TAC to 'transform the market'

DALLAS--TAC, an international security and building systems integrator owned by Schneider Electric, announced in late October the appointment of Jeff Drees as president of TAC in the Americas region and executive vice president of TAC worldwide. He will be responsible for the performance and growth of the company in North, Central and South America. He takes over for Dean Meyer, who has been named chief operations officer at new Schneider acquisition Pelco and will serve under David McDonald. Drees, who joined TAC in 2001 and has served in the Partner, Energy Solutions and Systems Integration divisions, has been an engineer and a salesman, an end-user and operations manager, and he said he knows about "buildings that don't work and accountability that isn't there, but we can approach clients in an innovative way that gives them that accountability." Drees feels TAC/Schneider's dual experience in the building automation and security markets differentiates the company in both markets. "I feel we can literally transform the industry by converging not just the technologies, but the know-how," Drees said. "We can bring paths to our clients that they traditionally buy through a contracting chain that is very painful to them." For example, in the burgeoning energy-conservation market, TAC views the integration of card-holder information with a facility's energy management as more than a niche market. "Because we have more data from the IP technology," Drees said, "that means customers can now understand how many people are in the building and use the card holder database to make decisions on how much air to bring in or how many lights to turn on, and that comes down to the engineering know-how to make that system work." Drees sees TAC's greatest growth potential in the Americas coming through selling security systems to its existing building automation base. He'll be working on that with Meyer at Pelco, with whom he worked for the past six years, "so, obviously, there will be a lot of collaboration going on," Drees said.