Dice: Conference, apps and growth

Dice released a selection of new products at its most recent annual users group conference, held Nov. 4-6 in Mount Pleasant, Mich., where 30 percent of its client base was present. Approximately 95 percent of those attendees were from North America, according to Carol Enman, senior VP of strategic business development and communications for Dice.

“One of the things we spent a good deal of time talking about was the difference between apps and applications and what they provided the customer,” Enman told Security Systems News. She described the root difference between the two as apps being for phones while applications are web-based.

Enman listed numerous examples of new products, including a system for mobile sales management, designed to allow managers oversee their sales people; a new data entry system that leads users step-by-step through information entry; a scheduling app allowing for customers to be quickly scheduled for service or installation; and a fire inspection app allowing service technicians to inspect fire systems on sites and fill out required forms.

One of the precipitating factors to this lineup of releases was “that the company's design and development staff has increased,” according to a prepared statement. Enman estimated an overall growth in the company of at least 30 percent across all departments in the past year and a half.

The main idea behind these products appears to be creating efficiency for monitoring companies. “We have customers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers operating companies with less people in them then some small alarm companies with a few thousand accounts have” Cliff Dice, CEO, said in a prepared statement.