Xentry Marks the Security Integration Spot

Xentry Systems Integration executives share their winning ways for starting, operating and growing the business.

Like a pro sports expansion team that bows with much fanfare, signs a superstar or two, drafts key role players and acquires specialized talent, Xentry Systems has burst onto the systems integration scene. Unlike most such sports franchises, however, Xentry comes out of the gate highly competitive and a contender to win new commercial business.

The company was introduced in January 2014 when Ohio-based access control solutions provider Matrix Systems spun off its products business as Frontier and its service side as Xentry. In short order, local AcreeDaily was acquired and folded into Xentry to deeply widen its core access offerings, competencies and personnel. High-profile industry executive John Nemerofsky (Stanley, Niscayah, SST) was named president and CEO, and Andre Greco (Johnson Controls, Ingersoll Rand, Siemens) was appointed vice president of sales and marketing.

Like Matrix, AcreeDaily possessed a successful track record of more than three decades. Thus almost overnight, Xentry had an established footprint and top-flight management.

“The more we talked about the businesses, and what Xentry, or at the time Matrix, was trying to achieve in splitting their business up, and what we were doing and trying to achieve, we found we could mesh together really effectively,” says Dan Blend, former AcreeDaily CEO, now Xentry’s regional president. “We have a lot of things in the forms of project managers, project engineers and totally new product lines that Xentry did not. The combination seemed to make a lot of sense.”

It’s a combination that has resulted in a formidable integrator bringing myriad solutions that, in addition to access, include video surveillance, intrusion detection, fire/ life safety, command and control, sound and communication, remote monitoring systems, and more. Although adept in numerous markets, Xentry Systems’ forte includes health-care, education, transportation and retail applications. High-profile clients include Miami Int’l Airport, Texas A&M University, Cleveland Clinic and Ohio State University.

To anchor this publication’s annual Business Issue, Security Sales & Integration braved wintertime Ohio to spend a couple of days with the Xentry team and uncover the fast-rising integrator’s strategic sensibilities. Fortunately, most of the story is more provocative than how Nemerofsky explains what’s behind the firm’s unusual name (pronounced Zen-tree). “I wish there was a great story around it,” he says. “We could probably tell you a better story about how the colors were selected than the name. It’s really a play on Sentry, the guard. They came up with Xentry with an X.”

RELATED: Xentry Systems’ Formula to Keep Techs at Top of Their Game

Now for the really good stuff, Nemerofsky, Greco, Blend and Senior Director of Operations Mark Ring, another crackerjack AcreeDaily carryover, discuss their winning ways for starting, operating and growing the business.

What drove Matrix to spinoff into the systems integration business, and where are you in the process?

John Nemerofsky: Matrix operated for 35 years as a business that manufactured and sold access control, and installed access control to the end user. It’s very difficult to be both the manufacturer and the installer and service provider. So they brought in a CEO about a year-and-a-half ago, Holly Tsourides, who had a vision to create two new businesses out of Matrix.

One business was called Frontier, which had been the name of Matrix’s software for 35 years. She changed the way Frontier goes to market now through a VAR channel and resells the Frontier product through a series of VARs, of which Xentry is one. She also realized she needed to go to market with Xentry as a systems integrator. And to be a systems integrator, we needed more than one access control product line to sell and a fast way to ramp up that business.

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About the Author

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Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].

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