Two major security integrators in the Pacific Northwest, Aronson Security Group (ASG), Seattle, and Selectron, Portland, Ore., joined forces in the acquisition of Selectron by ASG, announced Phil Aronson, CEO of ASG.

“Together we are now the largest independent security integrator in the Pacific Northwest ­â€” our footprint is huge,” Aronson told SDM. “We both have national accounts, so it enables us to serve them more completely with better services.

“Their accounts are in the Portland market and ours are in Puget Sound,” Aronson pointed out. “We ended up working together more than anything on national accounts.”

“In some cases, our customers can sometimes be the same but located in different areas,” agreed Jack Turley, ASG’s vice president of sales and marketing. “It turned out to be more advantageous to work together than to try to compete.”

Selectron will become a subsidiary of ASG, Aronson revealed. The two companies are privately held, so terms of the sale were not disclosed. “Selectron has a great reputation in Oregon, and we want to keep that name,” Aronson pledged.

“We’re two companies started in the 1960s and in the security industry for that length of time,” Aronson related. “We’ve had a very close relationship over that time, where we’ve shared operational best practices, and we are very close friends.”

Turley pointed out that Selectron was strong in policies and procedures before best practices became a buzzword. He praised the long industry expertise of Selectron’s employees.

Related to the acquisition is the creation by ASG of a new converged services division, Aronson related.

“We found in the past that it’s easy and common these days to attach a device to the network and call it convergence,” Turley remarked. “What it means to us is staking much more ownership not only for the impact of the security side on the network infrastructure, but taking that impact and turning that into value for the rest of the organization.”

“The person we hired to launch [the converged services division], Tim Winston, has been in security information and corporate information for over 15 years,” Aronson noted. “He’s built IT services organizations for large companies, so we’re lucky to have him. He really understands what needs to happen in the security industry, and he has the vision for it.”

“Because he’s somebody that’s come from a daily dialogue with lots of companies that are on the leading edge of convergence, he’s been able to rapidly accelerate our own forays into that world,” Turley pointed out. “How do we future-proof architecture so as products change, the initial architecture of a system doesn’t need to be redesigned or thrown out or heavily modified?”

Aronson emphasized the cultural similarities between ASG and Selectron in their mission statements.

“You just do it right and do it with integrity; that’s a big shared value we have,” Aronson emphasized. “The other thing is we’re going to secure the core, lock up the No. 1 position in the physical security space in the Pacific Northwest, and then expand our operations to give more services to our clients.

“Because it’s really about expanded service for clients, to provide additional security system integration services, and that’s what we’re talking about,” Aronson concluded.