It’s been about 2 weeks since the greatest ever game of cricket was played at Lords.
Champagne was spraying, fans were cheering and the nation was united in watching Team England bring it home.
But now the champagne’s fizzled and the teams have returned home, the focus has shifted from the performance of Team England to recognizing just how well the tournament was delivered.
Much like the 2012 Olympics, the congratulations is being extended to the many individuals and organizations operating behind the scenes to deliver a safe and enjoyable tournament.
One such unsung hero of the tournament is AtomicMedia client Halo Solutions whose award-winning event safety system, Halo, was used by the ICC Cricket World Cup Organizing Committee to streamline security, safety procedures at the event.
In the short space of two years, we went from training small-scale events to guarding some of the most high-profile sportsmen on the planet.
Read on to find out how we supported their incredible rise to the world stage.
From lanyards to Lords
The system was founded by emergency service and industry professionals passionate about keeping the public safe at events.
Originally intended to be printed as a handy aide memoire, Halo is the brainchild of founders Lloyd Major and Greg Horsford who between them have worked at all the major events in recent UK history.
Having noticed huge flaws in the widely-accepted methods of managing the safety at events, they were quick to spot a gap in the market for a more technically-advanced solution.
AtomicMedia was appointed to turn this idea into a reality back in 2017 after being tasked to design and build Halo from the ground up. Several months of planning, UI/UX designing, user testing and development followed before Halo 1.0 was born.
The multi-platform system comprising of a native iOS mobile app, desktop reporting dashboard and administrator backend was described as ‘the future of public safety’ due to the way it intuitively integrates incident logging, action recording, decisions and rationale for what is called ‘Total Threat Resolution’, giving venues and event organizers complete control and real-time, shared situational awareness at their events.
A winning formula
HALO was quick to grab the attention of major players within the events industry, being used at events like the Reading Marathon, Luton Carnival, Mansfield Town FC and Boyzone’s farewell tour within months of its launch.
Further recognition came in the form of silverware with the system going on to win a number of industry and Tech awards, including App of the Year at the UK App Awards.
It wasn’t long before Halo was catching the eye of even more high profile events and organizations. None more so than the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup who selected Halo to be their system of choice at the event, to streamline security and safety procedures throughout the tournament.
Shaping up
The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup would see 48 matches take place across 11 UK venues with 10 teams taking part over six weeks. To meet these unique requirements, AtomicMedia embarked on an ambitious 3-month development program that saw new features such as Incident triaging, multi-dashboard views and enhanced geo-location tracking added to the system, as well as beginning work on a native Android version of the app. Fast forward to June 2019 and Halo 2.0 was launched!
Over 1m attended and worked at the games and countless more attended the fan zones. It attracted a TV audience of 1.6bn viewers. Halo was used to keep everyone attending the event safe along with protecting the teams from hostile actions at their hotels and during their movements by coach to practice venues throughout the tournament. All close protection teams, residential security teams, hotels, cricket stadia and police forces used the same intelligence platform for the safeguarding of everyone involved in the event.
Jill McCracken, Director of Tournament Safety and Security at the Cricket World Cup, says of working with Halo at the event: “Halo allowed me to keep my security plans discreet yet offered me the oversight to see what was going on across 10 cities at the same time. The app was a superb choice for the Cricket World Cup 2019 as it was so flexible we could tailor it to our requirements, it was also secure, fast and reliable.”
