New central station opens in Maine

CARIBOU, Maine—In Northern Maine, Virtual Managed Solutions LLC recently opened a wholesale monitoring center.

“I have wanted to develop a central station for a number of years,” CB Smith, CEO of Virtual Managed Solutions, said. The development of the monitoring center started in September 2016, and Smith credited the company's VP and CIO Steve Boddy with much of the due diligence and technological setup.

Virtual Managed Solutions, or VMS, has operated a contact center here since 2007 and will be the parent company to VMSCS. “We've had a couple of really good years of growth and financial stability, so we've recently invested and we are online,” Smith said.

“We recognize that we have a skillset, we certainly have the network and we have the redundancy—of course—and now … the UL certification,” Smith said. “We are, as I see it, able to present ourselves as an apples-and-apples comparison to any other wholesale [station] out there in the country.”

The center, which officially opened at the end of February, currently monitors for about 150 accounts, Smith said. VMSCS is using Bold Technologies' Manitou Cloud Services for its automation system. In addition to traditional alarms, the company will also do PERS and video monitoring.

Smith said that having the contact center business, collocated with the central station, will allow the monitoring center to offer “quite aggressive” pricing.

The company will be dedicating employees to monitoring center services, separating them from other call center operations in VMS. Picking the right people was important to the company, Boddy told SSN. “We're looking for people that use customer service not as a job but as a career, because they're going to put people first,” he said.

“Business development is obviously a big part of any business operation,” Smith said. The company is starting to grow its account base through contacting local dealers, he said. VMSCS is increasing its marketing and has created a new website. “From there, it'll just be spreading our wings and going to different geographic areas of the state and then outside of the state of Maine as well,” Smith said.

Smith has a variety of experience with the industry, working with SimplexGrinnell, and Maine-based integrator Norris Inc, before working with VMS. “Since I opened this contact center with my team here, I've had a vision of coming into that world and working in that world. … I recognize the potential,” Smith said.