Alarm Industry Stood on Head as Forward Thinking Security Companies Capture the Market
DICE Corporation is focused on bringing products that go beyond the standard in the alarm industry, while providing both out-of-the-box thinking and yield success for clients. There is a reason that in 2010 DICE broke a 12 year sales and growth record that was previously set in 1999. With technologies changing, and the industry full of talk and speculation, DICE Corporation remains focused on the production and delivery of innovative, new products.
Please take a moment to read the following article that will be published in the winter issue of the CSAA Dispatch. This particular client is one of many new clients that stand out, and they are winning the large scale RMR deals in every sector because of the technology they have deployed.
Grandpa started his alarm company when direct wire was king of the hill. He made the big change to digital dialers as the family’s second generation learned the alarm industry. Today, Grandpa would be rolling over, as companies like CamGuard in Ontario, California pave the way to a new alarm industry that is based on complex networks, wireless devices, and remote software tools running on smart phones. Wireless broadband services, including video verification, surveillance, and intelligent analytics are set to wipe out the industries false alarm issues while at the same time connecting with end users of alarm devices in ways that Grandpa would have never imagined. The result is that CamGuard is bursting at the seams with large RMR deals that clients are begging for.
CamGuard’s technological innovations really started over 10 years ago as Kathleen Sowder, a GM of Westec Business at Westec and Clifford Dice, Systems Engineer at DICE Corporation sat in team meetings geared toward building the first interactive video center in the world, later called Westec Interactive. They developed a friendship that has lasted all these years, with both having a deep passion for new monitoring technologies. For the past two years Kathleen, now VP of Technology at CamGuard, and Clifford have focused again on not only building new technologies, but developing a new security industry whose foundation is so different from most alarm companies; it models the differences between the horse and buggy and the modern day automobile.
In this industry there might not be dedicated alarm sensors to install such as a motion detector; instead the sensor is part of a sensor eye that produces analytics which provide information about what is happening in its field of view. There might not be an installed alarm panel, rather activations are based on software that can run at the site or in the cloud. The devices could be mobile and move about, meaning that location-based services are needed. There may also be two way audio providing an interactive atmosphere. Operators in central stations who monitor events at these types of centers do so in a many to one relationship called a Matrix Grid. This environment produces the capacity to have an operator see many alarms from many devices that could be video, card access, or IP signals from any device. What used to be an alarm event or trip of a device might be combined with other site patterns and analytical information that change the dynamics of how the event is processed.
As CamGuard deployed its new technology, it had to take a myriad of technologies, system types and generations and tied them into a modern center. The result was staggering as the team at DICE Corporation took hundreds of DVRs by Honeywell and other manufacturers and packaged them into this new technology, giving the video center the capacity to monitor and handle all DVR clients at the same time, and manage literally thousands of preliminary and post video alarms. The high capacity system also allows operator tracking and integration to standard automation software from any of the current vendors. In addition, external guard stations or corporations can view their own cameras using the video center’s cloud-based software. This allows the center to be a backup or part-time replacement of the guard during shifts where it may not be profitable to have a guard on-hand. Kathleen Sowder commented, “What is really amazing is that we took all our products in the field and placed them into this large capacity monitoring software. The immediate result was that we could add customers daily and not increase the staff level in the station, while providing unparalleled service levels to our clients. A bonus is that it gives us the capacity for modern technology growth going forward. It also provided us with added services such as pushing monitoring software over the web to our clients, for those that wish to view their own sites.”
It doesn’t stop with one install. Clifford Dice said that DICE Corporation is spending a lot of time learning and building what this new industry needs from software and analytical processing systems. For the past two years, we have been building custom processing systems for Homeland Security projects, city and municipal governments, high-end retailers and various other diverse business industries. DICE Corporation has always served integrators as a customhouse of software systems used in commercial and retail installations, and now those systems are gaining speed with the use of video processing and intelligent access control systems. It’s a new world in the alarm industry, and companies like CamGuard and DICE will continue to thrive as more clients expect advanced, integrated system installations.
