Monitronics and BlueWave forge partnership

DALLAS--Monitronics announced that it has signed an exclusive partnership deal with BlueWave Security, a Wi-Fi lock and security company. Reginald Blakely, product support manager for Monitronics, said, "Part of the agreement is to forge a relationship that allows us to build on future products ... What we can do right now is provide a unique product in Wi-Fi-based access control systems." Terms of the agreement, which was signed on Sept. 22, could not be released because "all details have not been finalized yet," according to Blakely. "We've never done an exclusive agreement in the past, so this is somewhat new territory." BlueWave's physical access control solution is an end-to-end, IP-network solution with full support for both the IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet) and 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standards. "Our solution is a network-based system at its core--the application happens to be physical control," said Mance Harmon, chief executive officer and founder of BlueWave. This technology eliminates the need for traditional panels and wires, and integrates with industry-standard locking devices and electronic readers. In addition, "Because it's a network-based product," said Harmon, "it lends itself very well to remote management. If a central monitoring company wants to remotely manage a system, they have the ability to do that over the Internet, which is very attractive." According to Blakely, the IP-based physical security solution is appealing to its customers because "the product is priced very competitively--it gives our dealers an edge. To be on an access control job, they are now able to do it for hundreds of dollars cheaper than [with a traditional panel system]." And, for Monitronics, "the potential to do a lot of access control in the future is definitely there as we grow our business," said Blakely. "The ease of working with the staff at BlueWave and the ability to get a unique access control product is what drove this thing." Harmon said next year BlueWave will be building WIDS (a wireless intrusion detection system) into their solution. "If your proprietary network is being jammed, what can you do? [Your security people] may have never realized that someone is actually jamming the network. But with Wi-Fi, the second your system comes under attack, an alert is raised to the administrator which takes it to a whole other level, and sends a message to the physical security guard, 'The attacker is in parking lot C, go get them.'" "No single vendor will ever be able to do that because it's not their expertise--they build locks," said Harmon.