Security Systems News Top Stories

Honeywell launches Open Technology Alliance

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Honeywell has announced a new Open Technology Alliance, which is described in a press release as “a group of global security manufacturers that will collaborate to increase interoperability between third-party IP systems.” As part of the group’s launch, Honeywell announced it will work with other manufacturers to integrate their IP cameras into Honeywell’s Maxpro video management system, as well as make its other devices more compatible with other vendors’ software platforms.
Other members of this Open Technology Alliance include Milestone, OnSSI, Heitel and IproNet Sistemas S.A.
However, Don Roberts, strategic corporate accounts for Honeywell Security Group, said this is more just making formal what the company has been doing informally for years. “This is something we’ve been doing quietly for years, just to drive some value to our end users,” he said. “Honeywell has been integrating with other products for quite some time.” The formal announcement of the Open Technology Alliance, he said, will help “to get some legs for the program, get some resources dedicated to it internally, and so we can formalize the process for those people we wish to work with on an ongoing basis.”
As part of the initiative Honeywell will be offering software development kits “to enable its growing portfolio of IP cameras to integrate with other third-party video management systems.”
Integrators welcomed the announcement, even if they retained skepticism until more evidence of this easier integration comes about. “I think releasing SDKs and expanding interoperability is definitely a good thing,” said Jeff Novick, director of technology at Peace of Mind Technologies in New York City. “In a lot of ways they’ve been a closed company regarding product releases—it’s always been Honeywell island in many ways. But they make a good product in a lot of areas. I’ve always liked their products and I’ve worked with many of them. It will be a good value to the industry if they follow through and make it more functional to work with other vendors.”
Ethan Ace, director of sales and engineering, Communications Systems in Pennsylvania, agreed with Novick. He said his company installs a lot of Fusion DVRs, for example. “As an analog DVR, they worked fine,” he said. “It wasn’t until [customers] started asking for IP cameras that we started running into problems, and my understanding is that the enterprise NVR, and the new ProWatch line, are much, much easier to integrate.” With this new Alliance announcement, “if it all goes according to plan,” Ace said, “it would make us very happy, and I’m not telling you anything we haven’t told all the way up to the vice president level. They know what they have to do, and they’ve just been slow to do it. Existing customers are now asking for tougher requirements that their current products don’t support. They’re a big ship. It can be slow to turn ... But if they do follow through, if they do support those products, our search for competitive products would be over.”
And Roberts said Honeywell will be participating in larger efforts to make sure interoperability is commonplace in the IP video world. “We are very active in PSIA and ONVIF standards efforts,” he said. “We have engineering resources dedicated to that right now ... I won’t throw out dates, but we’ll have ONVIF and PSIA appliances released in 2010 and we’ll be driving our video management system to those standards as well. This whole situation we’re in right now, where everyone is having to share SDKs, we think some of this will only be a short-term thing until the industry catches up with the standards. We’d like to get back to the old analog days where everyone’s cameras would work with anyone’s system.”
Further, he said Honeywell is committing to fully featured SDKs, so that VMS manufacturers can unlock its cameras’ full capabilities. “We don’t edit that,” he said. “It’s full content. Sometimes we’re more concerned that the open VMS systems don’t take advantage of all the features that are released in those SDKs, so I’m looking forward to industry standards where all of those features are unlocked on both sides. We don’t restrict any part of the SDK, it’s purely open, and anyone can get support with our engineering team when VMS companies are working on it.”
This is music to the ears of Novick and Ace. “I would say there were some Honeywell products that we’ve deliberately not worked with in some applications because we knew that it wasn’t supported by the VMS application at the time. I knew that Honeywell was not on the list of supported devices and I’d avoid them. I’d take someone that was on the supported list.” But he doesn’t want to be installing products based on who works with whom.
“My goal is to always compete on features,” Novick said.
Ace talked about a middle school project his company is working on now, where they spec’d in the Fusion DVR some three years ago, and since then the school district has acquired more money and wants to put IP cameras at its ball fields and parking lots. “Honeywell’s support for handling that request is not the best,” Ace said. “That’s a prime example of the things that aggravate us. If they support third party devices better and keep pricing competitive, there’s less reason to go elsewhere.”

Quick Response acquires American Response Center

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

CLEVELAND, Ohio—The Quick Response Monitoring Alarm Center on Jan. 29 announced it had acquired the assets of Ohio Alarm, Inc., dba American Response Center, of Euclid, Ohio. According to Quick Response president Jeff Cohen, the acquisition makes the combined company a regional force. “I believe it makes us the single largest wholesale central station in Ohio,” Cohen said. “I’m working on our sales analysis right now. We have close to 450 dealers right now.”

Former ARC president Jim Osbourne Sr. will remain with the new company and help marshal a seamless integration of the accounts. “I’ve been through other sales,” Osbourne said. “These things are sometimes done abruptly and it causes many, many problems. We decided we wanted this to be done so that service to the dealer and the customer was uninterrupted. It needs to be invisible.”

Osbourne also agreed the new company was sizeable. “I would say we’re probably the biggest central station in the region. Emergency24 is bigger going one way, and going the other way, Pat [Egan] may be bigger, and C.O.P.S.,” Osbourne said. “We’re at plus-70,000 systems. That’s pretty big.”

Quick Response and its parent company, U.S. Protective Services, have provided alarm monitoring services for more than 40 years. Quick Response operates a UL-listed and CSAA 5-Diamond-certified central station providing wholesale monitoring and additional services like access control, video monitoring and two-way voice PERS systems, according to Cohen.

“We’ve always been strong in the two-way market and now we’re getting back into that,” Osbourne said. “Remember ‘Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up?’ We were the monitoring company for that. We think that the two-way market for PERS is only going to get bigger and bigger.”

Cohen said all the ARC employees have remained on and will continue to staff ARC’s Euclid, Ohio central. “We’re running their facility in their facility,” Cohen said. “The idea of running two centers is nice from a disaster recovery point of view.” Cohen said both centers would be converging to a single automation platform from DICE.

Marietta implements model ordinance, sees major false alarm reduction

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

ATLANTA—Marietta, Ga. Chief of Police Dan Flynn, at the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police Winter Conference held here, presented a report proving that industry/municipality cooperation on a false alarm ordinance had paid off in his city through an overall false alarm reduction of 65 percent in the last four years. Further, the report suggests the overall reduction in calls for service, or CFS, has led to a drop in overall crime since officers have been freed to spend their valuable time on proactive crime prevention.

According to the report, when officers are freed from having to respond to wasteful false alarms they can focus on their real job. “Marietta police officers have been trained and instructed to use their additional unobligated patrol time for proactive crime prevention activities,” the report reads. “With a new departmental emphasis on the use of field interview cards and photos of individuals engaged in articulated suspicious behaviors, there has been a gradual shift from officers being incident-driven, i.e., primarily responding to calls for service, to being analysis-driven, i.e., conducting proactive crime prevention activities in areas with higher crime trends.” This shift in focus of officer time is evident in a nearly 19 percent drop in felony crimes from 2006 to the end of 2009. The report notes that while “the causes of crime and crime rates tend to be multi-faceted, crime rates in Marietta have been dropping at the same time false alarms and calls for service have been dropping.”

Flynn said the importance of streamlined officer time cannot be overestimated. “Right now, revenues coming into cities and towns are way down. So we’re furloughing officers and we have hiring freezes,” Flynn said. “If we can economize how we use our officers during a period when they’re at a premium, I think that’s a pretty timely solution.”

SIAC national law enforcement liaison Glen Mowrey, who worked with Flynn on the Alarm Management Committee to implement Marietta’s ordinance in 2008—based on SIAC’s model ordinance—felt Marietta was a good example of a successful partnership. “With that model ordinance, they always have the questions: ‘How’d you come up with this? How’d you get here? Where’d you get this from?’ When we can tell city council that this is a model that’s approved by resolution for use by the Georgia Police Chiefs Association, it jumps through their legal hoops and makes quite an impact. They go, ‘This is something that’s going to be good for us.’” Mowrey said. “We were able to answer everyone’s questions. The industry helped register all the customers and the results have just been phenomenal. This has been a great success.”

Flynn echoed Mowrey’s assessment. “Private industry, in this case the alarm industry, through their professional organizations can work in harmony with the municipality and the police synergistically and the outcome is good for the community,” he said. “Yeah, it’s good that we’ve drastically reduced false alarms and we’ve reduced calls for service and crime has gone down, but there’s a bigger lesson here. To me the greatest success here is that we can work together congruently for the good of everyone.”

Congress mulls IEMP threat to critical infrastructure

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

DELRAY BEACH, Fla.—In a possible boon to some involved in physical security, members of Congress, and key personnel at DHS and DOE are reportedly eager to pass a bill, currently in the House of Representatives, that would enable the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require private utilities to protect against IEMP—intentional electromagnetic pulses.
Not only that, according to Emprimus CEO Gale Nordling, these stakeholders want to ensure that funds are appropriated this session to ensure this happens.
The government entities have recently been made aware of the danger posed to our critical infrastructure, data centers, and security systems by IEMP, and they’re eager to act, Nordling said.
During the closing session of the first day of the TechSec Solutions conference Nordling, and Jim Danburg, Emprimus director of security and continuity, described in chilling detail how IEMP can quickly and quietly render useless or severely damage computer chips used in private and public sector facilities throughout the country.
Equipment used in IEMP weapons is easily made, instructions can be downloaded from the internet or purchased online for $20, he said. IEMP is so effective that the military uses this technology for defensive purposes in Iraq.
The danger, of course is that it will be used against American business or government targets. Much of the government infrastructure is already protected, Nording said. It’s the private sector that needs to play catch-up.
Technology, in the form of protective containers and remediation processes are readily available, Nording said.
Nording said the legislation, HR 2195, would go a long way toward addressing the threat and said the bill is expected to pass the House and Senate with little opposition in the near future.

Sensormatic Hawaii is now Pacific Security Integrations

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

AIEA, Hawaii—After nearly 20 years in the security business, first with Alert Alarm and then with Simplex Grinnell, Richard Osborne has now purchased his own business, acquiring Sensormatic Hawaii from Greg Murphy. The asset purchase came with offices here. Osborne has retained seven staff members, and added COO Greg Au.
Osborne said the deal closed not more than three weeks after Murphy contacted him with the opportunity: “When two people are motivated, things move quickly,” he said.
The company will now operate as Pacific Security Integrations, and Osborne said he has already begun to expand the company’s offerings significantly.
“Sensormatic didn’t do any alarm work,” Osborne said, “they just walked away from it. But we’ll be getting into residential and commercial alarm, and also into the PERS market.” Pacific will use Grand Central Station for its alarm and PERS monitoring.
Why PERS? “There’s a great need for it here on the islands,” he said. While national PERS suppliers might just send product to the home and contract with an electrician or independent integrator for the installation, Osborne said he’ll be able to bring a superior level of service and support and feels it will be a significant revenue source for the company.
Further, he’ll be expanding Pacific’s commercial capabilities by adding parking control. Despite his history with Simplex-Grinnell, he does not expect to move into the fire alarm market, as his experience was exclusively on the security side of Simplex’s business and he feels that market is already being well served in Hawaii.

Honeywell launches another response for dealers looking to escape POTS ties

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

MELVILLE, N.Y.—Continuing on a trend made more urgent with recent reports that AT&T and others are looking to discontinue POTS service in the next three or four years, Honeywell on Jan. 21 announced its newest product line, the LYNX Plus, a self-contained, wireless, residential system that supports two-way voice capabilities over GSM with SMS network backup, allowing it to cut out disappearing POTS lines and often patchy VoIP service. Despite its GSM capabilities, however, LYNX Plus can also communicate using standard phone lines and broadband transmission.
PERS provider Critical Signal Technologies worked as a beta dealer to test the enhanced two-way voice capability of LYNX Plus. According to CST project manager in charge of multi-tenant Doug Lint, the LYNX Plus was a boon that allowed CST to access whole new segments of the market and grow its business. “Our primary business is PERS and within PERS we had markets we couldn’t reach. So this is creating business opportunities we did not have because people couldn’t get a phone line or they couldn’t afford a phone line to be dedicated to PERS, or VoIP was inconsistent,” Lint said. “This is something we were waiting for. This opened up whole new markets for us. Two-way voice over GSM was the key, because everything with the PERS market is two-way voice, so for PERS this is excellent.”
The LYNX Plus is a combination control panel/keypad/siren/dialer/two-way voice-enabled system/speakerphone with an integrated signal-strength meter. LYNX Plus also helps dealers differentiate themselves and generate incremental RMR through Total Connect Remote Services, a suite of web and mobile applications that allows homeowners to remotely arm and disarm their security systems. The system can also send emails to alert homeowners of critical and non-critical events, such as a child returning home from school. When utilized with devices such as motion detectors, IP video cameras, asset protection and environmental sensors, end users can use Total Connect to access a complete picture of their protected premises
Ralph Maniscalco, director of marketing communications for Honeywell Security & Communications, said LYNX Plus paved the way for a POTS-less world. “We know VoIP is inconsistent at best and we know POTS is going away. So the GSM radio allows a dealer to place this unit anywhere. It also has SMS backup, so if GSM for whatever reason was not available, the SMS would communicate,” Maniscalco said. “This is also one of the first units to have two-way voice over GSM and that allows the dealer to differentiate themselves because there’s another opportunity to add RMR.”

Preparing the way for IP

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

LOS ANGELES—IP Alarms founder Steve Nutt has a warning for dealers and centrals during this time of change from analog to IP: “Losing dealers and centrals remain stuck in their analog world.” To help with the transition, Nutt is launching this this month the Virtual Monitoring Dealer Program. The program is the fruition of months of helping end users and dealers find affordable and simple solutions to the VoIP/security conundrum in which a switch to high tech VoIP service oftentimes renders security systems impotent. “It became perfectly clear that if we could provide IP monitoring solutions to dealers who were looking to upgrade and move their existing accounts and at the same time introduce the dealers to new subscribers wanting to upgrade to IP, then we had the makings of something very promising,” said Nutt. “We decided to launch the Virtual Monitoring Dealer Program.”
IP Alarms, on its website, promises: “Whether you are a Monitoring Center, Alarm Dealer or End User, IP Alarms can help you migrate from monitoring security, fire or medical alarms over telephone landlines to reliably monitoring them over the Internet.” Nutt said the industry needed a solution now, to prepare for the imminent all-IP world. “The electronic security industry is generally very slow to adapt to new technologies and this has proven to be the case for IP alarm monitoring,” Nutt said. “Sure, the big boys are all geared up for it but most centrals and the vast majority of dealers are not.” The Virtual Monitoring Dealer Program provides dealers a managed IP-monitoring solution that works with their old equipment and allows them to upgrade their accounts to IP without a large upgrade cost.
Mark Fischer, VP and CTO of New York Merchants Protective Co., said IP Alarms’ program worked because it provided affordable options for the company’s clients, including those with Nationwide Digital Monitoring and Smith & Wesson. “Phone companies are going to IP-based communications and when they do that, they gain bandwidth, but they do so by dropping packets, and they can throttle the bandwidth based on demand. When a human being is talking on the phone and you drop a packet, it’s not a big deal, but when digital communications are going on and you drop a packet that doesn’t work, because you need every one of those ones and zeros for the signal to make sense,” Fischer said. “What IP Alarms does is it takes a standard control panel, converts it into IP using a very inexpensive adapter and transmits the translated signal to a virtual receiver at the central station, which looks to the automation platform like a standard receiver and the alarm just comes in … They keep their own control panels and their own dialers. We’ve found that when we tell people you need new equipment they don’t like it.”
Why isn’t everyone offering this kind of translation-to-IP solution?
“There is technically nothing to stop any other company out there doing what we are doing as long as they are able to develop and produce their own IP communicators and gain the acceptance of the central stations,” Nutt said via email, claiming most manufacturers want to rope dealers into using proprietary hardware and software. This can get very cumbersome and expensive. “The panel manufacturers will not give their IP protocols to any Tom, Dick nor Harry … It makes it technically difficult and very expensive for a central station to provide support for all the panels that their dealers use. Dealers are also being forced to use a particular brand of IP communicator and subscribe to a single IP network, which many of them do not like. We have focused on producing universal IP devices that can upgrade any alarm panel to IP.”
More information on the Virtual Monitoring Dealer Program will be available soon from www.ipalarms.net.

AlarmForce goes to Minnesota

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

TORONTO, Ontario—AlarmForce, a super-regional security company based here, announced Jan. 20 that it will open an office in a fourth U.S. state, Minnesota.
The office will be in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region and will have 12 employees to start, said AlarmForce president Joel Matlin.
“We think there’s a great market there for our technology. We’re going to do here what we’ve done in our other U.S. markets: build our brand and build market share,” Matlin said. “We cherry pick our areas and Minneapolis-St. Paul was near the top of the list.”
AlarmForce opened its first U.S. office in North Carolina in 2005. It opened an office in Ohio in January 2006 and an office in Georgia in 2007. The company now services seven major regions within those three states.
AlarmForce manufactures and installs its own two-way voice home alarm systems. Some additional features “are coming down the pike in the next six months” for those systems, Matlin said.
The company, which relies on organic growth, rather than acquisitions, had more than 103,000 accounts in Canada and the U.S. as of Oct. 30. That is up from 56,700 accounts four years ago. The market growth has been strongest in the United States. “Canada is a tough country to do business in. It’s got a population the same as the state of the California, but it’s spread out over a country that’s much larger than the U.S.,” Matlin said. In addition to dense population centers that are easier to penetrate, “the perception of crime is stronger in the U.S. than it is in Canada.”

ADT awarded $112m in racketeering lawsuit

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

HOUSTON—Tyco/ADT acquiring Texas-based Broadview Security was not the only ADT news coming out of Texas this week. In other, unrelated news, ADT was awarded $112 million in a final judgment in a racketeering suit that dates back to 2006, according to AmericanLawyer.com.

The verdict is “among the top U.S. verdicts of 2009” according to information on the Web site of the law firm representing ADT, Ajamie LLC, which is based here.

AmericanLawyer.com reported that ADT sued a Mexican businessman and a Dallas company for violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). A jury awarded ADT $36 million in October. The final judgment, awarded on Jan. 20, included interest, bringing the total to $112 million.

ADT released this official statement about the case to Security Systems News: "This was an exceptionally long legal case dating back to 2006. With the favorable outcome on the claims brought by ADT Mexico, we can continue focusing on our business of providing life safety and security to our valued customers in Mexico."

According to the report, ADT had some alarm dealers in Mexico, with whom it stopped doing business in 2002. Some of the dealers then hired Mexican businessman Jesus Henandez Alcocer and “assigned the equipment they allegedly owned to his affiliated company, Alert 24.”

ADT filed the lawsuit in 2006 saying that Alcocer and Alert 24 “conspired to authorize the filing of Mexican criminal complaints without any factual basis against current and formere ADT management and employees in an attempt to extort money from ADT."

Alert 24 filed a counterclaim, which was successful. The company claimed that ADT stole equipment that the dealers had assigned to Alert 24. The jury found in favor or Alert 24 and awarded the company $7.8 million in October, which in this week’s final judgment increased to $9.2 million.

AmericanLawyer.com reports that Alcocer’s attorney would appeal the $112m verdict and ADT’s attorney would appeal the $9.2 million verdict.

For sale: Protection One

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 00:00:00 CST

LAWRENCE, Kan.—Three days after the largest security company (ADT) announced it was buying the second-largest alarm company (Broadview Security), Protection One, the third largest alarm company, announced it is exploring its strategic alternatives, including a sale of the company.

“The financial markets are much stronger now than they were a year or so ago. Our company is performing well, and our balance sheet is in great shape,” Richard Ginsburg, Protection One CEO told Security Systems News. “We think it’s an opportune time to explore these alternatives and to maximize value for shareholders.”

Protection One has hired J.P. Morgan to advise the company on this process. The process involves “gathering those—newcomers and those who’ve expressed interest [in buying Protection One] in the past—to take a look at the company,” Ginsburg explained.

The process can take “two to four months, sometimes longer” and it could be “that nothing will come of it.”

Asked if Protection One’s majority owners, Monarch Capital and Quadrangle Group, are pressuring for a sale, Ginsburg said he couldn’t speculate about what the shareholders’ want. “I can tell you that we are under no financial pressure to do this.” He noted that Pro One received a $22 million payment earlier this year, and in November Pro One extended its credit facility and increased its available cash by $75 million.

He noted, however, that Monarch and Quadrangle “are going on six years of ownership. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to look to get liquidity after that many years, but there’s certainly no pressure.”

When companies explore strategic alternatives, they often keep it quiet. Ginsburg said he made the choice to go public because Protection One views this as a positive next step for the company and because he wants to “be open with our employees.” The day-to-day business will not change for employees or customers he said, adding that, “we’ve been through this before, in 2004, when we were sold by our owner Westar.”

Is Protection One still in acquisition mode, as it announced in December? Absolutely. “We have the capability and the desire to do acquisitions,” Ginsburg said. “Our acquisition team is primed and ready.”