Tenn. company creates new life safety division

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—Stop Alarms Inc. is a fire and security integrator in business since 1970. But in an effort to take advantage of the growth potential it sees in the fire market, the company recently created a new life safety division called Critical Communications & Technologies.

“We're no stranger to life safety,” Trae Carney, president of Stop Alarms, based here, told Security Systems News. “We have been involved in it since the inception of the company.”

But he said the creation of the new division, currently housed in the same office as Stop Alarms, “is just rather a new focus where we see potential in the marketplace for a provider such as ourselves.” The 24-employee company is the right size to “bring high-quality, person-to-person interaction,” working with AHJs and others, Carney said.

He hopes the new division will grow the fire-related aspect of the company's business. He said that previously, business was “about 90 percent security, access and video. … Now, of course our results aren't in yet, but we're leaning toward 50 percent penetration with fire and life safety in this marketplace.”

The company does business in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. Its top verticals are industrial and property management clients.

Carney said the company is a new Notifier by Honeywell distributor. “We're relatively new to the Notifier line of products, but we're excited about their potential and are already seeing expected traction,” Carney said.

He said it has taken about three years to create the new division, “culminating in the last six months.”

In addition to becoming a Notifier distributor, Carney said the other steps the division has taken to ensure its success include earning “our UL certification for installing fire alarm and life safety systems, as well as being able to certify them.”

The new division has “a focus on the AES-IntelliNet product [patented wireless mesh technology], which we have branded within our company as something called UltraNET [an advanced private radio communications network].”

“We feel there's a lot of potential there for better communication with fire alarms and life safety systems, so we have an operating mesh network in our municipality and we're able to be a full-scale solution to the market, where we're not just looking to sell and install a system and walk away, we're interested in many years of relationship-building with clients,” he said.