The 911 call came in at 10 a.m. on a chilly day in February: A burglar had kicked in the door of a West Hartford home, rifled the house and was now on the run.

Working dispatch that morning, West Hartford Police Officer Alan Goldstein checked the 30-inch computer monitor above his desk. From the interactive map on the screen, Goldstein could see the location of four patrol cars that were near enough to form a perimeter and possibly corner the burglar.

Public safety software is proving to be a valuable tool, making catching the bad guys a little easier. There are several firms nationwide that design and sell such software. In Connecticut , a small, 10-year-old East Haven firm, NexGen Solutions LLC, has negotiated software contracts with more than 30 Connecticut law enforcement agencies, in some cases edging out much larger competitors, said Sal Annunziato, the company's managing partner.

Police departments in Farmington, Vernon, Avon, Bloomfield and West Hartford are among those that have purchased NexGen's public safety software. The West Hartford Police Department installed NexGen's software in 2006 at a cost of about $200,000, Annunziato said.

Goldstein, the West Hartford police officer, said that before NexGen's software and its interactive maps were in place, he would have spent valuable minutes thumbing through maps trying to plot the burglar's potential escape routes.

The program has also made life easier for patrol officers. They can pull up an interactive map on their vehicle's laptop computer to show the locations of their colleagues.

"Before, it was a constant back and forth on the radio — where are you?" Goldstein said.

In the burglary case, West Hartford police were able to make an arrest less than an hour after the emergency call.

"We got him," Goldstein said.

NexGen's software allows law enforcement agencies to track emergency calls, share information, and map — in real time — the location of patrol vehicles, said Lee Wezenski, the company's director of development.

The two partners, Wezenski and Annunziato, credit their success to focusing on the needs of Connecticut 's law enforcement agencies.

"Lee and I made a decision to only market our products in Connecticut ," Annunziato said. "The application and its installation is very complicated. Being a small company, we wanted to be accessible."

Because of Wezenski's familiarity with Connecticut 's statutes, "we knew what to incorporate into the software," Annunziato said.

The Connecticut State Police recently signed an eight-year, $7 million contract with NexGen, the company's biggest contract to date.

Since 1999, NexGen has grown from two employees to 12. Last year, it had revenue of $2 million, Wezenski said.

Wezenski, once a computer programmer for Dunn & Bradstreet, became a part-time police officer in 1993. He quickly took note of the time-consuming tasks that police had to complete when responding to an emergency.

"When dispatch officers had a call, they had to take the paperwork over to a time clock and have it time- and date-stamped," Wezenski said.

Wezenski's colleague at the time, John DeCarlo, now Branford's police chief, was experiencing similar frustrations. Every month, Branford police sent a list of major crimes committed in their jurisdiction to the FBI. As a simple tally, it did not include details about crimes, such as a burglar's description or methodology: Did he prefer to jimmy the back door or shatter a basement window? As a result, there was no way to search a database to determine if similar crimes had occurred in neighboring communities.

"At the time, there was a movement afoot to change over to a detailed incident report that would allow us to search the text. Part of an officer's report is describing the crime — a narrative — and there was no easy way to search the narrative," DeCarlo said.

Wezenski began developing a software application in his spare time that could compile and search those details. As the software began to take shape, Wezenski hired Annunziato in 1999.

"Lee knew the law enforcement side; I knew the technology," Annunziato said.

NexGen has continued to expand the program's capabilities to allow agencies to share data and allow police to write their reports in their cruisers. Without that capability, "they might spend the rest of their shift filling out forms at the station," Wezenski said.

Now they can pull over to the side of the road and do the paperwork.

"They can keep an eye on the neighborhood and take calls," Wezenski said.

Public safety software "isn't a substitute for good, community-oriented policing, but it is a valuable tool in an officer's tool belt," DeCarlo said.

Contact Janice Podsada at jpodsada@courant.com