Acadian Monitoring to convert all centrals to DICE platform

LAFAYETTE, La.—Acadian Monitoring Services—with monitoring centers in Lafayette, La., Austin, Texas, Chicago, and Baton Rouge, La.—has begun a company-wide conversion to the DICE central station automation platform. Previously, two of its four centrals—Lafayette and Austin—were already running DICE. The other two are in the process of being switched over to DICE now, and the total conversion is expected to be complete by the end of Q1 2010.

Acadian director of operations Kenny Savoie said the redundancy would make operations more efficient and would help with Acadian's plans for the future. “We needed to build a solid backbone that will support both our organic growth and expansion plans for the future. We approached DICE and they engineered a solution that puts us to the forefront of technology while solving our growing pains,” Savoie said. “Once complete, this build out will allow us to provide a unique central monitoring offering that few, if any, other central stations can match.”

DICE CEO Cliff Dice said the conversion would allow for unlimited future growth. “We built this so that we could plug in multiple centers. We asked them, 'How many are you going to have?' And they said we could have as many as 10 centers or 20 centers, whatever.' So we built it so as they buy or build other centers they can just plug it in and it will be hot redundant.” And Dice was quick to point out what “hot redundant” really meant. “Acadian is the first central that I know of that has complete redundancy between multiple centers. The roll out of those centers actually moves data to all four for all the accounts, all the signals, all the history, up to the second,” Dice said. “Acadian has always been on the forefront of technology and this is another example which sets them apart.”

Acadian will also be one of two pilot companies implementing a new DICE offering, Quantum Mobile Data Management, which will give dealers more control and more up-to-date information exchange in the field. “Dealers want to have their own laptops and their own computers and be able to do everything that they could do if they were connected, but be mobile,” Dice said. “This allows them to have an application on their PC or laptop, and do data entry, do history, do everything … I can be unconnected all day in my service vehicle, and do everything, see all my accounts, and then I synch when I'm connected and, voila, it all goes back to Acadian—all the history, all the signal handling and they can do all the reports and everything.”

Savoie said the winner in the end was the dealer. “Our dealers will have access to more services, a unified Dice platform with four-way redundancies, which ensures the integrity of our national account base from ISP and Telecom outages, and weather-related incidences such as hurricanes in the Gulf and severe ice and winter snow storms in the Midwest,” Savoie said. The DICE platform would also allow the “implementation of universal VRT (Voice Response Technology) for both inbound dealer/tech assistance and outbound low priority alarm and service call handling.”