ADT brings verification to SMB customers using its Pulse platform

BOCA RATON, Fla.—ADT announced in late December that it could verify alarms through cameras connected for small- to medium-sized business customers on the ADT Pulse platform nationwide.

“The Pulse solution for ADT—and we've had that in the market now since 2010—already has cameras on the premises. It seems a natural fit for us to take the cameras and the service that we already had for the customers and when an alarm occurs, take an image that we already could capture and give to the customer and give that same image or clip to our agent in the monitoring center [for verification],” Ray North, ADT director of service platforms, told Security Systems News.

Including verification means a “more intelligent dispatch decision, for the benefit of the customer, for the benefit of the law enforcement agency, and for the benefit for us as a company as well,” North said.

The Pulse platform connects up to 10 cameras at a location.

ADT integrated with I-View Now, a cloud-based video verification platform company, to bring verification into ADT Pulse. In August 2016 ADT announced a deeper integration with I-View Now. “The previous solutions involved a much more difficult integration using a DVR-based solution, and this solution takes technologies that we're already selling to the customers and leverages that. So, we think from a marketing perspective and an implementation perspective, it's a far more elegant solution,” North said.

Verification is also required in some regions, North noted. “We in the industry recognize the need to be able to provide verification services to law enforcement, and that you have many jurisdictions across the country that won't even send the police unless you have a verified alarm these days,” he said. “Your options there are to send a guard or to have some sort of video verified service that you can tap into from your monitoring center.”

ADT plans to expand the Pulse platform's verification capabilities later in the year. “We'll be looking at rolling it out to the residential markets in 2018,” North said. “We're going to start this quarter. … [The] transition from small business to residential is pretty straight forward; it's really just making sure we have people trained, and packages to find, and pricing to find. The technology implementation is actually the same—between the small business and the residential [spaces]—using Pulse.”