Department of Redundancy Department: Five for COPS

Make it five for COPS.

The wholesale monitoring company, headquartered in Williamstown, N.J., has opened its fifth central station, an 8,000-square-foot facility in Lewisville, Texas. The new center will share live alarm traffic with the company's centrals in New Jersey, Florida, Arizona and Tennessee.

Four-year COPS veteran Derek Kopko will manage the new facility, which has 26 employees. Kopko relocated to Texas from COPS' headquarters in December 2011 and has been hiring and training new dispatchers for the past seven months, the company said in a prepared statement.

Gene Reed, an industry veteran and COPS' newest account executive, will oversee sales in the region.

David Smith, director of marketing and communications for COPS, told Security Systems News that adding central stations benefits the company in two key ways.

“First, because all five of our central stations are hot-redundant and actively share the signal load of the entire company, each central station we bring online reduces the probability that adverse local conditions [such as weather] will affect our response times,” he said. “Second, we believe that each geographical region presents its own benefits and challenges to alarm dealers. By operating central stations and having employees in these different regions, we have the opportunity to become more involved with our dealers and better understand how we can support them and help grow their business.”

Smith said the commitment to redundancy proved its worth last August during Hurricane Irene.

“When (Irene) went up the East Coast and actually hit our New Jersey headquarters, it only added about a second to our response time because we were able to overstaff all our other central stations,” he said. “The more we do that, the more that we diversify our staff, the more stable and dependable our fast response times become.”