New APX central now in full operation

PROVO, Utah—Summer model alarm company APX, one of the fastest-growing and largest alarm companies in the country, on April 26 announced its new central station—located at the company's new corporate headquarters here—was now in full operation. The new monitoring center is the company's second and is hot redundant with its first monitoring center, which APX bought from Protection One subsidiary CMS in November of 2009.

According to APX VP of operations Lindsay Grauling, “We swung accounts over here from the Minnesota station at the beginning of April … The most important thing for us to note about this new station is that it does make us a fully redundant company in terms of monitoring,” Grauling said. “That's really exciting because it means that in the event of any emergency we can still take care of our customers.”

APX on April 26 also announced its St. Paul monitoring center had recently achieved CSAA Five Diamond certification. Grauling said APX was in the process of working toward Five Diamond certification for the Provo center, as well.

Grauling said that since both centers work together in real time as one virtual monitoring center, the focus wasn't really on load sharing to improve response time, but on service overall. “We didn't really do this to improve response times. It was to create stability and back up … It means we can better meet our customers' needs. Both stations are working on the same pool of alarms. So we can have 30 people working in Minnesota or 30 people working here, or 15 working at both and it's really the same thing,” Grauling said. “We're like one big center with a thousand mile long hallway. We function as a team. At the end of the day, every decision we make is made with the customer in mind.”