HSM severs last tie to Honeywell

MINNEAPOLIS--HSM Electronic Protection Services will relocate its Protection Net Center to a new facility here in October, which will be the last step for HSM in separating from its former parent company, Honeywell. "This has been the last real estate that we have co-occupied," said Don Young, the chief information officer at HSM. The new Protection Net Center, a legacy name kept when HSM bought the central station from Honeywell in June 2004, will "have service dispatch completely centralized, where it was distributed before into the field offices," Young said. Built in 1999, the operation center's new home has modernized infrastructure, including fiber access. "The building was built to suit Computer Network Technologies, a company that monitored data and voice networks," Young said. Because the former tenant had similar technology needs, such as central office feeds, the new facility was well equipped for occupancy, with only minor changes. "The only significant change to the property is the installation of the two brand new generators," Young said. HSM's second monitoring location in Santa Ana, Calif., will also be redundant to the Minneapolis location. With 34,000 square feet of space, HSM's new location will serve more than half of its accounts, offer staff larger work areas and have the capacity for growth, Young noted. Service upgrades include leaving the company's five-year-old Fujitsu phone system at its former location and switching to "a million dollar Avaya call center solution," which offers the "ability to balance call traffic among personnel." With its reach spanning throughout the United States and covering the residential, commercial and national account sectors with 50 HSM branches, Young said the new facility provides the architecture needed to continue to grow: "Our primary goal is to keep up with the expectations of our national account customers; they typically have the most customized requests, which means we have to be the most flexible to respond to those."