Dice's hosted monitoring certified

BAY CITY, Mich.—Dice, a provider of central station software, announced that it gained UL certification for its hosted monitoring center platform.

“This is really going to open the market and take the barriers [out of] starting a central station,” Cliff Dice, company CEO, told Security Systems News.

According to Dice, a UL listed, hosted monitoring service will drastically reduce the amount of infrastructure and start-up capital needed to open a monitoring center.

The company has offered hosted monitoring for three years, but has been working on the UL certification for the last 18 months, he said.

The initial investment needed to start a central is “huge,” Dice said, “and that's why there are so few central stations starting up.”

With Dice's hosted UL center, “the only thing the customer needs is an Internet connection and a PC,” Dice said. “They get all of their monitoring, their receivers and phones, and everything is all run by us and handled by us. It reduces their costs by 70 or 80 percent.

“What distinguishes Dice from other people that are trying to do cloud hosting is that Dice provides all of the telecom infrastructure [including line infrastructure through Dice's partnership with phone company IPtelX],” Dice said.

Carol Enman, communications and success facilitator for Dice, said that Dice has “two centers that are 400 miles apart that sit on different power grids [and] have different service carriers. If one of our centers were to go down, we would [transfer] to a second center.”

“We've not only just created a hosted center, but we've created a disaster recovery plan for our hosted center, and that was one of the things that I think impresses UL,” she said.

Dice predicted that “in the next five years, there'll be very few central stations that have their own infrastructure, unless they choose to.”