Security Sales & Integration September 2022 - 32

EXCLUSIVE!
Executive Interview
Alarm.com
Connects the Dots
We have an Alarm.com for Business unit with
its own sales team, product management team
and marketing folks. It's really now part of the
core business because it was grown organically
from within, and we continue to invest. It's a
transition of refining our core platform to work
for a small- to medium-size business.
Our strategy in commercial has got a few
The acquisition of OpenEye
allows Alarm.com to offer
Cloud-managed video
surveillance solutions to
integrators serving enterprise
customers. In addition to
acquisitions, Alarm.com has
spent $300M on R&D the past
couple years.
different prongs to it. We've taken the Alarm.
com residential interactive services platform and
we've been investing in organic growth to enable
that SMB to benefit from all the great integrated
services that we provide in terms of intrusion, access
control, and video, as well as some of the automation
offerings like temperature monitoring.
Those are all stitched together in a single, simple,
unified platform and really gets you a lot of the
benefits you would expect in an integrated residential
system. Of course, the SMB operator has
a bunch of different technology and operational
needs than a homeowner does. We refactor the
platform and make a variant or a set of services
that are specifically geared toward SMB.
When we acquired OpenEye, which we run
as an independent business, what we saw was a
higher tier of services that were required, specifically
in the video surveillance domain, that
Alarm.com for Business wasn't offering at the
time. We offer video capabilities, but they're
really suited at a lower configuration in terms
of complexity, number of cameras and more
advanced administrative features. OpenEye
brings us upstream and they still sell to a different
set of integrators. There's some overlap,
but they're a little bit higher up the commercial
food chain than Alarm.com for Business,
although the lines blur from time to time.
Then when we acquired Shooter Detection
Systems, they had been selling primarily to
enterprises, the highest end of the commercial
market. We're investing across the board.
There's a commonality in the sense that we can
call it all commercial, but the end customers
and the end partners, because in all cases we're
going through the partner channel not direct
to the end consumer, but in concert with partners.
The partner mix is all slightly different as
well. We're stratified across the entire pyramid
of commercial opportunity at this point.
How are the OpenEye and SDS
transitions progressing? How close are
they to being fully integrated into the
Alarm.com platform?
Bedell: All of the platforms, in this case OpenEye
and SDS, still have their own standalone,
independent versions. They are operating their
own software stack, but we have made sure that
stack is operating with the robustness we would
expect the Alarm.com Cloud to run. It's integrated
from a network operations standpoint.
The other question is how does it appear to the
end consumer of the technology? Does it look
independent or is it totally unified?
In the case of SDS, there is work we're doing
to integrate it directly into the Alarm.com for
Business platform, but that's a longer-term initiative.
We're first and foremost making sure we're
making R&D investments in the SDS platform
itself. Gunshot detection is a more nascent technology
in general, it's not as mature as say, video
surveillance, VSaaS. There's still work to be done
to make sure we're integrating in the right fashion
and that the end solution makes sense.
In terms of the video solution, it's important
to understand when we acquired OpenEye we
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Security Sales & Integration September 2022

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