Monitronics adds DSC as a preferred partner

DALLAS-Monitronics International, a provider of residential alarm monitoring services, announced on March 13 the addition of Toronto-based manufacturer DSC as its third preferred manufacturer partner. "We have always limited our program to two partner manufacturers, being Honeywell and GE," said Reginald Blakely, product manager for Monitronics. "The premise of the partnership [with DSC] is to enhance our dealer base as well as the number of dealer partners our company has." DSC will provide Monitronics' dealers with its hardware solutions, including customized products and kits. Blakely said the partnership is effective immediately. However, he expects it will take several months before it becomes visible to the market. "We have customized products with GE and Honeywell and we probably won't have any customized products [with DSC] before the end of '08," he said. David Grinstead, DSC vice president of sales for the Americas, said the two companies have had a running dialog for several years, but attributes the formation of a partnership to the release of DSC's self-contained wireless system products as part of its PowerSeries Alarm System line. "The delivery of our new products to the marketplace provided a new life to the discussions," he said. "Our new self-contained panel is fully wireless in terms of peripherals and allows Monitronics dealers to really raise the productivity of their installers … We'll make training available, but one advantage of the new generation of DSC products is its template programming. It's very simple even for dealers that are unfamiliar with DSC products to install and implement." Although the partnership includes all of North America, Blakely expects Canadian Monitronics dealers to be impacted before U.S. dealers. "We have a number of potential dealers in the Canadian market who want to use DSC products so we have forged this partnership to allow them to use DSC products without any problem," he said. ssn