Monitoring Today

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I have been involved with the Central Station Alarm Association (CSAA) for approximately seven years and am honored to be named president. The CSAA has a proud history of representing its membership on a wide range of issues that impact the monitoring industry.  

Ted Stoler, East Central Station manager and assistant vice president for Vector Security, Warrendale, Pa., is the winner of the 2013 CSAA Central Station Excellence Award for Manager of the Year. Stoler has 35 years of security experience under his belt, 19 of which have been spent at Vector.

More than half (56 percent) of Americans have smartphones today, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And that number most likely is higher among people who have security systems.

Dealers and integrators, when asked in SDM’s Forecast Study how they would rate the potential for sales in 2013, ranked monitoring as their second-biggest growth area, only after video surveillance. Whether you operate your own central station or use the services of a third-party monitoring company, this annual special supplement of SDM — Monitoring TODAY — contains information that is relevant to your business: the monitoring of subscriber accounts.

Read about these companies that offer monitoring services.

Read the latest news about monitoring.

Now that the elections and their TV ads are over with, you might notice that replacing those politicians are ads for interactive home services and monitoring. Homeowners can lock or unlock a front door of their home from a thousand miles away. They can receive and respond to alarms on a smartphone or look in through a camera to make sure Mikey came home from school or Rover is not tearing up the house. They can monitor and manage home appliances ranging from a complex HVAC system to a simple coffee pot.

Each year, it seems as though there are new technologies, new products and services, and new standards with which to cope, not to mention a plethora of new laws and regulations that will affect businesses in the coming year, and 2013 will be no different.

As the 2012 winner of the CSAA’s Central Station Manager of the Year Excellence Award, Amy Becht knows a thing or two about how to manage a central station. Becht, a native of St. Paul, Minn., is the senior central station manager at Vivint Inc., with responsibility for the company’s central station located South St. Paul, Minn.

Making market predictions is never an exact science, even for the experts. However, in the case of the baby boomers, with their sheer numbers, that they will dramatically affect a given consumer market is virtually guaranteed. “Other companies and industries have to pay for projections of the market. The Census Bureau tells us with precision that this segment of the market is growing,” says Stanley Oppenheim, president of Affiliated Monitoring, located in Union, N.J.