a.p.i. Monitoring adds managed services division

TORONTO—a.p.i Monitoring, a wholesale monitoring company with seven central stations in the U.S. and Canada, is seeing some encouraging early returns from its managed services division, which debuted as a separate unit in November 2013.

“We saw a spike in demand for the services,” Lewis Jacobson, director of dealer sales, told Security Systems News. “So it was time to break it out from our regular operations.”

The new division concentrates on hosted video and video verification, both markets where a.p.i. hopes to continue to augment its presence. Through the division, a.p.i is also offering a remote monitoring service to commercial clients designed to reduce their reliance on on-site guards, generating considerable cost savings, Jacobson said.

“We'll have operators watching the cameras in place of on-site guards, which ends up as substantial savings for a lot of dealers and customers,” Jacobson said. The solution, he added, can be integrated with video verified alarms or static surveillance cameras.

With respect to the managed services division, which has “been in the works for a couple of years now,” Jacobson said the company is “finishing up the aesthetics of it now, in terms of providing a new area to host large screens and a separated staff.”

The next phase for the managed services effort, Jacobson noted, will involve developing dealer programs for the whole range of equipment platforms—not just for traditional alarm panels but also DVRs and card access systems, he said.

Other recent a.p.i. news includes the installation of a CONETTIX receiver/gateway at its central stations, which adds support for IP communications with Bosch intrusion systems, a move Jacobson said will enable a.p.i. to “offer more integrated solutions for video monitoring and access control” to its dealers.

A.p.i. monitors about 270,000 accounts in the U.S. and Canada, a base that's split about evenly between commercial and residential accounts.