Security Partners acquires Mace Central Station

LANCASTER, Pa.—Security Partners, based here, announced today that it has acquired its third monitoring center: Mace Central Station, located in Anaheim, Calif. The buy comes nearly four months after Security Partners added a second central station in San Antonio.

The third central adds another layer of redundancy to Security Partners, giving the company facilities in three separate time zones on three separate power grids. The acquisition also adds “between 300 and 400 active dealers” to the fold, while bringing Security Partners' total number of accounts up to 170,000, Patrick Egan, CEO of Security Partners, told Security Systems News.

“We now are a national player, like the other multilocation redundant central station [competitors],” Egan said. “We now have a marketing presence in Southwest, and now on the West Coast, so this acquisition puts us in that realm.”

Security Partners has the right to use the Mace brand for “about six months,” Egan said, but the central station will eventually be rebranded under the Security Partners' banner.

Mace Central Station is a subsidiary of Cleveland-based Mace Security International, a publicly traded company known as a manufacturer of defense sprays, which entered the alarm monitoring space in 2009.

The monitoring center in Anaheim will continue to be managed by its current manager, Michael Joseph, a 30-year veteran of the industry.

The accounts from Mace comprise about a 50-50 split between commercial and residential accounts, Egan said.

Egan expects certain technological factors to ease the integration of the new facility. Security Partners is currently in the process of installing the Tadiran voice processing telephone system in its centrals here and in San Antonio. Mace, for its part, had already made a “big investment in Tadiran as well,” Egan noted. “So that will be plug and play.”

Mace also deploys the Immix remote video monitoring platform, which is already installed in Security Partners' Lancaster central station, and is in the process of being fully deployed in San Antonio.

Mike Bodnar, president of Security Partners, expects the acquisition of Mace Central Station, which is very active in managed video, to be a boon to the company's Advanced Services Division. “[Mace] did quite a bit with Videofied and VideoIQ and other video surveillance products, so couple that with what we had with our Advanced Services in Lancaster, and we take that level of service with our redundancy and software updates up another notch with dealers,” he said. He added: “We'll be introducing managed access across the board. We're going to get that going down in Texas, then we'll be further enhancing it with our partners in California.”

Bodnar added he is eager about the prospect of having “mirrored setups” of receiver systems across the board at all three centrals. That, he said, will further enable the company to provide enhanced offerings to dealers across the country. “Now we'll roll up our sleeves to get that done,” he said.

Barry Epstein, president of Dallas-based Vertex Capital, represented Mace in the transaction. Epstein said Mace attracted great interest due to strong growth opportunities in the West Coast market.  "Mace's decision to divest of its wholesale monitoring business produced great interest from a wide variety of buyers both in the industry and those trying to gain a footprint," he said. "Pat's team ultimately won as it delivered the best package of price, terms and structure."

Mace, he added, will continue to be a presence in the physical security space through its branded product line of personal defense, safety and electronic security products.

Security Partners did not disclose the terms of the deal.