Acknowledging that customer service is the key to his business, Gerald Vento, CEO/owner of Westec InterActive, Irvine, Calif., maintained the acquisition of three new companies would help “build awareness and intelligence” into his company’s offerings of video monitoring to retailers, restaurants, commercial businesses and government municipalities.

Westec’s acquisition of DV Dallas and d2 Digital Designs, both of Dallas, and Sparta Consulting Group of Frederick, Md., doubles the company’s work force, expands its regional presence and adds new technologies to expand service offerings to other areas of operations.

DV Dallas provides remote video monitoring hardware to small, commercial and enterprise businesses. It is also the innovator of an industry-leading digital video recorder that integrates alarm panel functionality, intelligent video applications and advanced video surveillance monitoring into one platform. This can change the way central stations monitor and track events at customer sites, the company maintained.

d2 Digital Designs, an application development company, develops advanced online applications for digital video, portals, training, interactive applications and more. Both are now divisions of Westec. d2 Digital Designs and DV Dallas previously were owned by Darjon Bittner, now vice president of technology development for Westec InterActive.

“DV Dallas is a smart, intelligent platform,” Vento remarked. “I see a lot of boxes out there, but not a lot of winning strategies. If you’re a manufacturer and you’ve not awakened to the fact that you have to be in the customer service business, you’re in peril unless you become a service-centric business.

“What you have to do is build awareness and intelligence into the products you offer,” he asserted. “A lot of companies out there are selling stuff, but the difference with Westec versus the others in the field is that we created a significant amount of customer dependency on what we do. We are a service company with smart technologies that complement that service-centric culture.”

Sparta Consulting delivers advanced physical security solutions for high-risk environments, such as housing developments, law enforcement, government municipalities and manufacturing facilities. Now a division of Westec, Sparta previously was owned by Severin Sorensen, who now is vice president of business and applications development for Westec.

“Its beginnings were as a consultant to a number of housing agencies,” Vento said of Sparta. “This gave me an opportunity to acquire a group of individuals who are premier property managers in development and redevelopment of multifamily housing space, which is a good strong vertical that Westec didn’t have much depth in.

The acquisitions follow the company’s recent announcement of $20 million in combined funding from Clarity Partners, Los Angeles, and Vento. He contemplates further acquisitions but not of security or guard companies.

“We’ll be looking for probably non-traditional kinds of acquisitions,” Vento predicted. “I think that we’ll look for ways to enhance our value to our customers. We’ll certainly look at a lot of emerging technologies, mostly software-related, that will help the economic performance of our customers.”