Dynamark Convention wrap up

Over the course of my two days at the Dynamark Convention, I had the good fortune of speaking with several knowledgeable industry veterans, and I'd be remiss not to mention some of them in this space. Whether at the vendor show, educational sessions or during my tour of Dynamark's central station, I found no shortage of folks with industry expertise.

The vendor show featured a vibrant mix of companies, with virtually every facet of the industry represented, from access control and video surveillance to fire alarms and intrusion detection. There were distributors like ADI, which had a booth, and several attendees from The Systems Depot, including CEO Robert Pinion, who gave me a thorough description of the company's new call center, a 20,000-square-foot facility with an efficient layout that's rapidly adding new employees. In the spirit of the season, there was some gridiron chat weaved into the industry-specific discussions. As it turns out, Pinion's son is a punter for the No. 3-ranked Clemson Tigers.

Those very same Clemson Tigers travel north this weekend, heavily favored in their matchup with Syracuse, the alma mater of Tom Piston, vice president of sales & marketing at Dynamark. Piston, along with Lamar Shroyer, IT director at Dynamark, guided me and SSN publisher Tim Purpura on a tour through the central station. Shroyer showed us a veritable wall of servers and systems, which included Bold Technologies' Manitou automation platform, as well as servers from Israeli-based Tadiran Telecom.

Keith Godsey, Dynamark's vice president of central station operations, answered a few questions about Dynamark's training procedures. Training typically lasts two weeks, and operators accrue greater responsibility as they ascend to higher levels of training. Interestingly enough, Godsey noted that 80 percent of their operators have been at the station since the facility opened in 2011—no small feat for a profession typically prone to high turnover.

To conclude, I wanted to mention a final element of interest about the conference: The presence of companies offering peripheral services that both dealers and central stations are leveraging for value. I spoke with Joseph Narkin, director of business development at Demand, a marketing and business development firm that works with alarm companies, including Dynamark, and whose cold-calling team is comprised of qualified prison inmates (Narkin himself is a former prison inmate who said the company contributed tremendously to his rehabilitation and reintegration in society).

I also spoke with John Latimer, senior account executive at Keller Stonebraker Insurance, based in Hagerstown, Md. The company works with alarm companies, both dealers and central stations, to help transfer and mitigate risk—legal concerns of no small importance to the alarm industry as a whole.

In summary (I fully intended this update to be just that), my first voyage as part of SSN was a valuable and diverse experience, and the folks at Dynamark, and many others with whom I happened to cross paths, were nothing short of welcoming and bright.