Monitronics and Alarm.com announce alliance

DALLAS and MCLEAN, Va.--Monitronics, a security monitoring company with a growing dealer channel, and Alarm.com, a provider of wireless and Web-enabled security technology, announced on Oct. 30 a partnership allowing Monitronics dealers to offer Alarm.com's Web-based technology to its customers. "We're very excited about the deal with Monitronics because they have a large established dealer base of high quality dealers," said Alison Slavin, vice president of product management for Alarm.com. "We think our goals are complementary because they clearly want to deliver the latest technology to their dealers and to their dealers' customers, instead of offering the same old traditional security offerings." Alarm.com's wireless and Web-based system allows customers to remotely control and monitor their security systems via Web devices. "A key feature of the system is the ability to monitor activity remotely 24/7 and customers have full control when they want to be alerted," Slavin said. "It gives more control to the customer, it's easier to use and results in less false alarms." Monitronics authorized dealers will begin offering Alarm.com technology, which works primarily with GE panels, in November, said Mitch Clarke, vice president of marketing and market development at Monitronics. "Monitronics is trying to offer the best innovation for our dealers and consumers and [this alliance] is a step toward that," Clarke said. "It is giving the end user the ability to be more in touch with their alarm system." Clarke said he expects the transition to be fairly seamless and won't require an extensive amount of training for dealers or customers. "As far as the training part of it, it's mostly a matter of going on and using [the system] themselves," said Clarke. "It's very intuitive and brings the information right to them, so there's not a lot of training required. It's mostly educating people about the capabilities and creating awareness of what the product can do."