A Bold move to the cloud

Bold Technologies has launched its new cloud-based automation platform, Manitou Cloud Services, and is working to add 30,000 accounts to it by the end of the year, Rod Coles, Bold's president and CEO, told Security Systems News.

Designing the service to be UL compliant was the company's top priority, Coles said, and it is currently in the process of attaining that certification.

Coles said the release of Manitou Cloud Services was sooner than he expected and credited a rise in consumers' confidence in cloud-based systems. “Hosted solutions seem to have a better reliability than individual service because they have so much redundancy.”

“The first installations will be on our existing Manitou platform,” Coles said, but the cloud automation will also be ready to use Manitou Neo, the next version of Bold's central station automation, to be released in 2016. Coles estimated its release to be around ISC West 2016.

Bold first talked about the service at its annual Users' Group Conference in early August, Coles said, and now has a couple of clients transitioning.

Bold has experience with hosted services, according to Coles, through similarities with the company's disaster recovery center—a separate cloud-based center that Bold has been offering for years.

The cloud center will be based in Colorado Springs, Bold's hometown, because of the area's small risk for natural disasters and its location between both coasts, the company said.

Manitou Cloud Services can make operations easier for Bold users, according to Coles. “We're getting to the stage now where people [have] to replace their hardware, every few years. They're also having to employ staff to look databases, to look after operating systems to make sure that these things are running 24/7. All of these [issues] go away when you have a hosted solutions.”