Pro One invests in Irving monitoring operation

IRVING, Texas--After Protection One invested in a million-dollar makeover of its monitoring facility here by expanding the square-footage and adding multiple levels of redundancy and video and access control monitoring technologies, the company switched its Network Multifamily and commercial accounts to the location in May. Once home to Westinghouse, a security company that Protection One acquired years ago, the modernized facility will now serve accounts from Network Multifamily Security Corp., a provider of alarm systems exclusively to apartment buildings, along with more commercial accounts, a market that the company has worked to expand its footprint in over the past few years. "This [facility] shows our commitment to what we said we were going to do: invest in the company, grow business and become a commercial player in the industry," said Richard Ginsburg, president of the company. The accounts were transferred from Protection One's locations in Addison, Texas, and Portland, Maine. However, Ginsburg said the location will also serve new accounts: "A lot of the customers are brand new to the company as we have been building our commercial business pretty much from scratch." "We still will have a presence there [in Portland]," Ginsburg said, but he added that the company has plans to move operations at that location to a larger facility in the same area. After the rebuild in Irving, the facility took roughly eight months to test the upgrades. In line with the company's mission, Ginsburg took extra steps to ensure that the technology was ready for customers. "A lot of the older facilities in the country are kind of putting band aids on their existing center to accommodate this new technology," Ginsburg said. "We found that really rebuilding a center almost from scratch with this new technology in mind was the right thing to do." Another company philosophy is to have customers experience firsthand what makes the service work. "This facility was optimized to show existing and potential customers the technology," Ginsburg said. At a location close to Dallas and a mere 30 minutes from the airport, Protection One's customers can touch down and tour what the operators can do, have an opportunity to interact with the company's national account representatives as well as attend customer training sessions for the web-based products the company offers. Although the building will serve the two account bases, Ginsburg said Multifamily and commercial accounts are segregated. "I'm a big believer in highly specialized training for the operators depending on what they are doing," he added.