Recently ADT in the US has purchased Reliance/Protectron here in Canada for a princely sum reputed to be about $5.5 Billion. Protectron is a major pla yer in the security market here in Canada with about 400,000 accounts on li ne with their six major stations spread across Canada. I myself am a third party dealer on their station with 1200 accounts monitored by them.
Over the last twenty years, my customers have been well served by their mon itoring services, which have allowed me to set up my own custom priorities with their operators.My past experiences with the normal, instantaneous "co okie cutter" ADT response to alarms, has shown that without such signals as "cancel codes" being programmed, this has resulted in far too many false a larm dispatches (which in our jurisdiction costs the client $140 a visit). Today, that kind of unfiltered response is close to irresponsible ! That, and other service related reasons, is why I took some 200 accounts off ADT' s station initially and put them over on Protectron's station.
Now the gigantic fish has swallowed the big fish in the ocean !!!!!
My prediction is ADT will leave the operations side of Protectron alone for the short term until they are able to flush out their long term plans. At that time, they will as per their normal practice, "rape and pillage" the p ersonnel of Protectron for only the best people, and let go the remainder o f the Protectron staff. More important to me, they will also force Protectr on to follow their established guidelines for response, as used in their ex isting stations, in order to implement a consistent response pattern overal l.
This is an unhappy day for clients and for dealers on Protectron's stations (IMO). The day they implement those kinds of response policies is the day I swing over all my accounts to an outside independant monitoring station
ADT, you've been warned (not that you really give a damn about the small fr y.....)