Alarm.com opens new global HQ facility

WASHINGTON—Alarm.com officially opened its new global headquarters here in March, bringing the entire company under one roof and expanding its dealer-training capability.

“The new facility allows us to create high-quality innovative technology, and offers the capacity for our engineers to design and create great products,” Jay Kenny, senior vice president of marketing for Alarm.com, told Security Systems News. “That is both in the amount of space and the way the space was designed, as well as some the things we intentionally put in and around our quality assurance labs and our engineering labs.”

Located in Tyson's Corner, the center of the Washington D.C. metropolitan technology innovation corridor, Kenny said that the new facility was designed and architected from the ground-up to foster “cross-team interaction, creativity and collaboration that leads to better products and better innovation.”

He said one of the highlights of the facility is a central staircase that connects all of the floors in the building. “It is interesting to see as I walk the stairs from floor to floor that there are people using the social and meeting areas at each landing, as we designed them.”

One of the goals for the new facility was to create a state-of-the-art training center for the Alarm.com Academy. “We know how important it is to bring our dealers in to understand our technology, get hands-on experiences with it, and really feel like they are in the best position to bring that technology to market,” Kenny explained.

In the first training session at the new facility, Alarm.com hosted trainees from 23 different dealer partners. “It went really well,” said Kenny, who noted that the training curriculum was updated “because of the capabilities that the new space offers us.”

First and foremost, the new space allows Alarm.com to host more people. “Before we opened the new HQ, a lot of our training classes were over-subscribed, so the ability to bring more people into the experience was a big factor,” he said. “We also spent a lot of time on the structural design and development of our courses to have a combination of more traditional classroom learning with really hands-on experience. Our goal was to make sure we had the space and technology in place to facilitate that instructional-design approach.”

In addition to the new HQ facility, Kenny said that Alarm.com is preparing for its first time exhibiting at ISC West. “A lot of it was driven by feedback from our dealers and our partners,” he said.

“I think they are really excited to see us on the show floor, and be able to connect with us. And we have some exciting announcements that we are making at ISC West, in regard to both new products and services.”

Kenny pointed out that for ISC West and beyond, Alarm.com is excited to expand even further into the commercial and international markets. “We have a best-in-class residential platform, and we have a lot of great commercial services today,” he said.

“We have expanded our hardware partners, so we have more commercial-grade panels out there, and we plan on expanding the feature sets that are unique to businesses to make what happened with the interactive services in the home a standard in the small-to-medium business market as well.”