Alarm.com closes on acquisition of business units from Icontrol

TYSONS, Va.—Alarm.com, a platform solution for the connected home and business, announced on March 8 that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of two business units, Connect and Piper, from Icontrol Networks.

Comcast also completed its acquisition of Icontrol, specifically the Converge business, which includes Xfinity Home and creates Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and next-generation platforms for connected home security.

The cash consideration paid by Alarm.com for the two busienss units, after the estimated working capital adjustment, was $148.5 million, according to the SEC form 8-K that was filed, which also noted that Honeywell entered into a confidential “agreement to settle the lawsuit, which became effective upon the closing of the acquisition.”

“We are all excited to get past this process of being on the cusp of having completed this acquisition because we announced the acquisition last year, and the review process and regulatory process has taken awhile,” Dan Kerzner, chief product officer for Alarm.com, told Security Systems News. “So, now not having to worry about the logistics of getting a deal like this done, and instead just focusing on building great technologies and on executing is pretty exciting and will make for a really good 2017.”

“We are pleased to wrap up our acquisition of the Icontrol Connect and Piper business units,” Steve Trundle, president and CEO of Alarm.com, said in the announcement. "The market for security-oriented connected home and connected business solutions continues to be attractive. These two business units will allow us to upsize our distribution channels and increase the scale of our research and development initiatives.”

Piper, based in Ottawa, Canada, designs, produces and sells an all-in-one video and home automation hub. Connect, based in Redwood City, Calif., provides an interactive security and home automation platform that powers several service providers' solutions including ADT Pulse. ADT uses the Connect platform under the Pulse brand, and ADT will continue to go to market under the Pulse brand, according to Kerzner.

“We've been lucky to have so many great partners in the security dealer channel on the Alarm.com side, and now by adding ADT, we get greater scale of leverage so we can invest more in R&D, innovate faster and invest in things like our Insights Engine—making the software more predictive, the technology more useful to consumers and service providers,” said Kerzner.

In addition to having development offices in Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida and Colorado, “We are adding an office in Silicon Valley as well, so it really broadens our R&D investment footprint,” he added.

Kerzner pointed out that the Connect and Piper business units will add new technology infrastructure, talent, key relationships and hardware devices that are expected to help accelerate Alarm.com's development of intelligent, data-driven services. With increased scale and breadth of service, the Alarm.com platform enables service providers to address a broad range of consumer needs with reliable and innovative connected home and business solutions.

“We see the IoT and the connected home as part of large secular trend that is taking place and these technologies are really starting to mature, and customers' expectations are that they are going to want more and better versions of these things,” said Kerzner. “So our goal is to take the combined resources of the two teams and make sure that our customers, the professional service providers, can really continue to have best-in-class technology that they can use to bring these solutions to market.”