Emerging hybrid and hosted monitoring services are revolutionizing the life safety industry and opening a wealth of opportunities for organizations either running their own monitoring centers or supporting customers that are.
As technology has progressed, wholesale monitoring centers have taken the opportunity to offer services and streamlined communications that most security companies cannot afford to provide themselves.
A New Chapter For The Security Industry
Central Station as a Service (CSaaS) marks the beginning of a new chapter for the monitoring service industry. There are many factors driving the need for a CSaaS business model.
Some of those are:
- The sheer cost of technology
- The cost and challenge to find qualified technologists
- The need for more features and products
The average cost for items like receivers, communication networks, storage systems, computing platforms, software licensing, infrastructure redundancies, and the unexpected has skyrocketed. At the same time, technology has advanced at an astronomical pace, hence hiring a few IT generalists is no longer enough. Monitoring centers are now required to hire specialized employees to keep up with the demands of the business.
Unsurprisingly, hiring and managing specialized employees who handle this complicated and costly infrastructure is the second biggest expense. Every role in technology now requires a salary of $100K to $180K+ a year, if not more, to recruit them and keep them on staff; not to mention the benefits package today’s employees demand. On top of hiring new employees, you need to keep the ones that understand your industry, business and can work on all the legacy infrastructure you have to maintain.
So what can be done? More and more monitoring centers have made the move toward a hosted or hybrid or central station sunset business model to be able to really focus on what they do best, which is selling and installing security systems and not trying to maintain a very specialized high-cost monitoring platform.
In this model, some or all the receivers, servers and applications are hosted by another company, allowing the organization to focus on the tasks they are used to handling, like selling and installing panels and detection devices.
The CSaaS model allows monitoring centers to skip the inflated CapX investments and move into an OpX model so they can focus on excelling at what they do best.
Types of CSaaS Relationships
Most hosted and hybrid monitoring providers will work with centers to craft a relationship that works for their needs. Initial conversations involve discussing the technological requirements needed and the type of partnership that is right to maximize their business growth.
Most relationships fall under one of these categories but there is always room for others:
- Hosted Monitoring Partnership: The wholesale monitoring provider hosts alarm processing automation and receives all alarm traffic, while the Dealer’s in-house team provides monitoring services.
- Hybrid Monitoring Partnership: The wholesale monitoring provider hosts and/or monitors a predetermined percentage of accounts, while the Dealer’s in-house team handles the remaining.
- Hosted Monitoring with Backup: The wholesale monitoring center offers emergency hot redundant monitoring in case the Dealer’s facility ever goes down. It would offer failover signal processing in real-time and be ready to take over professional monitoring of 100% of the account base.
- Central Station Sunset: The wholesale monitoring provider hosts alarm processing automation and provides professional monitoring services to 100% of the Dealer’s customer base.
CSaaS Relationship with Rapid Response
With Rapid Response, Dealers gain the reliability of our multi-redundancies, the efficiency of our advanced automation software, the power of our proprietary suite of notification tools, and the full support of our 12 specialized teams, including the IT, Dealer Support, Technical Support and Compliance & Licensing departments.
Rapid Response has two 927a UL listed full-capacity data centers equipped with all known receivers and platforms. API integrations for major platforms such as Alarm.com, Telular, etc. are also implemented. Our Dealers have access to the Immix® CS platform integration, established AES Networks, native support for Bosch, AXIS, Avigilon, CHeKT, DSC, and NMS, along with many other platforms. Please contact our Sales Department at Sales@rrms.com for specific inquiries about our integrations and capabilities.
When it comes to capacity, we provide thousands of dial-up channels on Bosch, DMP, and Sur-Gard. Our Dealers have unlimited API support for signal service delivery so that their business never runs out of capacity.
Conclusion
A CSaaS monitoring solution can save you money and is a key factor in the growth of the alarm monitoring industry.
Hosted services have many benefits including:
- Reducing the steep cost of technology required to run a monitoring center
- Skipping the challenge to find qualified technologists
- Gaining the multi-redundancies and first-class technologies of your monitoring center
- Easing the certifications and licenses requirements
- Skipping the process of hiring and training monitoring Specialists
- Focus your attention and resources on unique aspects of your business to provide more value
- Increasing recurring monthly revenue (RMR) with a more cost-effective business model
