built mobile apps that were designed to eliminate the need for hardware in the field by officers. So these mobile apps are revolutionary in that they secure the chain of custody for all evidence that's captured in the field, and they're directly connected to Evidence.com, so they're highly efficient. So no more manual workflow, no more you know, pulling out SD cards and putting them into computers. Next slide, please. What I'm really excited about is what we're launching this year. Rick talked a little about this, but Axon Fleet is the first cloud-connected in-car experience. So it's more than just an in-car camera, it's a fully connected experience that taps into the workflow of the platform.
It has automatic tagging, just like our body cameras have, and it's plug and play. And what I mean by plug and play is that you can actually take out a camera and put it in, and you can easily install it, and it's super simple, and ultimately, at the end of the day, it has a lower total cost of ownership. Next slide, please. So, you know, our cameras, our entire camera suite, it's the best on the market. So, we have the most comprehensive capture suite that's vertically integrated from capture to court. And you can read it in pilot studies by our customers, that highlight the features that we build. They're intuitive, they're purpose-built, they last for the entire shift.
And from a wearability standpoint, officers care what how those cameras are designed, they care what they look like, they care how they feel, and they care how they operate. In the same way, officers want a TASER to be mission-critical and to work well, they actually want the devices that they put on their uniform to matter, and having options, like different mounting options for different climates. So our cameras will work with a heavy leather jacket for the North, or they'll work for a lightweight duty officer down in Florida or in Arizona. And we work closely with our customers to make sure that all of our devices are wearable, and ultimately, we make sure those devices are connected. Next slide, please.
So I wanna zoom in and talk about our cloud solution, and really, you know, what's important here. We talked about hardware, software working together, and really transforming the workflow. You know, I talked a little bit about how what we did with mobile devices and what we're gonna do with Fleet, is that we carve out pieces of each. We see a workflow, we see the complexities of those workflows, and we look to transform that experience for our customers. And so really, what matters is the platform is the key differentiator. Next slide, please. So zooming in specifically to the platform, at the center is the cloud service, Evidence.com. So it's software as a service. And really, it's. We've modernized the way officers capture and manage digital evidence.
Our goal is to eliminate the physical CD from the digital evidence room, and provide a unified silo that or repository of digital evidence that can be taken from capture to court. When we think about digital evidence, we've broken it down into these five phases, and Luke really highlighted this, is that we wanna revolutionize each one of these experiences to make the efficiency of how officers capture data and move it through the process. We wanna make sure that there's no stone left unturned in this platform experience. Next slide, please. We're certainly leading here. As we've highlighted earlier, we've got over 6,000 agencies on the platform.
We get a file every 1.2 seconds, and we have over 3.5 PB of data that's been uploaded to the system. To put that in perspective, next slide, please. That's more than the entire Netflix catalog. And if you were to take each episode of Star Wars and make 55,000 copies of each, that's the amount of data that we're dealing with today, and that's continuing to grow, and we think we'll be, you know, getting multiple petabytes, you know, on a quarterly basis, ultimately by, you know, very, very soon. Next slide, please. But what's unique about what we've built? There's really sort of three key aspects. Number one is this transformational workflow.
We were the first to build a dock, that you could drop your camera in and walk away. We've now taken that dock experience, we've applied it to our mobile apps, and we're gonna apply that to Fleet. Really, what that does, is that drives efficiency and saves time. We've unified it into a repository, where you can manage data, users, and devices. All of the devices within an agency, our goal is to make it really easy to manage those end to end, but also create and put the data in one place, so you can manage the retention policy, as well as, make sure that it moves through the proper channels of the chain of custody. Lastly, it's all tied together with a large investment in security. We look at security from a people, products, and process standpoint.
We have an industry-leading security team that really changes the game in how we think about not only how we operate the service, but how we build our products. Next slide, please. We're a global service. We're in 7 regions in 17 different languages. We have an operational team that runs Evidence.com as a service, 24/7, 365 days a year. We have a, you know, commitment that we make to our customers about our uptime and our SLA. We commit to 99.99% uptime, and we often exceed that. Next slide, please. So what's unique about what we've built? I really look at it as from an enterprise cloud standpoint. Our-...
We have delivered a solution that works from the smallest agency of, you know, 10 officers or less, to an agency with thousands of officers. We're the only service that's been able to deliver device management at volume, so thousands of cameras can be deployed and managed within our systems. This is a competitive advantage for us. We understand what it's like to manage thousands of devices, update the firmware on those devices, make sure we're getting real-time monitoring about the health of those devices, and inform our customers about what it takes to actually keep a fleet of body cameras up and running. Second, our solutions are simple. They're defined with purpose, and they actually remove complexity from workflows, whether that be that dock-and-go workflow or that efficient tagging that Rick talked about from an RMS and CAD standpoint.
We reduce, officers having to actually type in record numbers because we have, you know, patent-pending technology that allows us to automatically annotate records that are captured in the field. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it's wrapped together, in our, what I call our governance, risk and security programs that help us lead the industry in how we're approaching how we store and manage our evidence for our customers. Next slide, please. So to zoom in really, on our execution, and this really shows our demonstrated success. So, we look at three different things. We look at bookings, licenses booked, as well as, recurring service revenue. And if you look at these three, you'll see the demonstrated success here.
Between the first quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, our bookings grew by over 220%. The licenses booked on the platform grew by over 270%, and our annual recurring service revenue grew by over 230%. So, what's clear, you know, the major cities have made the choice for us. Over 80% of the major cities are on our platform, have really signed up and are excited about what we're doing. Next slide, please. But we see what we've built has a pretty big opportunity within the U.S. We see a $1 billion total addressable market. That's a makeup of 600,000 patrol officers in the field and 400,000 patrol cars. Next slide, please.
To put that in context, on a global basis, we see the opportunity of over 2 million patrol officers and cars. And, you know, to put that in perspective, we as of today have 75,000 booked Evidence.com licenses out of the 600,000, in context of the 600,000 patrol officers in the U.S. So next slide, please. So that's where we are today. Our goal is to provide efficiency to our customers to solve problems and challenges that are really difficult. When we deployed a body camera early on, we recognized there's a tidal wave of digital evidence that's really not just, you know, weighing down the law enforcement agency, but everybody in the capture-to-court workflow is challenged by this tidal wave of digital evidence.
Our goal is to help our customers make that efficient, capture everything in one place, manage it with one chain of custody, and ultimately, we see where we're going, is gonna transform how they actually use that data, applying machine learning and computer vision that result from, you know, so deeper analytical analysis. Ultimately, we see the edge devices that we're building are going to be connected real-time, and they're gonna transform the officer's experience from a situational perspective to provide more real-time intelligence. All right, I think that's it for now. I'll wrap up. I think we have. We're gonna take a few minutes of questions, and then we're gonna have a short break.
I have two questions. One, on the TAM, it looks like the fleet opportunity is also fairly large. Can you just give a little more color as to how early you are in that process? And then secondly, obviously, because of your success, a lot of competitors have tried to get into the space, Motorola Solutions, even Panasonic and others. So on that point, when you do lose, and the few times you lose, why is that? And then secondly, when you look forward, are there things that some of these other competitors are doing that you're worried about or things that they can offer that may impact your competitive position?
Great. So three questions there. So the first one is the fleet total addressable market. We see there's 400,000 cars in the U.S. market today. We think that if... And I think about 260,000 of those cars actually have cameras in them today. We think with the cost of the solution we can bring to market and the workflow that we can deliver, we think that it increases the size of that market, 'cause I think if an agency really, you know, had the choice, their goal would be to deliver or to install in-car video solutions in all of those. And so, we think that there's a unique market to grow the total TAM and what's the installed base from a fleet perspective.
We're certainly learning more and more about that market as we bring the solution to market, but that's, that's at least how we look at it. Okay, so your second question, it was about-
Competitors.
It's about competitors?
Yeah. So, it's two parts. So the first part, when you do lose, why? And then the second part, if you look at existing competitors like VIEVU and Digital Ally, and then new competitors like Motorola Solutions, maybe even Panasonic, what are things that you're worried about or not worried about, and what are things that-
... they could be using in their sales pitches when they go to agencies, to, you know, chip away at your competitive leadership?
Yeah. So why do we lose deals? And I think, you know, there are, I think it's five major cities that just use those as an example, that we're not in right now. The number one thing is early on, this has been an objection to cloud. And so, the premise is some of these agencies want to manage their own data sets locally. Though, from a major city chief standpoint, there's a survey out that, and a recommendation from both IACP, that, like, now it's becoming more and more clear that cloud is the right way or more than likely the right way. And our service is, you know, head and shoulders above the rest, the most scalable cloud solution on the market.
And so, your question about competitors and sort of how do we think about what our competitors are offering from a product standpoint. I think our competitors generally offer those, just that, products, and we look at that from a solutions and workflow standpoint. So, you know, whereas in some cases, we're dealing with, you know, competitors that are just doing, you know, individual features in the camera to make the camera better, there might be, you know, individual features that are here and there. We try to reframe sort of what the challenges are in the context of the larger workflow. So, you know, I'll give you an example.
From our body camera standpoint, we didn't have HD until we launched our Axon Body 2, but we think about the entire system holistically, where we have an industry-leading redaction suite, where our competitors may just introduce one component of redaction. We offer bulk redaction, smart redaction, smart tracker redaction, as well as manual redaction, and we use our sort of experienced design team to tie that all together to where we have the best of breed services in the market. So I mean, I think we look at each competitor, and we divide them up into classifications as to whether they're just a camera competitor, maybe they're an in-car competitor that wants to go camera, or maybe they're an incumbent in another space that they want to get into the space.
At the end of the day, none of our sort of, at least some of the larger competitors, have delivered a solution at scale where they can manage tens of thousands of devices in the way that we can.
So we're gonna, we're gonna hold the rest of the questions till either the, the general, question session at the end. We're gonna take a five-minute break. When we come back from the break, Josh Isner is gonna talk to us about, our channel strategy. So five minutes. All right. We're, we're gonna go ahead and get started with our next segment. There's really been two phenomenal leaders at, at Taser that have driven our transformation from kind of a single weapons product company into this Axon solutions company. The first is Marcus, who you just heard present. The second is Josh Isner, who heads up our global sales. Josh is a Harvard grad. He joined the company in our leadership development program and quickly moved into a sales role.
In that role, he, within a few months, came back to the executive team and requested to make a proposal to take his region direct. And at the time, this was kind of controversial because why would you ever upset the apple cart with a great, you know, high-margin business like we have with TASER? And so, Josh, who, you know, is a silver-tongued devil, you know, convinced the team to take that part of the business direct. And he did such a good job that we gave him control over all of the domestic team, and has really been the thought leader behind scaling up the team and the growth that we've seen in both the weapons and the Axon bookings business.
A little over a year ago, we started getting him involved in international as well, and he's just done a phenomenal job for us. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Josh Isner, Head of Global Sales.
All right. Thanks, Luke, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. Like Luke said, I'm Josh Isner. I head up the global sales org. We're gonna start by talking a little about our domestic weapons business, and I think one of the misconceptions we wanna clarify upfront is the fact that we're saturated domestically. If you look up at the graphic here, we've still got about 200,000 patrol officers today that do not carry TASERs, and that assumes that every one of the 400,000 handles we've sold to date went to a unique user, so not upgrades or RMAs and so forth. So obviously, we know that's not the case, so we have plenty of runway here domestically, still in the domestic weapons business. Now, the question is: How do we, how do we capitalize on that?
If we look back to 2011, at that point in time, we had five TASER sales reps, and we had 23 distributors. Okay, so these 23 distributors, they were carrying hundreds, if not thousands, of products, and TASER was expecting them to dedicate most of their mind share to TASER's devices. Now, this was a big challenge for a number of reasons. Obviously, they want to sell all the products in their catalog. They also have trouble selling service plans, warranties, et cetera. So at that point, we made the shift to take more and more business direct. And right now, we've actually totally flipped things upside down, where we have 35 domestic reps for CEW and only three distributors left, who generally do a good job of selling our products.
Now, this channel shift led to a lot of really positive improvements. Top-line sales went up, gross margins went up. We've been able to sell warranties and our strategic programs, and just the focus on TASER, being in front of the customer, understanding the customer's concerns and problems, all of this stuff improved. And so it's been a really, really valuable tool to open up the channel and go direct. Now, most importantly, like I mentioned, the direct channel allows us to sell in our service offerings. And so when we're with the customer every day, explaining the value of these service plans, we've just seen phenomenal results early on.
We've seen LAPD, Chicago, and Minneapolis, in the last about 15 months, move on to what's called our Officer Safety Plan, which is not only the camera, unlimited storage, usage of our Evidence.com application, warranties, upgrades, it also includes a TASER, okay? And so these are three of the biggest departments in the... adopted this plan. Think with TASER 60 or some call it TASER as a Service, the spread-out TASER payments over time will achieve the same results now that we're working directly with our customers. Now, this channel and opening it up has led us to a position of strength, and we're really, really proud of this. Our customers view our sales reps as trusted partners or trusted advisors.
We come to our customers asking them what their problems are and how we can help solve them, and our customers trust that we deliver solutions that improve workflows and save lives and reduce injuries and so forth. We have a phenomenal brand, and maybe most importantly of all, the fact that we're in front of the customer with our own people allows us to gain key insights into our product development cycle. So now when our customers say, "Hey, we need this, this is gonna really improve how we use the product," we can take that back ourselves to our product development team and build that into our roadmap, which is a really valuable tool that we wouldn't necessarily have if we didn't have a direct channel. Now, on the CEW, the growth has been fantastic domestically. We're really proud of that.
We feel like we have a long way to go, though. I, I firmly believe that a TASER deserves space on every officer's belt in the entire world. And starting with the U.S., we still got a long way to go. And, you know, every single day, kind of the battle cry for our domestic weapons team is, we need to find a way to make TASERs a standard issue for our customers. And the second transformational goal is gonna help with that, and that's getting all of our customers on a service plan, whether it's TASER 60, the Officer Safety Plan, our upgrade plan called TASER Assurance Plan, making sure that they have ways to equip their officers with the newest, best, safest technology available on the market and allowing our customers to take advantage of those plans.
And again, it all starts with the right channel, which we think we have now. So now moving over to the domestic or the domestic Axon business. At every single sales meeting, we start with this slide with our sales team, and it's really simple, but it's really, really important. What it's saying is, what you believe affects the way you feel, and it affects the way you behave. And we believe at TASER, and our reps believe at TASER, that there's only one way to successfully deploy on-officer cameras and digital evidence management, and it's using Axon and Evidence.com, and the results have proven that. We really, really feel like we are the only company out there who can make customers successful over the long term and scale into the thousands of units. And again, you know, the results speak for themselves.
In the major cities in the U.S., we've won 30 of 37. The 7 we haven't won are split between three competitors. So we feel like we're executing really well. You know, early on, we had some objections to, you know, going to the cloud, and we lost a few early on, but we're executing well, and it starts again with our reps believing that we're the only people in this world that can solve this unique product for or problem for law enforcement. Now, taking a step down below the top major cities, which are kind of the top tier, you know, top 60, 65 accounts in the country, we have what we call the top 1,200.
Now, one thing we've said on our earnings calls, and it's a really important fact, is that 1,200 out of 18,000 accounts make up 70% of the total number of users in law enforcement. So if we capture the top 1,200 agencies in the US, we've captured 70% of the market. Now, we need to make sure we can cover those top 1,200 accounts well in order to win them. And so, just like in the weapons business, we're really, really focused on building out the team to make sure that we're in front of the customer every day as trusted advisors and helping them arrive at the solutions that work best for them.
Now, in addition to that, once we sell one of these accounts, we want our sales reps focused on moving on to new opportunities and new prospects, but we don't want to leave the customer hanging. So we have, we've come up with an account management concept that we're deploying this year, whereas we have a team handling making sure that our customers are using the product to its maximum, you know, capacity. Making sure that they understand the integration features that are available to them, and making sure that they're deploying Evidence.com on the highest feature tiers that enable the most features. And so, this team has really done a nice job bringing our customers along, making sure that utilization is high, and that our customers are getting all the value that they're paying for in the solution.
Now, not only is it important now to build out this team to win the top 1,200 and beyond, but it's also important for future growth. Without having really good coverage in the market, it's hard to sell in new products. We're really, again, excited about the channel we've built out, and when we launch things like Axon Fleet, it makes it a lot easier to sell those products in, and our customers kind of add that in as a node into their existing ecosystem. So we're really excited about, you know, making sure that we continue to leverage the channel to provide continued growth over time.
Again, you know, customer intel and feedback is also a byproduct of this, where we continue to learn about our customers' problems and come up with solutions that help them solve them. Now, again, in every sales meeting, we go over our strategic focus for the year. Again, on the weapons business, it's really simple. It's about full deployment, standard issue, and making sure that our customers are on our service plan. On the Axon side, it's about coverage. We feel like we've got the best product by a long shot, and we feel like we're the only company that doesn't let our customers fail. It's about making sure we're in front of customers and helping them deploy this technology.
And then on the international side, we'll talk a little about that in a second, but it's about building beachheads and making sure we start to change the channel strategy in international over the next couple of years as well. Now, I've got two graphics at the bottom, and, you know, we're pretty pragmatic as a sales team. We know what's out there. We know about all the press that's out there, both good and bad. We know about, you know, this is a hot topic. This is a really important social issue. We want our sales team to block out all of that noise, okay?
Our sales team's job is to execute, and we feel really good about the fact that we've got focused executors in the field, not worried about, you know, the good or the bad, and, and continuing to keep their head down and really focus on on helping customers solve problems. With that, you know, comes this concept of, hey, we're the market leader. We're the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and we know that there's, you know, that we've got a target on our back. Our competitors are coming for us. There's negative press at times and so forth. This all comes with the territory, and we're not gonna let it affect the way we execute. All right?
We're really proud of the way we've built and established this market, and now we feel like it's ours for the taking, and we're gonna continue to dominate in this space. Our sales team, you know, I've said it a few times, but it's all about execution. All right? Our sales team, we've got 70-75 reps in the field between the two businesses. They're in front of the customer every day. They're not distracted, and really, that's been the key to our success. Focused, direct channel with really talented sales reps in the field. Now, with that, I started to take a more active role in international about a year ago.
After spending the first six years looking at our domestic team, I think a lot of the concepts can apply to international as well. When we first kind of looked at international and took a fresh look at it... Next slide, please. This is what I kind of saw, at least, and it was a rollercoaster. We had these lumpy one-timer deals. There was no predictability. It was pretty inconsistent. So as we just kind of solved this problem domestically, it's important that we kind of look at how we do business internationally, and we've implemented some changes in strategy there to win in the international space as well. Next slide. Now, historically, the way the company's looked at our international business is we see all of these large opportunities.
There are these huge police forces, and we're excited about the prospect of doing business with them. We would take resources off other important projects, spend a lot of time in custom work and custom product development, but a lot of times those deals never came into fruition. They'd slip out, they'd keep getting pushed out in budgets and so forth, and it was a really kind of frustrating exercise over and over again. So when we looked at this, as our good friend Lao Tzu once said, "If you don't change direction, you're gonna end up where you're going." Okay? So what we're headed for is mediocrity, all right? And in the international business, it's too big of a market to mess up by not having the right strategy.
We've taken a really, really kind of reconstructive approach to international to figure out how we can improve, and it's really been about doing less and doing it better. The factors we look at as we prioritize opportunities in markets now are things like product-market fit, current product adoption, and the volume of opportunities, meaning there are multiple forces that can adopt our technology, and we can build a consistent and growing business. So we call our most kind of strategically important markets Tier One markets, and they check the boxes in these three categories, okay? They've got product-market fit. They deploy both of our technologies, meaning the Axon business and TASERs, and there's a high volume of opportunities.
In those markets, we staff them with a country manager, so a person in country who's a local citizen. That person teams up with some salespeople, a sales engineer, and some account management and customer service. Those markets today are Canada, the U.K., and Australia. We're really proud of the business we've built in those markets. We see the early signs of mass adoption in the video space. All of the forces in these nations generally use TASER devices. We have a strong brand and a strong presence. So these are the markets we really feel like in the next year to 2 years, we can grow a really consistent and predictable business.
There are also some markets out there that have huge police forces that use our products to some degree, and we're probably 95% of the way there on product-market fit, meaning a partnership or a small product change might open up the entire market, but they have a large number of users in a small number of agencies. And so we wanna pursue those, too, but we think they're longer term. We don't think they're gonna happen as quickly as our Tier One markets. There, we put a country manager partnered with a distributor and a regional sales engineer, and we'll open it up with future hires as we see momentum.
Now, right now, we have 5 of those Tier Two markets, and we're not gonna talk about every one of them today, but the combined TAM in those markets is actually 1.5 times the US TAM, okay? So these are big opportunities. An example we're gonna use is France. So France has 200,000 officers in one police force. So if you think about, if we can do the work to get them on our platform, that, that in and of itself is transformative for our business, and we don't wanna lose sight of these opportunities. We're really excited about them, but they're big bureaucratic agencies that can take some time to, to move forward. And then lastly, we have the rest of the world, or what we'd call Tier Three markets. I, I don't want Tier Three to confuse people.
These are still important markets in a lot of senses. We just had a big one-timer from a Tier 3 market in Q1. These are a part of our business, right? These are big one-time deals, either on the weapon side or the video side, and we expect some of these every single year. The challenge is, we can't let them distract us from executing in the rest of international, meaning in the Tier 1 and Tier 2 markets. So we look at these like they're a little more unpredictable, they're out, you know, they're out in the future a little further, and there's not necessarily market maturity. They might not have the right infrastructure to deploy cloud services at the moment, or, you know, there's some issues, kind of moving forward with bureaucracy and changing governments and so forth.
However, again, we want to approach these markets, and we want to win in them where there's opportunity and where there's kind of a qualified opportunity. So in each... We kind of set up the world into three verticals, the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. And in each of these teams, or in each of these verticals, we have a small team that's going after these opportunities. So it generally consists of a really good solution sales guy with the correct language skills and a sales engineer traveling with him. And we think we can address most of these opportunities and qualify them and decide where to, where to spend our time. The best part about this is we're not distracting the rest of our resources from the key predictable markets that we think we can win and scale the business in.
Now, over time, the Tier One markets, we believe, will stay the same. You know, they'll always be priorities for us. We'll have a solid upgrade cycle there. We'll grow the number of users and so forth. Tier Two markets, once they get going, we think have the ability to become Tier One markets, and Tier Three markets will kind of move through the funnel into Tier Two markets as we go. So we, you know, we hope in 3 to 5 years, we'll be talking about, you know, 5-10 Tier One markets and, and, you know, 10-15 Tier Two markets and so forth as we scale the team. But this is the way we're really looking at it right now to make sure that we can scale in a focused way.
Now, we do want to set a couple expectations up front, in international, and it's that, international agencies don't generally value the fact that we have 30 major cities on our platform in the US. That doesn't mean a lot to them, and it's because they don't look at the American policing model as similar to their own policing model. So in the UK, very few officers actually carry weapons. And so agencies... There are a lot of agencies like that, that actually wanna see what the UK does or what Canada does or what Australia does, and it's really important for us as a business to gain reference accounts in those markets.
While we're not gonna talk about any specific deals on this concept, we are gonna say that, you know, we are gonna have to make concessions to win our first early adopters at large scale, okay? That's the same exact thing we did in the U.S. early on to gain references, and those references are still really valuable to us, and we understand that we need that in every region of the world. Now, we'll go into a couple case studies to kind of show how we're looking at some of these international deals. The first one is the Greater Manchester Police Department in the U.K. They were the first department in the U.K. to go to the cloud. Their tender offered a cloud option and an on-prem option, but it was based 60% on price.
So that kind of shows the dynamic in the U.K., where they might not value technology and product as much as they do, how much they have to pay for it. And so it's a very challenging procurement model, but we're able to prevail with Evidence.com at the GMP, and it's really opened up some of our largest deployments in the U.K., including West Midlands and British Transport Police. And so we think this was a really good early adopter for us. We're really proud to be working with them, and we're really excited that they're gonna see the value of Evidence.com. On the weapons side, France is a really good example of how we've put people from TASER in front of the customer, and it's made a big difference.
We have a country manager there, and as well as Rick spent a lot of time in France, and what we heard was: "Hey, it's hard to find a contract vehicle to use to purchase these products. These accessories are not priced correctly, and it's confusing us," and so forth. And once we unclogged, like, two or three minor objections in the deal, it opened up the entire market for us, where in the last year, they put in two or three really large orders, and now they're talking about making TASER a budget line item, just like we're talking about in the U.S., where they'll buy a lot of weapons upfront and kind of finance the deal over five years. And so we're really excited to be working with France.
And again, this agency in France is 200,000 users. So these are the agencies we wanna work with, we wanna get in front of with our own people, and we wanna understand how we can help them solve problems. Another key element to our international strategy is our partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft is a global brand that is trusted by law enforcement, and no matter where you are, just the name Microsoft eases some of the concerns about going to the cloud. And so now Microsoft is deployed in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, and they keep standing up data centers around the world, and it's really exciting for us because it really opens up those markets-those markets for us to be able to sell.
Now, to just summarize the strategy here internationally, again, is it's more about focus than anything else right now, and we need to make sure we start to execute in our Tier One markets. We wanna bring along these big Tier Two opportunities that are these large bureaucratic police forces, and we wanna capitalize on Tier Three markets without letting them distract the entire team as we scale and execute. And so that's really what it's all about. We wanna get our own people in front of these customers and work them through the funnel, just like we did over the last 5 or 6 years in the U.S. business. So with that, I'll answer a few questions before we go into our next session. Sure.
Hi, Bill Baker, GARP Research . In these Tier Two markets, are you seeing... What kind of mix are you seeing vis-à-vis straight CEWs versus Axon versus the combination of the two? And I realize it's early and, you know, I'm looking perspectively, maybe two years from now, are you gonna be reporting back to us, bump, bump, bump, which one of the three is on top, middle, bottom? Are they equally weighted or all one way or the other?
Yeah, so did everyone hear the question okay? How are we looking at the product opportunities in each of the Tier Two markets? I think we're really excited that we feel like we have an opportunity in both. I think the weapons will likely move faster just because, you know, the sales cycle, just like domestically for large weapons deals, is generally shorter. But we think there's legitimate opportunities to sell both products, and there's obviously synergy between our offerings. And so, you know, the idea is that these are Tier Two markets because we think we can sell both products into them, and that's the expectation we've set.
I don't know if I'm jumping the gun for a more general question, but, you know, I know people on the San Diego PD and LAPD and Las Vegas Metro, and they corroborate everything you guys have said here today. I guess what my question would be, though, and maybe could be elaborated on, is, in year 2, 3, and 5, assuming you execute on this, things are gonna get rebid and that kind of thing. How ingrained will your product be, and what will be the barriers to the rebidding process? As investors, we wanna know, you know, 5 years out.
Sure. That's a good question. I think, the platform story is really important, where, you know, if customers start to use our platform for multiple items, it becomes a part of their everyday life, and we think that's really important. But the shorter answer is, we have no intention of letting our product lead become narrow.
You know, we continue to add new features and new, new concepts into our product offerings that further separate us from the rest of our competitors, and we can't get into kind of the procurement cycle of each individual deal, but we're super confident that the product is gonna stay, you know, largely ahead of our competition, and that, you know, we've built a brand where customers trust us to scale, and in five years, they're not gonna wanna roll the dice on a, on, on a different kind of backbone for managing digital evidence and information.
Great. And, with that, I'm gonna segue into the next session. That's also gonna be led by Josh. Let's have our two guests come up. We've got Major Willis, the CIO of Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD, and also Chief Chew from Evesham Township in New Jersey. Probably butchered the pronunciation of that.
You got it right.
Good to see you.
Good to see you.
- These guys are gonna do kind of a fireside chat from a customer's perspective.
All right, gentlemen, grab a seat here. Thank you very much for joining us today. We're really excited to hear kind of some of the perspective of our customers. And so, maybe we'll start, if you guys each wanna give maybe a 30-second kind of description of your police department and where you're at with deploying TASERs technology. I think that'd be a great place to begin.
Okay. I'm Steve Willis. I'm from, Charlotte, North Carolina. We currently have about 1,852 officers in our department. We are the largest department between Miami and New York.... We have been a TASER customer for a number of years. We started in the weapons category, and then the, thanks to your tax dollars in 2012, the Democratic National Convention came to Charlotte, and we then became an Axon Flex customer, and have been that customer and grown that ever since then.
Good afternoon. My name is Christopher Chew, I'm Chief of Police from Evesham Township. We're about 15 minutes just west of Philadelphia. We have approximately 85 sworn officers. We started our partnership with TASER with the electronic device, the weapons, 2011, fully outfitted our officers with the TASERs, and then in 2014, we fully outfit all of our police officers with body-worn cameras, including myself.
Great, and we actually have a model here right on the chest of one of our Axon Bodies. So, thanks, gentlemen. I think one thing, maybe we could start with is when you went through the procurement process of, you know, on-officer cameras and digital evidence management, how did you kind of look at that process, and what drove the decision to deploy those products in general?
Well, I'll say for me, and, as a captain in 2011, we were served with a civil tort notice for excessive use of force for an incident in one of our carnivals. We had to OC spray one of our 16-year-olds who's actively engaged in a fight after numerous times trying to calm him down. And what happened is, as I was watching from the backside, doing all the prep work for the case, the whole case revolved around a 10-second video from somebody's cell phone. And what that captured was three officers on top of this 16-year-old, who looked like he was 25, and it created... painted a different picture.
As I was going through the process, pulling all the paperwork, listening to depositions, we spent probably close to $300,000 between outside attorney fees, inside work, and it was all over a 10-second video. During the testimony, it was readily apparent that they had no interest in actually the event that occurred. They were trying to paint our police department as a rogue police department that used excessive force. When I was going through, I was watching this from the outside, going for the chief's position as my number one goal, to paint a different picture. I wanted to show exactly what happened, what our officers do each and every day, which are great things.
Therefore, that was my number one platform when I was going for police chief in 2012, was to get the body-worn cameras. Taser just came out with these, and that's where we started the process of field testing approximately six different products, and at the end of the day, we chose Taser, and we're very proud of it.
For us, we've had in-car cameras since the early 1990s. We're up to about 650 cars now, fully equipped. Every one of our marked patrol cars has an in-car camera system in it. In 2012, when the convention came to town, we decided to leverage that money to put cameras on our motor officers, because back in that time period, and even in the early 1990s, early 2000s, there weren't opportunities for cameras on motorcycles. Motorcycles conduct numerous traffic stops, and none of those things were recorded, so that was our first toe in the water, if you will, concerning cameras on the body.
We were approaching the end of a life cycle of our in-car camera solution, and the current vendor of that has changed that product to a point that we would have to do a wholesale, complete infrastructure changeover, all of the equipment in the cars, all of the backbone, everything was going to have to be changed. So it was an opportunity to step out and see what the Flex could do for us for potential replacement of that system, as well as giving us the opportunity to get beyond the car. We saw all the successes that have been mentioned today, with reduction in uses of force, reductions in injuries, reductions in complaints on officers from our in-car solution, and we were looking forward to the opportunity to get that success from the away-from-the-car position.
Our complaints are generated now from when officers are not in front of their cars, not on traffic stops, because people in Charlotte have become accustomed to the fact that we have in-car video. So this was a huge opportunity for us. We originally started with our plan was to do 250 cameras, and then shortly after the procurement process started, Ferguson, Missouri, happened. And it didn't take long for the politicians and our city manager and chief to decide we wanted to go full deployment. So we went from 250 planned cameras to 1,385 Flex and 15 Bodies for a full deployment across all patrol officers.
And we did that deployment in about 7 months to the point that every officer by September of 2015 every officer in Charlotte actively wears a either a body or an Axon Flex.
Excellent. Excellent. And now, you, you both have mentioned kind of the procurement process and evaluating vendors and so forth. What are some of the things that, you learned along the way in terms of the products that are out there, why you eventually decided on, on TASER and so forth?
Well, I know when we field-tested 6 different products, we were looking at a myriad of questions that we had. You know, we were looking for somebody that was a reliable company, that we know we can count on for not just, you know, the initial purchase, but somebody that we can partner with for 10, 15, 20 years down the road. We also were looking at camera angles, user-friendliness. We wanted the ability to not have officers continually, at the end of their shift, upload information manually, and then on the back end, have somebody burn discs so they can present on the grand jury or evidence. So we're looking at all of these things, and at the end of the day, we just wanted something that was user-friendly as well. You know, dummy-proof.
I just wanted my officers to have the ability to push a button and have everything be recorded from beginning to end. After we field tested all the products, by far, unanimously, it was proved that the TASER was the best choice. We had our union on board, we had all of our officers and our community, especially. We got their input from the beginning, and we held a town-wide forum where we had 100 of our business owners there, and we showed the different body-worn cameras and what they can and can't do. Every single one had an opportunity to speak around table discussion, and all 100 of them support our purchase of the TASER.
Excellent.
For us, it was. We really wanted to have officers that were interested. So the first thing that we did, once we did the RFP process, we put the paperwork out there, and we only had 5 vendors submit, TASER being one of those. We already had them on the motors. We already had that experience, but we didn't have it from the perspective of the patrol officer answering the everyday call for service. So it was important to us. We're not a union state, so, but it was important to us to have the officer buy in. So we reached out and found volunteers from every one of our 13 patrol divisions that were interested in testing it, wearing it out into the field.
We brought them in, and we had narrowed the five down to two particular vendors. It was TASER, and the other company was a company called MediaSolv, that was fronting a camera called Wolfcom. We put both of those cameras out into the field with those officers, tested them for about three weeks each, and then brought those officers in and did kind of a Q&A with them. What did you like? What did you dislike about the particular product? Keeping those of us that were already intimately familiar with the products out of the mix. Unanimously, they came back to the TASER product. Most importantly to them was the ease of use.
The other product had a little bit more associated with it to turn it on, turn it off, do recordings, stop recordings, upload, things along those lines. But to them, it was more important how they could wear it, where they could wear it, how easy it was to turn on, how easy it was to turn off. And so far, everybody to the point now that they don't want to go to work without a camera on.
That's great.
Mm-hmm.
That's great. Now, switching direction a little, how important was the camera in the overall, kind of thinking about which system you were gonna deploy? Was it the majority? I'd imagine from the end user, it might have been pretty important, but from a strategic level, can you talk a little about how that kind of played out between the camera and the software?
Yeah, I'll say for our end, the one thing that set TASER apart from every other company out there was the Evidence.com portion. That has the ability to have the cloud-based, which you're all familiar with, and for us on the inside, for management's reasons, it was very important that we had the ability to marry up the camera to a software system where we now can share information with our district attorney, our prosecutor's office, and defense attorneys, processing cases. We send a link, and we're done with it. We also have the ability to have audit trails and viewability for use of force incidents quickly, instead of you know having to rely on officers with USB ports, plugging them in at the end of the shift, tagging them properly.
It's extremely user-friendly, and I can't tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of hours it saves an officer's time at the end of their shift.
You know, and ironically, to the question, the officers that were involved in testing it, they were more concerned about the camera. Their interaction with the Evidence.com system is at the time that they're having to present to court. They're having to prepare their cases, things along those lines. But for their day-to-day operation, the most important piece to them was the camera, the quality of the video that's coming from the camera, and most importantly, what their perspective is. What is it that I'm seeing? What is it that I'm interacting with? Was the most key, important piece for them, of course, in addition to the wearability. They wanted the options of where they could wear it, as opposed to being told they can only wear it one way.
Okay, great. Now, on the weapons side, maybe just give, if you don't mind, a little background on, you know, your deployment of Tasers, how you look at upgrading the weapons, you know, future features that might be of interest, and so forth, as we walk through the weapons program.
Yeah, like I said, we've been in the weapons program since 2011. There's a little more cost associated with that on our end, especially back then. We went through what was going through the economy and the recession and doing more with less. So we only had the ability to purchase 20 at first. It's one of those things that we had to budget outside the norm, so we had to capital bond it, pay it over 5 years, and we just got approved this year to fully outfit every single one of our officers. And the officers in the state of New Jersey, we were the last state to actually allow to carry the weapons.
Now, finally, they just released the regulations where, you know, we can use it as just like applying physical force, where in the past, probably about four or five months ago, it was equivalent to deadly force. So now we have the ability to utilize it what it's for, and we just had our first use last night and two nights ago. And the officers that actually had to utilize it, you know, in the past, we had to actually put our hands on somebody, which increased an officer getting hurt, somebody else getting hurt, and when you introduce a fight and you have a firearm, bad things can happen. So I had the ability to watch the video very quickly from the TASER Cam, and it was just amazing how quickly it de-escalated.
The person apologized afterward, nobody got hurt, and we processed and released them. So to me, that's where the home run factor is to the weapons.
Excellent.
From the weapons side, again, we've been an early customer of the weapons and have transitioned from first generation to second generation now. We ironically just did an audit last week. We have 1,623 units. Every patrol officer, every patrol sergeant, all of our tactical units are all issued the weapons. We're actually looking. I have a meeting tomorrow with the chief. We're looking at purchasing additional handles for more staff to have, especially in an off-duty capacity. You know, the weapons have been a godsend for us for a number of years, in that the officers, as the chief had mentioned, don't have to go hands-on.
They don't have to the perspective of, and you've all seen it out there with, with, cell phone video of an officer striking someone. You know, we still carry collapsible batons. Mm-hmm. You know, think of the public perspective of rearing back and striking somebody with a metal bar, a metal bar, as opposed to hitting someone with a TASER, being able to take them into custody very quickly, as opposed to that perspective of you're beating them with a metal bar. So it's, it's been, a very, very good product for us, and we plan to continue to be that customer.
Excellent. Excellent. Well, at this point, why don't we open it up to a few questions in the audience, if that's okay? And, Erin, just a time check. How are we doing on time?
15 minutes of questions we have, actually.
Oh, great. Okay. Wow!
This is either for the chief or the major. There's been a lot of discussion over the last couple of years about on the video side, the standard procedures. I think it was Seattle that somebody tried to kinda muck up the whole deployment process by doing, I don't know if it was Freedom of Information requests or... Where does that stand in your jurisdictions? How did you work through it, and where does it stand, I guess?
You want me first? Sure. Yeah, we have in New Jersey, it's called the Open Public Records Act. There are certain criteria where people can get copies of all data, whether it be a written report, any kind of video, audio. So we haven't experienced a severe backlash because we have the ability to scrub the video. So there are certain portions that are private. The Attorney General's office in our state just came out with new law, where you can and where you cannot videotape. So that eliminates some of the things, like, say, if you're going in a hospital room, you know, and you have different patients in there, do we have the ability to record? Do we not? So they created basically a law for us to follow.
As a result, we haven't had an influx of people come in or complain. I could say for the state of New Jersey, at least in the southern end, that, you know, it's been welcome with open arms, that majority of our customers, which are our community, want to be- they have information to be on audio, video, so it's been very successful. Yeah, transparency is important, but overload of transparency is also important to the, to the agencies. Fortunately, in North Carolina, the officers' activities are kind of covered under the personnel, personnel laws in our state. Therefore, the video is not publicly accessible. FOIA is a federal requirement, does not apply to the states. So you can come in and ask for the video, but unfortunately, we cannot release it.
It is either considered to be part of the officer's personnel file or is to be considered evidence. Now, evidence can certainly be released, but generally speaking, the prosecutors aren't going to taint their cases by releasing it prior to the case going to court. So we've been fortunate. Now, there is a current bill that's been produced that will change that for us. It's not going to change it significantly if it passes, but it is going to make it a little bit more transparent. It's going to make it accessible to the persons that are associated with the video, which is going to prevent everybody and their brother and sister from coming in and saying, "I wanna see all the video from Steve Willis for the last seven days," which would be crippling to some agencies.
That, quite honestly, from the agencies that I've talked to, that's some of their challenges with body camera video is the fear of what's going to happen from that public perspective.
Other questions at all?
Who vets the security as well as the efficacy of the data centers, or wherever the information is being stored? Obviously, you want it to be secure. Obviously, you don't want it to fall into the wrong hands, particularly if there's a major case going on and, you know, and things are happening. You want that data to be the right data, and at the same time, you want it to be secure data. And how do you, as maybe in the interaction with the company and with the police forces, make sure that the third party is the right third party?
Well, for us, one of the things is judicial recognition. You know, once the local judicial bar identifies that the video is coming in, there is some reliance on that the video is accurate. The other part is as a part of the contracting, a part of the RFP process, there are certain requirements that are put out there for the vendors to meet. And that is one of the things that TASER was able to meet. They bring to the table those persons necessary to testify in court if it becomes the issue as to the validity of the transfer, of the validity of the video that's being watched. Because quite honestly, they're watching the copy because they're not looking at the one that's coming directly from the cloud solution.
We're burning a copy, giving it, or we're transferring a copy and giving it over, and what's actually being introduced into court isn't the actual one that's sitting out there on the server. It's going to. Unfortunately for North Carolina, I'm gonna keep it for 20 years. And it's gonna be sitting out there being stored. So there is that judicial notice component that is important to each of these, and video is not new. We've had video in court for years. We've had photographs in court for years. It's just the new thing, and once we get past the first few bumps of court, I think it's going to be much easier down the road.
Yeah, I would happen to agree. What I really liked about the, the product from Evidence.com is the audit trail. So anytime somebody clicks on that video, it timestamps, it dates, and identifies who that person is. We only have two people in our organization who have the ability to modify any video in there. Actually, one, the other person retired. But this prevents other people from going in and defense attorneys saying, "Well, 25 people looked at this video, had the ability to alter." Well, it's not necessarily true, because only one person in our organization has that ability, but it does have that audit trail, and it says who, what, when, where, and you have to put a reason why you looked at it.
So anytime there's that serious event, anytime there's a use of force in New Jersey that is deadly or serious bodily injury, we're not even allowed to look at it. Our own officers can't look at their own videos, so they have to wait for the prosecutor's office to come in, and then that's when we have the ability to look at it. So the audit trail was, is key in our organization, at least in the purchase of the product.
Two questions. One, we're in the early adoption period of this, and you guys are early adopters. Where did price play in the, you know, process, if you will? And then going out a couple of years, where you think that might play as things get relooked at because you're municipalities. And also, you're the law side of law and order, so if you could speak to the other and the whole process a few years down the road, how hard would it be for somebody to come in and say, "We'll do this for you at another price or whatever?" What would it take for them to offer to change out a vendor?
All right, I'll go first. So the first part of the question is cost. So when we first partnered with TASER, we were the first in New Jersey, so we were very fortunate because we had the ability to work with TASER because they wanted to showcase an agency that had the ability, the funds, to outfit all their officers to bring in other agencies in New Jersey. So something that, you know, when we put it out to bid, like we have, like North Carolina has to, they came in under bid, but they also had the sole propriety of Evidence.com. Nobody else had the cloud-based server. That was key for us, and that's what we... When we went with TASER.
Our five-year contract is gonna be coming up in two years, so we're gonna have to revisit, you know, the next contract, I guess you'd say, agreement in place and determine what the costs are. I know in our mayor and council, in our community, I don't think cost is gonna be a major issue because they see the benefits. Because one lawsuit involving a deadly force can cripple a town. We're talking about $millions and millions, where if you put the investment in the technology to show exactly what's happened, you can prevent that. Going forward, all of our information, we're looking to put all of our dashboard cameras in our cars. We've also had it since 2001, car cameras. So we'd like to put all of our video and audio technology onto the Evidence.com there.
Therefore, it's permanently stored. We have the ability, it's backed up, it has purging features. There's nobody else that I know out there that has that ability right now to do that, so I don't foresee any issues coming up with ever-changing companies.
Cost is always a factor, especially when you're in local government. I can tell you from our perspective, we weren't funded when we went. We had funding for the 250 cameras, but when that morphed to 1,400, we didn't have that funding and had to go to our council to get that funding. Price was an issue, but for us, it truly was that cost-benefit analysis of: What is the product that we're getting? What is the longevity of that product? How good is that product that is out there in comparison to the other product that we were looking at?
Even though it may have been more expensive than some of the other proposals, the actual product that we wanted, the actual back end that was associated with it, the ease of use, and the acceptance of the officers was more important to us than the cost. And we were able to sell it to our council that that was the most important component, and it was going to get us the longer-term return.
You've been waiting?
Yeah. Thank you. You've had a lot of experience with using TASERs for quite some time. I'm Mitch Willis. Just wanna get an idea of how you've seen this move forward from the X26. You're going into the X2 now. And I understand, after talking to many different police officers over time, that the TASER now is becoming the most used product on their belt. So just wanted to talk about that to us, please. Thank you.
That's a fairly accurate representation. I think when you would talk to any of the officers that have a TASER. I'll give you a prime example. For us, if you move from a uniformed assignment to a detective's position, you have to give up your TASER. It does not transfer with you as a piece of equipment. However, that detective can put on a uniform and go moonlight, work off-duty. They can go work off-duty in a parking lot outside a bar. They can go work off-duty doing traffic, but they're still not carrying a TASER, and they miss it. They want to have it, which is part of the reason why we're going back to the chief to talk about purchasing an additional units for those officers that are not currently issued them.
So it has become a mandatory piece of equipment in patrol, and because we've made it mandatory, they use it quite often, or they threaten to use it quite often. And it has become probably, other than their handcuffs, it probably has become the most used piece of equipment that they have on their belt.
... how to upgrade, if you can upgrade their units from the, older units to the new units. And I just want to know what your ideas might be to, you know, get that moving forward, because it's a very important piece of equipment to have.
It is, and I, you know, I'll be honest, that's one of the downsides, at least for my department. I can't speak for the chief or some of the other departments. We don't plan very well. We're cops, we're not business people. And over the years, we've learned some lessons, and we've put some people in place to try and forecast that, but we still don't do a very good job. As an example, we are approaching the end of our life cycle on our current CEDs. So we will be at the 5-year mark at the end of this year. So that is a conversation that has to be had with the chief. It's not budgeted, it's not planned.
You know, just like the chief said here, it's a major ordeal to get that money. So that's one of the things that we've begun starting to look at. And quite honestly, now, the pricing plans that Taser is putting out there that breaks the price up over multiple years is a much better. It's easier to swallow than to come up with $5 million, $6 million, $7 million for a huge deployment every 5 years. So it's easier for us to swallow, it's easier to present to my city council, and easier for them to swallow as well.
Thank you.
First of all, I'd like to thank you as law enforcement professionals, too, for all the things you do in our community. My question is, the body cam and the Axon system, having rolled it out in your own departments, how would you see it? What, how do you think it'll look from ten years from now in various departments around the country that don't use the system? Or, you know, do you think it's gonna be 100%, or how do you see it rolling out, do you think? It's a hard question, but.
I can forecast, like, we go across the state in the eastern part of the upper Northeast and talk about the body cameras and how we implement it. From what I hear and from seeing from lawmakers, it's not a matter of if departments are getting body cameras, it's when. I think it's here to stay in New Jersey. The legislators are trying to pass a law that mandates body cameras on every officer. The thing with New Jersey, if you mandate, you gotta pay for it, so New Jersey doesn't wanna pay for it. So... But that's the philosophy I think you're hearing and you're seeing. In the future, you know, I think that you're gonna see a lot of the technology. In law enforcement, I think we'd say we're kinda behind.
Usually, technology, criminals are well ahead of us because we gotta go to our taxpayers to get to pay for these items. I think you're gonna see, hopefully, you know, different things come out, whether, you know, you have the ability as leaders to watch an incident unfold live from your computer while the officers are out there, or if it's tied into a holster, when you unhook to your holster, your body. You're gonna see a lot of different things, I think, going forward, that's gonna be protective of the officers and protective of the community. But I, I'm a firm believer that I think it's 5, 10, 15 years from now, this is gonna be the norm, just like your handcuffs, a handgun, a Taser, you know, the CED device, everything else.
I mean, I've been doing this for 28 years. So this is the fastest-growing piece of technology for police officers that I've seen in my 28 years. Just as the chief said, I think within the next 5 years, you're going to see complete infiltration of body-worn video across every agency in the country. Chief mentioned New Jersey is trying to mandate it. South Carolina has mandated it. You know, based on the last incident that they had in South Carolina, in North Charleston, it is mandated across the state. And I think you're going to see some states, as things happen over the years, that that's going to happen.
But yes, I think this is a product that's going to be just like the weapons. It's going to be just like radars in cars to do speed and laser and everything else. It is that type of product, but this one is one step above that because the officers want it now, because of the jobs that they do, and thank you for that point. To those officers that are out there working every day-
Mm-hmm.
They want something to back them up because times have changed from 28 years ago when I started. At that time, an officer's word meant something. Now, the expectation of the public, and part of it is because of that median age of the people that we're dealing with, the expectation is that there is something there to back up what that human is saying, and this is the best thing to do that with right now.
So I know there might be a couple more questions. I'd ask that we maybe save them to the end, and maybe we can even ask Major Willis and Chief Chew to come back up at the end for additional questions. But thank you both very much for coming today. We really appreciate it.
Thanks again. Nice seeing you again.
Thanks.
Now we're gonna hand it over, I believe, to Dan, and we'll get these chairs out of the way here.
Yeah, next up, we have, Dan Behrendt, our CFO, who's gonna talk about, our business model and path to profitability. Dan's been with the company 12 years, and he's really been what I would call kind of a steady hand on the wheel as we transition from just having that one business. Now, the business has gotten drastically more complex across multiple product lines and multiple markets, and Dan's done a phenomenal job guiding the team here. So over to you, Dan.
Thank you. Thanks for coming out this morning. It's an exciting time for Taser. Go to the next slide. So as you see, we've had a compounded annual growth rate of 22% over the last 5 years at Taser, which has allowed us to double the size of the company in a 5-year time frame. The thing that's exciting for me is that, you know, when I had conversations with investors, you know, 3, 4 years ago, we talked about the ability for international and the video business to be part of that growth. As you can see, that really all three parts of our business, both the weapons part of the business domestically, the international part of the business, and the video Axon segment of the business, are all contributing to that 22% growth.
So it's really exciting to see the fact that we've got really all, all three growth drivers in the company contributing to our success at this point. Next slide. So as we dig a little deeper on the weapons segment, you can see that we've seen great growth in the weapons, a little bit less than the overall business because we've seen stronger growth in international video. But, you know, with a 16% CAGR on the weapons business, we've actually seen the revenue go up a little bit faster than the unit sales. And I think it's a couple of things that Josh talked about before. Taking more of that business direct means that we're seeing a average selling price being a little bit higher over time.
That's actually improving our profitability in that part of the business, and it, it's really been sort of a key driver to the growth. Next slide. So as we look at the Axon segment, as Marcus talked about before, we really we're seeing really strong upward trajectory and really a lot of the key metrics we use to measure that business. We've seen revenue grow, we've seen dramatic increases in bookings, and we've really seen dramatic increases in the number of paid licenses we have on the platform. All those things are really contributing to that growth in the Axon business. Next slide. So on the international part of the business, we've actually seen the international business actually grow faster than the U.S. business on the weapons side. So we've seen 19% growth over the last five years. That's really been exciting to see.
It's really, I think, the result of a lot of the direct investments that Josh talked about before. You know, we've gone from being sort of opportunistic in how we approach the international business, chasing deals around the world, to being a lot more strategic, and I think that's creating a much more repeatable business over time that's leading to the growth. The investments that Josh talked about in Tier One and Tier Two markets is something we think that are gonna really drive long-term growth in this business. And we're excited to really see opportunities both on the video side as well as the weapons side of the business.
You know, Rick talked about this on the last conference call, and we're seeing the video in some of the international markets. We think actually it may be a big part of the driver to them buying weapons. I think the question sometimes is the use of the product, the weapons part of the business, when it's being used, is it appropriate usage? Is it being used disproportionately? You know, the video really solves that question. I think it gives our customers confidence to field the weapons if they have the cameras, because now any of those questions get answered through the video. So I think it's...
You know, what's exciting is we're seeing a large pipeline in both the weapons and video part of the business, which has really, you know, contributed to a 19% CAGR, which is great, but we really see the international part of the business growing faster than domestic over the next few years, especially on the weapons side, because of all the investments we're making. Next slide. So one of the things that I'm proud of at TASER is I, I think we've really been effective in, in returning excess cash to shareholders. You can see that we've bought back over 16 million shares of our stock.
I think we've been pretty good stewards of that capital, returning the cash in really sort of an opportunistic way, in that we've taken a lot of shares out of the market at a relatively low price. Our average basis is $8.25 per share, which really, it's led us to bring more than 25% of the shares out of the market through the buybacks. And then, this year, in March, we announced our biggest buyback in the company's history, announced a $50 million dollar buyback. We've already bought back $28 million of that. We expect to finish that sometime in 2016. So it's been a good program for us. You know, a couple things to note. We've done this all through operating cash flow.
We've not borrowed any money to execute these buybacks. So I think, you know, what's important is we've really generated the cash in the business, built up large cash balances, and then returned the cash to shareholders, we think, in an effective way. Next slide. So one of the things. Actually, do you go two, two ahead? All right, next slide. All right, so as we talk about the weapons part of the business, you know, the, you know, we're excited about sort of the recurring revenue that's in the video side of the business, but we actually also see that in the weapons side of the business with cartridges, batteries, and warranties making up about 30% of our weapons sales in any given year.
As we have a larger, installed base of weapons, we see that recurring, revenue coming through. We sell about 3 cartridges per handle in the field every year. We see battery replacements every 2.5-4 years, depending on the price they bought. And then we're seeing a large deferred revenue on the balance sheet as customers buy extended warranties, and then we warrant the products over a 5-year period. So we're seeing that sort of come through the income statement over 5 years. The evolution we talked about a little bit before, programs like Officer Safety Plan and TASER 60, we see that more and more customers are going to take advantage of these purchasing plans in order to spread their purchases over time. Now, we get some questions about what that's gonna do to sort of revenue recognition.
On Officer Safety Plan and TASER 60, we're going to recognize the handle sale upfront. So typically, what we do is, the customer's paying for it over time, but because our customers are good credit risk, we create a receivable on the books at the time of that first sell-in, and then record that sale of the handle and the cartridges and the TASER as a service plan upfront, and then we'll recognize the warranty over time. So there'll be a short-term cash flow impact, but we won't really see from a P&L perspective. We should see most of that revenue still come through. One of the things that's exciting for us is that we've seen this in leasing and some of the other purchasing plans we've had.
A lot of customers end up buying more product when we can spread out the purchases. So a customer comes to us, and they say, "Hey, we have $100,000 a year to spend on TASERs." As a result, they think they're gonna take 5 years to upgrade their product. We think with programs like TASER as a Service and Officer Safety Plan, they can accelerate that upgrade and buy all those products up front, and then spread their cash flows over time. So from a cash flow to the agency, it's similar to buying a small subset every year, but they get the benefit of getting the advanced technology all up front. We think that's really exciting for our customers. I think that's a benefit.
You know, customers, time to time, we, we heard from, a couple of our, our, our customers here, that the capital budgeting process is painful almost everywhere. So our ability to spread, the cost of the product out over time and have people make it more of an operating budget, we think is really, helpful for the customers. We see, we see the benefit as well in accelerating sales and maybe creating more predictable upgrade cycles. So I think it's one of those things that becomes, you know, good for both parties. Next slide. So as we look at the, recurring revenue on the Axon side, you know, we've got a number of pricing tiers. You see, we start at $15 a month for our Basic, program. We add $24 a month to get to advanced features that comes with Pro.
And then we have two plans, Ultimate and Unlimited, that include future TASER or future camera upgrades as part of their license. And we've seen a lot of, you know, great customer sort of acceptance of that. They really... Again, the ability to spread the cost of a camera over the life of the contract versus having to, you know, come up with capital money every two to three years as that camera gets to the end of useful life, is really important for customers. So we've seen customers really gravitate towards our Ultimate, and then the Ultimate Unlimited plan that actually includes unlimited storage as well. So for our customers, they're getting sort of budget certainty.
We're sort of future-proofing the agency, and for us, we're sort of getting the ability for a customer to lock in future camera upgrades as part of their contract. Next slide. So I think this is really sort of a compelling slide to really show that impact. Over the last two quarters, we've seen over 80% of the seats we've booked include future camera upgrades as part of their contract. So we're having customers. Most of these are 5-year deals, so we're having customers basically lock in the camera purchase at the 2.5- and 5-year mark. So at the time of the contract up front, we're locking in really three cameras worth of purchases. Again, the customer gets the benefit of spreading out those camera purchases over the life of the product. We get the benefit of longer contract lengths.
We get, you know, sort of, certainty in those upgrades. Again, the agency sort of gets future-proofed. And, you know, Mark has talked before about the fact that we continue to iterate on the camera. I think that we're seeing, you know, really, I think our customers have really shown a lot of confidence in us and the fact that they're locking in five-year contracts and also agreeing to make future camera purchases. They're confident we're gonna continue to keep up with technology and make sure we sort of future-proof them. So as new technology comes on board, we're gonna continue to iterate on the camera products in order to make sure that they keep up. Next slide.
So one of the key metrics we talk about on our earnings calls is annual recurring revenue, and I know it's an important metric for investors as well. We think that ARR is a great metric for us in that it really helps to measure sort of the increase in the paid users on the platform, as well as the long contract rate lengths. We're seeing, you know, you know, really, our ARR includes really three components. It includes the service part of it, includes the warranty, and includes storage. Now, what it doesn't include is those future camera upgrades. So we're seeing, you know, a pretty good piece of each contract actually not be included in the ARR. Go to the next slide.
You'll see that when we look at ARR, you know, the cash ARR, we look at sort of the cash we're collecting and billing each year, is dramatically larger. It's 25%-30% larger than the recurring revenue that's flowing through the P&L. It's because we're collecting, you know, again, 80% of our deals in the last two quarters had future camera upgrades built in. So those customers are prepaying for the next camera. The other thing that's kind of worth noting here is you sort of see the flattening of ARR from Q4 to Q1. You know, the one of the things we talked about on the call for maybe people who are a little newer to the story, we've introduced a new body camera in the fourth quarter.
We finished the year with a backlog of that camera, and actually, even in the first quarter, we still had a pretty big backlog, about 8,000 cameras still to ship. As those cameras come online, we expect that ARR to jump up nicely in Q2. Next slide. So one of the things, as we look at deferred revenue on the balance sheet, we've actually got over $28 million of deferred revenue on the Axon segment already. Total company's got about $55 million of deferred revenue. But as we look at the components of deferred revenue for the video part, the Axon segment of the business, we can see that the biggest part of that growth is actually those future camera upgrades.
We've seen that grow 225% over from last year's balance to this year's balance, as more and more customers gravitate towards those programs. You notice that the service piece doesn't grow as fast, and that's really because the service piece tends to... You know, basically, we bill basically at the time of sell-in, and then that service revenue gets depleted over the year, and then we rebuild at the end of that first year for the second-year service. So you sort of see, you know, a normal ebb and flow of that. So that's why that part of the deferred revenue is not growing, because it's gonna sort of be, you know, it's gonna sort of be depleted and then refreshed each year. Next slide.
So one of the questions we get a lot about, often from investors, is really understanding how the bookings, the contract value, flows through our P&L. So this is a, you know, this is sort of a typical $1 million Axon unlimited deal. So as we look at that deal, about 10% of the booking will flow through immediately as we ship the cameras and the rest of the hardware. So you're seeing about 10% upfront, but then you're seeing about 13.3% each year over the five years, and then the last part of it is, again, with these deals, we're having our customers lock in those future camera upgrades. So we're seeing spikes in revenue in the first, third, and fifth year as we deliver those cameras.
So although the service and storage piece and the warranty piece is gonna be pretty flat, you're gonna see sort of those spikes over time as those flow through. So this is sort of a typical deal, and it'll help you to maybe model the business and understand why, when we have the large booking value, you're not seeing immediate flow through to revenue. It's because you're only seeing about 10% flow through immediately, and about 13% of that booking will flow through in the first year and then every year after that. Next slide. So one of the things that, you know, metrics that we're kind of excited about is this future contracted revenue. So this is really a measure of our total bookings to date, less the recognized revenue.
So this is still to be recognized revenue on deals we've already closed. So we finished the first quarter with over $202 million of revenue still to be recognized on these deals. And I think this is reflective of a few things. One is our average contract length at this point is over 4 years long, so we're seeing long-term deals, which creates a lot of future contracted revenue and a large backlog of business. And also, we're moving people up to those higher-priced tiers we talked about before, which is driving larger deal values, which is also driving to this large contracted revenue.
So, you know, it's exciting to have, you know, a backlog at this point of over $200 million in this business, and we feel that this will continue to grow over time as we continue to have strong bookings in the future. Next slide. So we've talked a lot about the video hardware margins, and, and, you know, I think there's, there's maybe a, a, misperception in that, you know, we're definitely willing to sort of negotiate on the upfront price of cameras in order to drive business, because we want to make sure that, you know, we get the opportunity to show the value of our platform. So we're willing to negotiate on the front, on, on the contract. But we do expect that the hardware revenue will get to about 50% over time.
Right now, it's about 30% on the hardware, but we do see that growing over time due to a few things. One is these future camera upgrades being built into the programs we think will lead to better pricing on the second or third camera, just because of how the revenue gets allocated. The second piece is we're starting to in-source some of that work, so we're seeing a little bit better cost structure, and we're leveraging some of our fixed costs. Between all those factors, we expect that the video hardware margin will get to about 50% over time. I think it's important because we see this as sort of a key contributor with, again, with 80% of our customers contracting for second and third cameras as part of the deal.
Hardware is always gonna be part of the revenue stream for the video segment of the business and the Axon segment. So we need to make you know, we wanna make sure that's still a contributing part of it, and we do expect that to get to 50% over time. Next slide. So one of the things that, you know, another question we get a lot is really, what's the long-term model for our Axon business? So it's, it's, you know, it's certainly like lots of SaaS companies. You know, we have losses in the beginning. You know, as, as Josh talked about, we had to build a, a sales force. We have a completely separate sales force that sells the video products versus the weapons sales. So again, it's a solution sales team. We...
Really, the same sales people are not selling both products. So that's created a lot of, a large investment in SG&A costs. Again, Marcus has got a team of 80 people developing this sort of leading-edge product that really, we've got a large lead over our competitors. You know, we need to make sure we continue to run fast and develop products that keep that lead. You know, last year, we launched 11 versions of Evidence.com, so 11 times customers log into the system, there's new features that didn't exist the day before. That gives customers confidence in that we're a company that they want to contract with over time because they know that we're gonna continue to iterate and continue to provide new features to them. So as we look at the long-term model, we expect gross margins to improve.
It was about 53% in the first quarter. We expect, again, that to increase to about 60% over time, partly through the hardware margins, improving a little bit on the service and software piece as well. We do expect that we're gonna get leverage on the SG&A and R&D costs over time. Right now, you know, again, because the revenues are sort of a trailing indicator, the bookings are sort of the contract value because it's getting recognized over time. You know, we're sort of growing into that bookings value over time. So as we grow into that bookings value, we're gonna see more and more leverage for SG&A and R&D costs. As a result, we expect that we can get to a 20% operating margin at scale.
Now we're defining scale as 350,000 licenses and seats on paid seats on Evidence.com. You know, we're gonna continue to sort of balance sort of the need to invest for growth with, you know, the desire to get to profitability, but we're very confident that at scale, this is gonna be a profitable business that we're all gonna be excited about. Next slide. So my last slide here, I want to talk a little bit about the weapons business. As you know, the weapons has always been a big contributor to the profits in the for TASER. We're really. You know, I think as Luke talked about before, you know, we've created a product that solves big problems on the weapons side. It creates a lot of value.
The ROI for a TASER weapon is less than a year for agencies, with workers' comp savings, suspect injury savings, liability savings for settling use of force claims, and that's really led us to create a profitable business. You know, we've seen the near-term profits shrink a little bit, partly due to the investments to grow the international part of the business, but we're confident that over time, as we start to get leverage on those expenses, then we'll get to a 40% operating profit business over time. So, with that, I'll take some questions.
... operating expenses would grow faster than revenue. Do you foresee that trend continuing into 2017?
Yeah, so we're sort of measuring and calibrating sort of the operating expenses to bookings. A lot of the investments we're making are on the Axon segment of the business. We expect our bookings this year to actually grow faster than operating expenses, which gives us confidence that over time, there'll be leverage in the model, and we'll see the operating margins. They're going to be sort of challenged in the first half of the year, but we see the second half of the year, they'll start improving as we start leveraging some of those costs.
Okay, and then just to follow on, on the Axon long-term operating margin, 20%. Just if, for example, if you had a steady state police force, say, 1,000 seats on Evidence.com, ultimate tier pricing, if there were no changes to the seat count in or out, and they just renewed, would that steady state still be at a 20% margin, or would it be higher?
I mean, I think, yeah, that's a good question. I think that over time, if we have the ability to sort of sell other products to those agencies, we have the ability to sort of have other value-added services, which drive up our average revenue per, you know, per seat on the system. I think that has the ability to improve that. But right now, sort of with the business we have today, we think 20% is a good target.
Yes, hi. Where would you like to see the sales force kind of a year or two from now, size-wise, compared to where it is now?
That's probably a better question for Josh, we'll maybe open up for later, and allow him to answer it. But you know, what I'd say from my perspective is I think we're investing smartly. We're really. I think the investments we're making are paying off. We've seen the investments we've made in the video, the Axon sales force, really deliver higher and higher bookings. You know, what I get comfortable with is the fact that we've as we've added salespeople, we've not adjusted targets for each individual salesperson. So as a result, you know, I think we're getting a higher ROI, and I think we'll see the same thing. International is a little tougher because you see, you know, 18 months to two years before they start paying off.
But again, with you know, we've got a pretty good gross margin business, so I think each individual salesperson has ability to you know, pay for themselves pretty quickly.
One of the things that we've seen with security companies and with access and tracking companies in with the SaaS model is that you get them, you get them going, everybody's happy at the beginning. They're paying less, you're providing services. After several years, they begin to wonder, we have to remember, why are we paying, why are we paying this amount?
Mm-hmm.
What types of programs, be they educational, reminding them every day-
Yeah.
You just want to call it customer touch-type programs to keep you reminding them what your value proposition is, because that ultimately, that's what keeps them happy with you and reminding them why they're paying that monthly or periodic fee.
Yeah, no, I think that's a great question. I think, you know, we. You know, Josh covered that a little bit before with the account management. I think that's a big part of account management. You know, for us to develop new features and new advanced features, you know, with voice of the customer input, and then not let the customers, all the customers know. You know, we may have a small subset of customers ask for a feature, but we need to make sure we're doing a good job at communicating those features because, you know, we're continuing to iterate on the product, and we feel very proud of the product we have. But to your point, we need to make sure that we're constantly in front of customers and letting them know, you know, what those advanced features are.
We need to, you know, learning and development is part of that. We think that we've got the ability through. You know, we've hired some good people in that learning and development area that will help make our customers more successful and successfully, you know, utilize some of these features over time. I think that if people are having a great experience, you know, as they come, and it's time for their renewal, I think that we'll have good renewal rates because I think we've done a good job at that point of really showing our customers the value of the platform.
Could you just help us bridge the Axon services gross margin? So what takes us from 42 to 60 long term, when presumably, the cost of storage is a bit higher when you have everybody ramped up and storing more data, more officers, and maybe add fleet to the equation? So what does the unit economic look like per seat at, at that stage?
Yeah, no, I think it's a good question. You know, we think that, again, that we could think we get the hardware margins to be roughly 50%. We think the, the service and storage margins will sort of stay at that 65%, maybe 67% range, and that blended margin will get us to that 60% over time. Your, your point's a good one. I think as we see more storage on the system, there's sort of incremental costs with that, but, you know, that, that I think that gets offset by the fact that we continue to see our customers gravitate towards the higher-priced tiers to utilize the advanced features that they get with those higher-priced tiers.
As a result, I think we'll see, you know, on the service side, we'll see those margins continue to grow with our customers continue to gravitate towards those more advanced pricing tiers because they need those advanced features because of the, you know, that voice of the customer feedback we're getting, and that'll help to sort of offset the cost of storage over time.
Okay. Great, thank you, Dan. We're going to have Rick come up and do kind of a closing wrap-up, and then we'll bring up all of the presenters and do a general Q&A section.
Okay, great. Let's go ahead and click forward one. Again, the main takeaway I want you to have about our business strategically today is it's not about hardware.
...It's not about software, and it's not even just about the cloud. It's about connecting all of these things together to our community of users and driving high utilization. That last question about, you know, when I think of the alarm companies, one of the challenges, I think, is you buy an alarm, and then it's something that you really never use, right? It's something that's there, you know, that might get used very sporadically. We're laser-focused on how do we get our customers actively using this system and doing more and more and more with this system? Because we're the only people that will be able to do that, because we have the community that's connected here. And, you know, sometimes it's maybe hard to even wrap your heads around this connection. We've all experienced in our personal lives.
I could give you all the different examples of connected platforms that we use. But it, it's not about the specific phone you have or the specific apps even on it. It's how it all works together with the people you connect with. So this is about, you know, whether it's video or whether it's written records, it's when this data collides with a human being, how does it get used? How does that user experience feel? How efficient is it for both when they generate it, and then how will they work with it throughout the process? I think this is where we have some really unique sort of capabilities as an organization. You know, Luke talked a little bit about when we moved to this sort of human interface side. First of all, Josh talked about the direct channel.
You know, most of our competitors, especially the really large ones, go through value-added resellers or integrators and installers. The more obfuscation between you and the customer, the harder it is to have that level of intimacy. We see tremendous value in that we've been building these relationships directly so that we can, you know, we can do more missionary selling than we could possibly have done before, when we were selling through third parties and asking them to carry this—I got a little excited, knocked my mic off. The other piece to think about that I think is a little bit unique is the training situation. Because we are a tactical company in our roots, right? We think long and hard. We, we train 10,000 instructors a year. They're training hundreds of thousands of end users.
We approach training a little differently than your traditional sort of camera vendor or software vendor, where we're thinking, how does this integrate into an operator's life, to how they're going to learn how to use this across the whole life cycle, the different sort of roles within an agency. So ultimately, it's how this all connects together that we believe creates unique value, that allows us to continue to do things in the future that even we haven't thought of today, but we'll learn with our customers. Hey, now that we're all connected together, what else can we do with these petabytes and petabytes of multimedia information? And create sort of long-term solutions that continue to break out and create new value that, you know, frankly, other competitors just simply won't be able to do.
And we think also about some of the synergies between even our TASER business and our new software business. You know, now we're over the years, historically, we've had payment plans for TASER, but now that we're able to integrate it into this solution, now we're seeing our customers move towards TASER 60 or the Officer Safety Plan, where our TASERs are being sold more like a total solution. We talked about having two sales teams. Well, yes, that's true. We found that, you know, guys that sell weapons couldn't really sell the IT. It's different skill sets, but they also don't operate completely autonomously. There's a lot of team selling that occurs here. And we talked about our ability to get in and see a chief. Well, the reason we can do that is because of the TASER side of the business.
Chiefs and law enforcement tend to be much more focused on the job of being a cop. So I think they relate... We have a strong relationship with them because the Taser is strategic in the eyes of a chief. That's different than your traditional IT product sales group that's got to sort of come in through the IT group, which frankly, most police officers don't relate to IT as being sort of, you know, a strategic part of policing the same way they do with some of the equipment. So it's finding ways to combine this stuff together synergistically, to create more value for our customers and for our shareholders, at the same time. With that, let me click forward. I think I've got one more slide. Ultimately, the one other big differentiator, I think, is we are a mission-driven organization.
You know, we're not just in this to make products to sell, to make money. Now, we're also not a nonprofit, right? So I'm a huge believer, I'm a huge optimist in the capitalistic system. What a great thing! You can find problems, solve those problems, and do it in a way where we create massive value, and you get to keep some of that. You know, that means our customers get more value because we're solving things that matter. We create extraordinary breakthroughs. Our customers are receiving it, our employees are receiving it, and our shareholders are receiving it. So I tend to think of the business holistically.
We've got to look after all three of our stakeholders, but ultimately, if we do the right thing to solve these problems and make the world a better place, a safer place for our customers, it's going to be a better place for our shareholders and for our employees as well. I think that that's, you know, that's something we're really proud of. And, you know, Josh talks about belief with our salespeople. You know, for our salespeople to believe it, it can't be BS, right? We've got to be pursuing things we really believe in. We believed in the cloud, you know, back in 2010, because it just made sense.
We looked at what was happening in other industries, and even though there was a ton of skepticism because this was new to the market we operate in, we sort of had to stand up and say, "You know what? Yeah, we're hearing all this feedback that it's not right for this market, but we believe it is." Ultimately, I think we've been vindicated in those beliefs, and those beliefs also have to transfer over to our customers. I think we've established a very transparent relationship with our customers. I mean, one thing you'll learn about these guys, if you get a chance to talk to them, they spend their whole life dealing with people that BS them all day long, right? "I haven't been drinking, sir," or, "It wasn't me," right? I mean, our customers have the most highly developed emotional intelligence out there.
They read people for a living. So one thing that's great about our business model is we can come to them and say, "Hey, here's exactly how we approach this. Here's how we're going to solve these problems for you." And it's a way that all of our salespeople can feel good about because we're solving unique problems. We're not in a price-based war because we're the tenth company trying to sell you a holster that's like the other nine guys. We're creating unique sources of value. We ultimately expect to make... You know, we're doing risky things, too, and there's going to be a higher financial return on that. And that's something we can be proud of with our salespeople and with our customers. And ultimately, I think it's been really good for our shareholders historically.
We intend for it to continue to be good going forward. And those who've been around for a while, we appreciate the patience. You know, this iteration took longer than expected. You know, some of you shareholders as well, probably hear, you know, people saying, "Well, now it's obvious everybody's gonna wear a camera." Well, some of you were with us when this was painfully forward-leaning, and we were a little bit early to the market. But thank goodness we were. We got the kinks out of our cameras and our cloud software before the world saw that this was gonna happen.
So we're really well-positioned now to be able to scale and take advantage of it now that the sort of light bulb has come on, and we've seen the concept go from being, "no way" to "absolutely." So with that, I'm gonna turn back over to Luke to lead us through the Q&A section.
Great. Thank you, Rick. We're gonna have all the presenters come up, and we'll probably spend about 10 minutes doing general Q&A for the whole team.
Dan, I wanted just to ask a question, going back to the licenses being booked.
Mm-hmm.
What's the average time between when a license is booked and when it starts hitting sales? And then a follow-up: as you've grown more internationally, is that timeline getting extended because of the international contracts, or, you know, can you give any additional color on that?
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So typically, you know, when we have a new booking, we recognize that the hardware, you know, immediately upon selling. So typically, we're delivering that camera, typically the same quarter as the booking. Sometimes it might spill a quarter. You know, we tend to be back -end loaded as a sales organization, so we get a lot of deals in towards the end of the quarter, so some of those might slip to the next quarter. And then the license, you know, if there's not implementation services or other things, the license will start one month later. We've seen that a little bit more pronounced over the last couple of quarters because of the backlog in cameras.
So we finished the year with about 6,000 or 7,000 cameras in backlog, finished the first quarter with 8,000 cameras in backlog. So that's really caused that to be a little bit more pronounced. As a result, we've got a pretty sizable quantity of deals, so, you know, licenses that we booked that aren't in that ARR yet at this point. But that. We do think we'll catch up in second quarter, and certainly as we get into the third quarter, be fully caught up, and then we'll see that sort of normal, maybe, you know, deals we book in one quarter, those will be on the platform the next quarter in that seat count and ARR.
Yeah. Hi, I actually had a question for either the chief or the major, please. So, don't wanna talk about in general terms, but for your specific agencies, can you just talk about how important it is for you to be able to share data or files with neighboring towns or states agencies? And, I mean, just given your locations, if you're working with any of the agencies out there that are evaluating, you know, pilot programs or future RFPs?
Yeah, regarding area police departments in New Jersey, we have about 390 police departments. It seems a small state, but every town has its own police force, so we see a lot of issues with... We all have our own records management system, we have our own dispatchers. There's a lot of not sharing, you know, which is a problem. But I could tell you that when we went on board, we had over 200 of the 300 and some police departments come to our agency to do a walk-through and learn about how we do our program, our implementation. And as a result, there's a lot of counties now that are taking it from a county perspective. They're gonna go out there and buy them and mandate them to the police departments.
So I think the goal, I know in our New Jersey, is to have every agency have the same system and have the same ability to transfer information back and forth so we can share that. As it stands right now, we could have TASERs, somebody else could have somebody different and so forth. But since the successes, like I said, we've had over 200 inquiries from police departments, especially from all South Jersey, North Jersey, come down.
And similarly, we've had a couple of instances where we've had the need to share video. One most recently was we caught a murder suspect in Charlotte that was from a county up, about three counties up in Winston-Salem, and we had to share that video with that department so that they could make it a part of their prosecution of the homicide. Old days, we would burn it to a DVD, and they would have to drive down and pick it up, do the whole chain of custody process and take it up there. We were able to simply, with about three clicks of a mouse, send that video to them, and then they could download it or transfer it electronically to their district attorney there.
In a matter of just a few minutes, they had everything that they needed to be able to move forward with that case. So the opportunity is there. For us, there's not that many agencies immediately around us to share, but as large as we are, for some reason, all the bad people navigate to Charlotte. So the opportunity is going to present itself to do that much, much more often.
So, Luke talked about some of the. Or maybe it was Josh, about some of the tier two markets being potentially transformative deals. And, Rick, you mentioned that in France, you know, there was one other entrenched, maybe, incumbent or something. Can you maybe go flesh out a little bit of the details about what it's gonna take to win that market versus this other competitor, perhaps?
Yeah. So in France, there's a local distributor that has been reselling actually a camera that came out of the UK, the Reveal Media camera that we faced in the United Kingdom, had a head start on us in France. I think they've got around 1,500-1,700 of those cameras in the field today. And when I showed up in France, you know, there were already these rumblings about a nationwide camera program. To be honest, some of the initial reaction was cloud, no way in France, like, just complete skepticism. So I went into one of my first meetings, and we had one of the senior purchasing bureaucrats from the French Ministry of the Interior. And when we started talking about cloud, you know, we just related it back and forth.
You know, I saw the guy had an iPhone, and we started talking about that. And literally by the end of the first meeting, you know, I'd say, you know, there was an epiphany where he sort of said, "Hey, initially, frankly, I didn't even know TASER made cameras." You know, I was ready to come in today. We'd had some things we alluded to earlier, where our distribution into France, they were getting overcharged on some accessories, and they were really upset about that. But having a CEO sit there with them and say, "Hey, look, I'm here for the next three months. I really want to understand your agency, what the challenges are, et cetera. And, oh, by the way, the stuff you've been getting overcharged on, you know what?
We're just gonna give you guys a fresh supply of some of those to set that right." That was a relatively small financial give on our part, but did a lot to build the relationship. But I think even our own team in France, we didn't have somebody with sort of the cloud background. Our previous. We had a consultant in France who's really good on the police side, but I think historically, you know, he wasn't, it just wasn't really the right guy to be introducing the cloud concept and the cameras. So we hired a new, you know, sales resource, who's in-market now, who comes from a sort of an IBM-type background. And I was able to kind of open some of the doors as a CEO.
You know, so I can get meetings at a different level than your typical sales resource. So I think part of the investment of. The other thing that was interesting was just the idea that I'm not an American, who flies in to have a business meeting and flies out the next day and expects to do business.
That, I think, expressing interest, you know, to the degree of, "Hey, you know, we see this as an important country, you know, and I'm gonna come and live here because I want to understand what those needs are." I think that set a very different tone, and now that we've got a real French team there to follow up, and they can pick the phone up and call me directly as well, if there's some issue that sort of establishing the personal relationship at the leadership level of the company. To where, you know, we're waiting for the tender to come out in France now, but I think I was able to have an...
From that first meeting, to have a number of follow-up meetings, and I think consistently we heard the message go from, "No, we can't do the cloud," to, "This is absolutely the right way to go. Not sure we can do it." Well, okay, well, what would stop you from doing, right? You dig in there, and we find out whether there's issues around European data sovereignty and privacy laws. So we've engaged resources on those issues to help answer those questions. And we're in the middle of it right now, so I can't tell you we're ultimately gonna prevail, but I can tell you, we're in the game and fighting hard, and I think we have captured some of the mind share at the most senior levels, that this is the right way to go.
Whereas, had we not been in there, you know, had we not hired some people with solution selling experience, we wouldn't even have a chance of winning France. Now, when I say it's gonna—you know, we're hearing the national, the Prime Minister say, "Every cop's gonna have a camera." What we're hearing from the budgeting side is far less inspirational. It's, we're gonna start with maybe another 1,000 or a few thousand units. But we're in the game now, and I think we've got a better than 50/50 chance that we ultimately are selected. It might take 5 years, it might take 10 years. I think they will get to this idea that every cop's gonna wear a camera; we're running into it universally around the world.
And so for us, the most important thing is, like, we may spend a lot to get that first thousand-camera deal, but we're looking at this as, you know, this could be a super interesting and valuable business. The same thing's kind of happening in Italy, too, where I'd say they're a little further behind in France in body cameras, but we've got now an experienced solution salesperson. We've got, you know, relationships we've created. We just did an event at the U.S. Embassy that was very well received, where we had an opportunity to bring in senior-level customers from the, uh, Polizia Nazionale and the, uh, it's not the Gendarmerie, it's the Carabinieri, uh, in Italy.
So it's frankly been a lot of fun for me to go out and kind of, you know, be on the tip of the spear with our customers. But we're seeing it literally everywhere we've put investment, put the right team in place, it makes a difference. That, you know, they start uncovering opportunities. Between the weapons and the cameras, like, every... There's an opportunity with almost every police force in the world. Luckily, I've got Josh here to help keep me focused, so we don't distract the whole team trying to do everything at once. But a lot of opportunities.
What's that?
This is for Major Willis and Chief Chew. You— It sounds like both of you were OSP customers, and I'm just wondering if you considered other service plans, or were they just tossed out wholesale from the beginning? You know, how does that thought happen?
I actually don't think either customer actually went with the OSP. So the Officer Safety Plan would be bundling in the weapons with the video solutions. I think both agencies actually purchased the weapons separately at this point. That's correct, right?
Correct.
Yeah.
Yes, we had the weapons early on and then purchased the cameras much later. We did the same.
How do you feel generally about that model?
Yeah.
Is that something that, how do you feel generally about that model? Is that something that you think is viable or interesting or, or not?
Yeah, we, we've seen a lot of traction with the OSP plans. I think part of it depends on where the agency is in the life cycle of their product. So if they've just purchased weapons within the last, you know, 1-3 years, probably not a good candidate for OSP. And so we're, we've seen the majority of traction is where agencies are at the end of their useful life cycle or past that, and when we're talking with them in discussions, they say: Hey, this bundled package makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. And we really, you know, we really believe the Officer Safety Plan is a will help agencies arrive at full deployment as well. You know, we think cameras are standard issue, right? Agencies don't share cameras. They, they issue them to individual officers. However, TASERs at times are pooled, and when we have a bundle that actually is able to put a TASER and a camera on every officer, it really does help the agency achieve full deployment in an affordable way.
I guess maybe first, this question probably is, is best for, Major Willis or Chief Chew, but anyone else could chime in, too. But in, in terms of thinking about video adoption in, in vehicles and patrol cars or whatever, first, we've got many years of data and experience there. I think you guys have, have data in your, in your areas of, from the car as well. What, what are... I guess, what have you learned there? What are your incumbent solutions for dealing with managing, tagging, archiving, researching, pulling back that, that vehicle data, and, and how does that influence your thinking about why Evidence.com may make sense, and Axon makes sense for, for the, for the wearable camera on the officer?
Well, I can tell you from the in-car solution for us, I've got 13 different... Well, excuse me, 14 different servers across my entire footprint that I have to manage, update, provide patches to, provide security to. And an in-car solution that I can send everything to the cloud not only is gonna save me staff time, but it's gonna save me space in the offices. It's gonna save me the headache of having to deal with all those services, the maintenance plans, and everything that is associated with it. So that is certainly a path that we are looking at right now. We've got a new chief as of July of last year. Our previous chief was going to do away with our in-car solution.
This chief wants to keep an in-car solution, so we are seriously looking at what that solution is gonna be.
Yeah, I would happen to agree with the major. In a perfect world, you'd have the body camera and in-car camera mirrored together, matched, so you have the ability to... Let's just say, if you hit your overhead lights on, not only does it activate the car camera, but it activates the body camera. We, a lot of, well, actually all police departments in New Jersey have two separate systems. So I think that's something that all police chiefs would love. And if we have the ability where we can match that and mirror it, put it in one location, and it's one functionality, I think that would be ideal, and I think that's where we're going for instead of duplicating your efforts. It just doesn't make sense. So I, I foresee that being the future.
This is a question for, I guess, just about everybody up on stage here. You're, you've moved into multiple services over multiple products. To, to be able to scale, to handle the potential business that you have out there, you've got to create, I hate to use the word, but you have to create the ecosystem to be able to handle all this. Where do you still have holes in being able to not just go to market, but to support the market and have the, the backup so that when the orders do come through, everything is integrated, put together fast, and your ultimate clients, standing on the side here are very, very happy with you?
that this has been done not only on time, but they're being trained on time as well, and that you have the marketing to be able to just move into the next group of sales to be able to promote whatever successes you've had in the past. It all takes, like, what is called ecosystem.
Yeah, let me start by offering some perspective around some of the services and support that we offer. So, as we're scaling the business internally, we're investing heavily in sales operations and people operations and other functions that we need to scale the business. From what the customer experiences, though, we've invested heavily in a professional services team, as well as a learning and development team. And we've got the best technology solution, but another key element of kind of our positioning and our commitment to the customers is we tell them: We will not let you fail. So when Charlotte deploys their system, we've got Marcus and his team and some of our professional services team, they're in there consulting with them on, how are you gonna roll this out, and what are the pain points that you're gonna see?
Some of the big challenges in doing these big rollouts are just change management inside the organization. So at London Metropolitan Police and, and big agencies like Charlotte, they need assistance from people like our professional services staff that can kind of build a project plan for them and help them manage that change process. Maybe offer it up to Josh, if you have any other comments on that.
Yeah, I think the name of the game, like I said, is we just wanna make sure we can cover the market. And so from a sales perspective, we need to make sure that our outside salespeople have the time and capacity to meet with, you know, x, you know, every single one of their customers, x number of times per year, and for each agency, that's a little different. For a while, you know, the deal. The only deals we felt like we were losing were the deals that we weren't in. And so, you know, when we feel like we're in a deal competing against other competitors, we feel like there's a high percentage we're gonna win.
So for us, it's really just making sure from a sales perspective, we can cover the entire market, and we feel like we're gonna win the majority of those deals if we do.
One other thing, I would add, just, on the soft skill side of things, this is where passion is really important. Like, you know, for our team, you know, if the customer is failing, we want our people internally, visibly upset about that, ringing alarm bells and pulling in other resources, that this isn't a business... I can't tell you how shocked I am that this is such a competitive advantage. I hear from so many customers: "We deployed this other system, and it fell apart on us, and we felt like nobody was there answering the phone when we were calling." Whereas with our system, when we call, you know, hear continually, like, your people are so engaged and, and available and passionate. And I think that's just an important cultural issue, that being a mission-driven organization really helps drive it.
You know, we're not done when the sale happens. You know, if the customer is, like, unhappy, somebody inside of TASER needs to be very unhappy about that, too, and percolating it up and taking it very personally, that they marshal the resources to make them successful. Then it's obviously the job of management to make sure we organize that, all that energy in an effective way.
All right. Well, great. We will now transition into lunch and product demonstration. Erin, do you wanna maybe talk us through the logistics on this?
For those of you who are still here, we have a dinner tracker. So then we'll be doing that in order to stand by everything.