Acadian adds 40k accounts with Infinity acquisition

LAFAYETTE, La.—Acadian Monitoring Services, which has been monitoring accounts nationwide for 15 years, on Aug. 11 announced the acquisition, through an all-cash transaction, of Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based Infinity Monitoring. The acquisition adds 40,000 monitored accounts, bringing Acadian's customer base to just over 150,000.

Acadian Monitoring services division VP and GM Blane Comeaux told Security Systems News the acquisition is just one part of an overall growth strategy at Acadian. “This acquisition helps us get our network up to the Midwest area—that's a part we've been missing. Like Command Central earlier this year, Infinity has now joined the Acadian network,” Comeaux said. “We have several more targets. We're looking at a couple East Coast possibilities, and we're looking at one in the west, and in the next three years we'd like to complete that.”

Acadian, serving more than 400 alarm companies and integrators, has central stations in Lafayette and Baton Rouge, La., and has a redundant backup center in Austin, Texas. All Acadian's centrals are hot redundant, are CSAA Five Diamond-Certified, and the Lafayette central station recently received 2050 designation from Underwriters Laboratories for Department of Homeland Security services.

Additionally, Acadian announced on Aug. 9 that it had added AES IntelliNet receivers to all its central stations, another move aimed toward growth, according to Acadian director of operations Kenny Savoie. “The addition of these AES products allows us to take advantage of wireless mesh networking, giving us more reliability, redundancy and faster signal transmission than any wired or wireless network technology available,” Savoie said in a statement. “Furthermore, since the monitoring transceivers themselves make up the network, negating the need to use radio towers, this saves us hefty monthly fees and essentially offers us the lowest cost of ownership possible.”

Acadian will keep Infinity's Elk Grove Village central station in full operation, and all staff, including Infinity CEO Tim Newman, have accepted positions with Acadian. Tim and Kathy Newman started Infinity in 2002 and have grown it into a strong regional presence. In talking about the acquisition, Tim Newman said the time was right to merge. “We have taken the growth of the company about as far as we can without bringing in additional outside resources,” Newman said in a statement. “By merging Infinity into Acadian, we will have access to capital, human resources and technological advances that have been made in the security industry.”

Ron Davis, managing partner of Davis Marketing Group, represented Infinity in the transaction.