Honeywell combines businesses to leverage brand name

LOUISVILLE, Ky.--Honeywell announced plans to combine and rename their video and access businesses as well as rebrand its NexWatch dealer program in August in an effort to fully leverage the company's brand recognition. The combined businesses will be known as the Honeywell Systems Group and will be headed by John Lorenty, who was recently named president of the division. That business will be relocated to Louisville, Ky., and approximately 30 employees will move to the new location. Lorenty said the planned combination of the business was a logical move for the company. The rebranding as well as the combination of the two entities centers around Honeywell's effort to be a one-stop solution provider, which Lorenty said is, "not a request, it's an expectation." It also brought the engineering and the marketing of those product sectors together. "We talk about systems being integrated," Lorenty said, "but it's also very important for our entire organization, and especially for our people to be strongly integrated." Even though those departments will be combined, he said outside sales channels for the two product sectors will remain separate. In addition, the company's NexWatch dealer program, which is a network of 200 systems integrators that have exclusive use of the company's ProWatch product, will also be the subject of a new name, now being known as Honeywell Integrated Security. "One of the reasons we changed the name was that the Honeywell name carries all of the strength," Lorenty said. "We're focused very heavily with our integrator partners on the end user and the NexWatch name didn't mean anything to them." Although the merging of the two businesses is predominately a name change, he noted, it allows the new unit to combine efforts with other divisions within Honeywell, such as Honeywell Process Solutions. "The effort with Honeywell Process Solutions gives us the ability to share valuable relationships that Honeywell has in the industrial space," he said. "This will create many new opportunities for the integrators in our program." In addition to the consolidation, Honeywell also changed the structure of its European business, which will be reporting to management here. This effort shows the company is embracing the global systems integration business, which Lorenty noted that dealers and end users have been asking for. "This is a significant change," Lorenty said. "This helps us and our integrator partners work with end users who are global in their structure." For more on this story, see the September issue of Security Systems News.