Altronix’s Ronnie Pennington - ‘We listen to the integrator, we listen to the customers and that helps us develop new products’

DALLAS – The Altronix Corp. is a supplier that keeps its ear to the ground and an open mind to meet the needs of its clients, and that diligence falls to people like its Director of Sales for the Americas, Ronnie Pennington.

Security Systems News (SSN) had the opportunity to speak with Pennington during GSX this year, and it marks our final interview from the show. The below interview has been edited for length and clarity:

SSN

What is Altronix up to here at GSX this year?

Ronnie Pennington

As with any of the big trade shows, we want to introduce new products and keep the customers aware of what's going on at Altronix. What's different about GSX is you have more of the consultant community who's specifying the products into projects and integrators coming in, bringing their end user customers to show them what's new in the new technologies and how those can help in their installations.

For example, you know we had a healthcare company come by with their integrator, and one of the biggest problems they had was having to reboot certain boards and the integrator was losing a lot of money because they have to roll trucks, and then the end user was losing money because they had to pay some premium to the integrator for that, and the integrator wasn't recovering the full amount. It didn't want to really charge the end user more, and there was nothing wrong with the installation, it just happens that these boards locked up sometimes they have to be reset.

What we were able to do was show the end user and the integrator (the integrator was aware of the product) and they wanted to show them, ‘You know, this will cost a little bit more on hardware, but it would eliminate rolling the truck’. They could remotely reset the boards from anywhere. Basically, they could go in through their phone, mobile or from a service desk somewhere and log into the system, turn power off on the port and remotely reboot that board without having to roll a truck. Get the end user involved, get people to let them in the building. Come in after hours. Those type of things, so it's really going to work out for them.

Certain distribution boards that they have in place currently, they're going to replace those with the new distribution board that’s networkable. Then going forward, any new installations are going to have the new board automatically put inside the truck unit. Aside from just that, that was just an example of what is happening here at GSX. We're introducing new products and when I say introducing new products, we may have introduced these products say at ISC West, but we were introducing them to the integrator community. Right now, we're introducing them here to the consultant and to the end user community.

SSN

So what's what's next for you? What's on the road to ISC West?

Ronnie Pennington

Altronix has been in business for over 40 years and we started out with an AL612 and that migrated to an AL624. We still sell thousands of those today, and every year it seems like, you know, when does it end? When do you get to the point where you say, “Hey, we did it. We finally made the last product.” You don't, because technology changes, right?

So, one of the things that these shows also bring is the ability for us to see what the access control and video surveillance manufacturers are offering as far as new technologies go. Then it allows us to work on products to introduce at the ISC West or other major trade shows. So as far as what Altronix is working on now, we're working on things that we maybe saw at ISC West, and we may introduce a year later at ISC West in 2024. Engineering is busy working on some new power supply stuff. Some new adapters, new link products, adding link to certain products. So, our link dashboard or our link technology for network communications, for example, the OA2, which is a new product that we introduced at ISC West, which is the occupancy alert system. We will have a linked version of that, engineering is actually working on a network version of that so that we can do more programming and have more feature sets because of software within that realm.

While we may not introduce a whole new product like we did with OA2, we may be introducing products to the family. So now we'll have an OA2, we'll have an OA2 that's networkable. We may add some other products that are networkable, and if a technology that we see out in the field is up and coming, we may need to produce something to create a solution for integrators to easily install.

One of the things that Altronix prides themselves on is that we listen to the integrator, we listen to the customers and that helps us develop new products. No manufacturer wants to carry 3,000 SKUs. I can promise you (that), but we do, because every product has a different iteration. So, you might have a power supply with a distribution board that has a fire alarm, a power supply that has a distribution board with just auxiliary outputs, and then when you get to trove there's different combinations. So, we have just the empty enclosure with the electronics boards in it just wired together and then now we offer in certain cases the troves that are pre wired, so it has all the wiring in the connectors for the manufacturers. Boards that just have to be mounted and plugged in and then the field wiring has to be landed.

That's adding to the product family, and you just keep introducing, and you try to make it as easy as possible for the integrator to install. Labor is one of the most expensive things when it comes to an installation. If we can mitigate that labor cost with hardware, then you know what? We want to try.

SSN

Thank you for your time.

You can learn more about Altronix and their products online at altronix.com.