Northland opens new office

FREMONT, Calif.—Northland Controls, a global security systems integrator and managed services provider based here, recently opened a new office in Rochester, N.Y., which will be home to a technical training center with engineers focused on product testing and evaluation, as well as a redundant outsourced global security operations center (GSOC) to accommodate growing customer demand.

CEO Pierre Trapanese pointed out that with companies such as Lenel and Bosch taking root in Rochester, and with the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester right there, it was the ideal city for Northland's expansion.

“We have a couple of highly skilled employees in Rochester, and we feel that the culture we have built here at Northland really aligns with what we are seeing coming out of Rochester,” Trapanese told Security Systems News. “We are looking to develop future talent, with the idea of getting 20 to 50 application engineers in the pipeline so that five and 10 years from now we have great people who are trained from the ground up. So, access to those universities is key, and once they are trained, Rochester will become a technical support center for us.”

Trapanese said the office will train four to eight people at a time in six-month cycles. “By the end of the year we will have around six people staffed at the office, and it is designed for up to 12, so we will get to [that number] over the next few years.”

Northland CTO Henry Hoyne added, “This office will be our hub for Tier 3 technical support, as well as new security product testing and evaluation. We now have people dedicated exclusively to these services.”

In terms of overall growth, in a little more than a decade Northland Controls has grown from $1 million in revenue to $80 million with locations all around the world. The company had 10 employees in 2005 and has more than 280 now with offices in the Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., London, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, India and now Rochester.

“Over the last seven or eight years we have grown approximately 15 percent each year, closer to 17 percent in 2017,” said Trapanese. “For 2018, it is about leadership development, so we are looking at what we do and how we can do it better, as well as how we can structure ourselves to be able to sustain our continued growth over the next five, 10 years.”