LOUISVILLE, Colo. — Inovonics, a provider of wireless sensor networks for commercial and life-safety applications, has signed four integrator channel partners to resell its Radius solution.
Introduced last fall during ASIS, Radius is billed as the security industry's first situational awareness system that combines mass notification capabilities with advanced wireless positioning technology to pinpoint mobile duress alarm devices.
The initial integrators to sell and implement Radius are CyberMedix Medical Systems of Dana Point, Calif.; Capture Technologies of Oakland, Calif.; Phase 1 Electronics of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and VSA Security Systems of Columbus, Ga. The companies provide electronic security solutions across a range of market niches, including health care, education, government, commercial, industrial and others.
Although several national systems integrators already resell Inovonics' products, the company is establishing its own dealer network for the first time in its history.
"It is core to our strategy in bringing Radius to the marketplace," Inovonics President Mark Jarman tells SSI. "We have been sort of caged and constrained by being a wireless sensor and network company that sells into primarily the intrusion detection market space, but always in conjunction with somebody else's control panel."
Unlike traditional hard-wired control panel systems that have been used to detect safety issues and report alarm events, Radius provides an end-to-end, IP-based wireless solution. It can work alone or be integrated with other safety and security systems, according to the company.
"We have for the first time an opportunity to create end points that have an application associated with them — two-way devices that can do sensing of motion, gate, temperature, barometric pressure, and be able to provide information back to the head-end about what might be going on with a patient or a staff person," Jarman says. "You can go back out and program those [sensors] to increase the transmit power or decrease it and enhance even further the potential to locate a device. That kind of capability wasn't really available to us without a complete system solution."
Jarman likens the challenge of establishing a dealer network to "greenfield channel development," which can oftentimes prove more difficult to do successfully than even developing products.
"The hardest part is the evangelizing, the missionary work. You have to get the installer — your reseller — to have the vision that you've developed [a solution to meet] end users' needs; get them trained and convinced enough to say they will put their company's reputation behind it and make sure that all the economics work for everybody," he says.