A.p.i. acquires and builds

PETERBOROUGH, Ontario—A.p.i. Monitoring has acquired Trent Security, a full-service security company, based here. Trent will operate sales, installation and service independently, and its monitoring center is now a.p.i.'s eighth third party central station.

The acquisition added 10,000 accounts, including “many large government accounts,” Aaron Garr, a.p.i. director of operations, told Security Systems News.

A.p.i. upgraded Trent's monitoring center to monitor third-party accounts and brought it on to a.p.i.'s software platform as well.

A.p.i. kept key staff on board, Garr said. “We brought their staff up into our main central station [in Concord, Ontario] for training … it made the transition almost seamless." A.p.i. placed some of its own operators at the Trent station to help with the transition.

Trent's PERS experience will benefit a.p.i. “They were very big on medical monitoring, so we're using their expertise to help us … as we push forward to focus on PERS and medical monitoring,” Garr said.

A.p.i. integrated with Numera earlier this year to expand its medical monitoring business.

Garr said a.p.i. is looking at locations near Toronto to build its ninth central station, a 10,000-square-foot facility in the next year. “We are going to be building—from the ground up—a fully redundant UL/ULC site to comply with every new requirement that's coming out with the new UL standards,” he said.

The new building will have space specifically for video monitoring, Garr said. A.p.i. offers video monitoring, video tours and video-on-alarm, among other services, he said. The company in late 2014 created a “Special Service Group” in each of its stations—comprised of operators specifically focused on video.

“We've seen demand continue to grow for video monitoring services, and we've ensured we can meet the demands of our dealers and their clients and offer them the services they need,” Garr said.