Icontrol Targets Alarm.com, Honeywell With New Security & Home Automation Service

Icontrol will now offer its Icontrol One interactive security/home automation service to independent security dealers and integrators.

Get ready for Icontrol One, a new interactive security and home automation service from Icontrol, whose Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) platform already powers systems from ADT (Pulse) as well as large cable companies such as Xfinity.

The new service is meant for independent security dealers and integrators – a market that so far has eluded Icontrol.

“One of the most frustrating things we’ve experienced over the past five, six years or so has been not being able to provide a solution to a host of dealers that have contacted us,” says VP marketing Greg Roberts. “We haven’t had the resources or the right solution.”

Roberts wasn’t ready to say which alarm panels will be ready launch this summer, but the Web site lists Nortek’s 2Gig (GoControl), Interlogix (Simon XT, XTi) and DSC (PowerSeries).

GoControl and PowerSeries were already Icontrol partners through a relationship with Telular’s Telguard HomeControl program. As a maker of cellular radios for alarm panels, Telular already had relationships with independent dealers; Icontrol did not.

Now Icontrol has hired two big guns from ADT to run the new dealer program.

Icontrol One will now compete directly with Telguard. Roberts wasn’t clear on how the Icontrol One version would differ from Telguard, other than to say the Icontrol service would be competitively priced and will employ Icontrol’s new HomeView 3D graphical user interface.

“We think the pricing is a much more cost effective solution in the marketplace than anything that is offered in industry today,” Roberts says.

The security and interactive home automation business has been heating up, as millions of legacy alarm panels will require upgrades with the 2G cellular sunset. Icontrol is touting its new program as an excuse for dealers to update existing alarm customers and reap the huge premium in revenue for interactive home control services.

Currently, security dealers and integrators charge $50 to $70 per month for all that interactivity, about double the price of security monitoring alone.

Icontrol is offering an external module (image) with Wi-Fi, Z-Wave and 3G radios for the upgrade.

In addition to competing against it Telguard and the big daddy that is Alarm.com, Icontrol competes with Honeywell’s Total Connect cloud service, as well as relative newcomer Securenet, which works with hardware from Resolution Products. Napco Security’s home-grown iBridge service.

The new Icontrol dealers won’t, however, be competing too much with Icontrol customers ADT and the cable companies. ADT just announced a new hardware platform, Total Security, that is exclusive to the giant. The cable companies use a different hardware platform for their ZigBee-enabled control systems.

Icontrol will launch the new service through traditional security dealers, but also has an interest in attracting home systems integrators that are not yet involved in the security business.

Icontrol will introduce dealers to the new program at ISC West 2015 in Las Vegas, April 15-17.

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Julie Jacobson, recipient of the 2014 CEA TechHome Leadership Award, is co-founder of EH Publishing, producer of CE Pro, Electronic House, Commercial Integrator, Security Sales and other leading technology publications. She currently spends most of her time writing for CE Pro in the areas of home automation, security, networked A/V and the business of home systems integration.

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