Brivo Systems Acquired for $50M by Eagle Eye Networks CEO Drako

The firms’ combined technologies will deliver the first on-demand, cloud-based security and operations video management system (VMS) with both cloud and on-premise recording.

BETHESDA, Md. – Dean Drako, president and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks, has acquired Brivo Systems for $50 million. Drako will serve as chairman of the newly acquired company; Steve Van Till, Brivo’s president and CEO, will continue to lead its daily operations.

“Brivo will operate as a standalone company under the Brivo name. The companies will have close relationships and close ties on integration, on partnership, on teaming up,” Drako told SSI during a joint interview with Van Till. “Those will be tighter than would be possible with two companies that had separate owners, but they will operate as separate companies.”

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Founded in 1999, Brivo is a pioneer in Software as a Service (SaaS) applications for security management, providing access control services for small and medium businesses, as well as scalable and centralized management for global enterprises. The company’s solution currently facilitates more than six million users and more than 100,000 access points.

Brivo was previously a wholly owned subsidiary of The Duchossois Group, a privately held holding company. In striking a deal for the company, Drako said his goal was to acquire the physical security industry’s best access control system.

“Brivo’s true cloud architecture and open API approach put it a generation ahead of other access control systems. Cloud solutions provide exceptional benefits and Brivo is clearly the market and technology leader,” Drako said. “Brivo has also been committed to strong, long-standing relationships with its channel partners, which I believe is the best strategy for delivering extremely high customer satisfaction.”

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Drako said he would apply the strategy and execution processes he used at his other successful companies, including Barracuda Networks, to leverage Brivo’s technology lead and growth trajectory. In particular, Drako sees the opportunity to accelerate the cloud technology shift already underway in the physical security industry by combining Brivo’s cloud-based access control with the on-demand, secure, cloud-managed Eagle Eye Security Camera video management system (VMS).

Beginning in July, Brivo will offer an integrated solution unifying Brivo OnAir with the Eagle Eye Networks solution. The combined offering will be bi-directionally integrated using the open APIs from both companies. Drako said combining the technologies will result in:

  • Video verification of door events with natively viewable and searchable video
  • Door event visibility in video; Brivo OnAir door events will appear within the Eagle Eye security camera VMS

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“Brivo was the first company to really have an open API with a cloud standard in the access control space. Eagle Eye was the first company in the [VMS] space to have an open API,” Drako said. “These APIs allow you to do integrations and development of new products and connections that are very powerful. The next wave of cloud technology is going to be based around these open APIs.”

The acquisition marks the first time that two cloud companies will be fully integrating inside the security industry, said Van Till, who co-founded Brivo.

“We fully preserve all of the capabilities of both the product offerings in this integration. Second, this will be the deepest, richest integration that we’ve ever done with anybody. The reason is the Eagle Eye API is a richer API by a factor of about 10 than any other API that I have seen in the industry,” Van Till said. “That allows us to access more features, display more information, be more selective about video. It is just a lot richer experience at the API level and that translates to a richer experience at the user level.”

Because Brivo and Eagle Eye are both cloud-based, the combined solution uniquely offers flexible deployment, with scalability and cyber-secure remote management, according to Drako.

“One of the motivators for some of our customers moving to Brivo is the cybersecurity-IT interface. Every company wants to remotely manage their access control system. They want to add users, delete users, open doors, do things that they sometimes have to do at odd hours and they don’t want to have to come in to work to do it,” Drako said. “The access control system gets connected to the Internet and with that comes a whole host of [potential cybersecurity issues]. The access control system can now be a gateway into the rest of the network, potentially compromising credit card and private customer data or control the doors and let people in. If you go with a Brivo cloud system, then you avoid a lot of these headaches.”

Van Till said the timing of the acquisition was driven by external factors having to do with its former family-operated ownership, which has been cashing out of some of its bigger businesses to better diversify its assets and make plans for passing wealth along to the next generation.

“It really didn’t have anything to do with the particulars of Brivo or the market or anything else,” Van Till said. “It just had to do with changes at the parent company.”

Van Till said for years Brivo had contemplated developing its own native VMS implementation, but the considerable resources and infrastructure necessary to pull it off was never available.

“We could never quite get there as a company. I would say [the integration with Eagle Eye Networks] is the thing that we always wanted, which is a very close relationship with a very high quality, cloud-based video service and a very rich API,” he explained. “It makes it essentially the same as being built into Brivo from a user standpoint in terms of ease of use, coherent solution, richness, features, all those kinds of things. So this is something that we are getting through the relationship that we have always wanted to have anyway.”

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Although Bosch’s name is quite familiar to those in the security industry, his previous experience has been in daily newspaper journalism. Prior to joining SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION in 2006, he spent 15 years with the Los Angeles Times, where he performed a wide assortment of editorial responsibilities, including feature and metro department assignments as well as content producing for latimes.com. Bosch is a graduate of California State University, Fresno with a degree in Mass Communication & Journalism. In 2007, he successfully completed the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association’s National Training School coursework to become a Certified Level I Alarm Technician.

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