RFI goes with Rapid Response

SAN JOSE, Calif.—To provide more customized services to its clients, RFI Communications and Security Systems plans to close its internal monitoring station and outsource its monitoring to Rapid Response.

“Rapid Response can immediately provide more services to our existing base and bolt-on more services to our high-end commercial and enterprise customers,” RFI president Brad Wilson told Security Systems News.

Wilson said RFI was looking for “a partner that has agility and technical resources to support some of our initiatives.” He noted that Rapid has 20 full-time programmers on staff and the “thought leadership of Morgan Hertel.”

Wilson said he sees “a lot of opportunity for additional mobile services and applications that relate to security and non-security.” To take advantage of these opportunities RFI needed a sophisticated monitoring operation that could scale, he said.

Wilson expects the transition to be completed in the next 65 days.

Business continues to be very good for RFI, but the business of integration is changing, Wilson said.

Founded in 1979, RFI has about 225 employees and did $49.6 million in revenue in 2015. The systems integrator has sustained a 3- to 4 percent growth rate over the past several years. Outside of its headquarters here, RFI has offices in Sacramento, Calif., Los Angeles, Nevada and Washington. It is a member of Security-Net.

To stay relevant, “the integrator of tomorrow has to look well beyond security,” Wilson said.

“The more services you bundle, the more value you have,” he said. Those services include fire, security, audio, health monitoring, both on- and off-premise.

Rapid Response has locations in Syracuse, N.Y. and Corona, Calif., providing “monitoring services in all 50 states with mirrored reliability on both coasts," RFI said.