Dice adds 200k accounts to cloud-hosted center

Dice has added more than 200,000 accounts to its cloud-hosted monitoring center platform this year, the company announced today, and has a 24-month goal of reaching 1 million accounts total.

I got the chance to talk with Cliff Dice, company president and CEO, today about the platform's growth and some of the problems it has helped solve, like dropped signals and account attrition.

Prior to this year, there were only about 10,000 accounts on Dice's monitoring center, Dice estimated. Many of the new 200,000 accounts were added on after the service received its recent UL-listing. Here's a story on that.

When asked about strategies for hitting the 1 million hosted accounts mark, Dice said that the company's currently focusing on current Dice software users. Though, he said it could be an easy way for alarm companies to switch from a different automation platform to Dice.

Dice is part owner of a telephone company, and Dice's hosted monitoring center uses its own network. Having the ability to fully track the signal gives Dice the ability to see when and where a signal gets dropped and address the problem.

“Because we're controlling everything end-to-end, we don't have the problems with the VoIP issues that the alarm industry has,” Dice said.

This end-to-end understanding has even helped with attrition. “With the people we've put online, it's cut their attrition primarily because we were able to analyze which panels weren't working. … A lot of the alarm cancellations, problems, and service calls that alarm companies do, is related to the alarm panels not communicating right.”

Account attrition was cut by about 50 percent among the companies hosted on its cloud center, Dice said.

When I met with Cliff, both at ISC West and ESX, he mentioned the great reception the cloud-hosted service has had. It's interesting to see more about that.