AUSTIN, Texas and BETHESDA, Md.– You’ll have to decide for yourself which one is Iron Man and who’s Captain America (or Thor, Hulk or Hawkeye, if you prefer), but one thing’s for sure: the recent merger between Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks has created a new superpower in the security industry.
“Eagle Eye could have stayed independent,” says Dean Drako, the founder of Eagle Eye Networks and chairman and CEO of Brivo, in an interview with SSI. “Brivo could have stayed independent. Joining forces is how I would characterize it. Think of the Avengers. They’re powerful by themselves but, as a team, they’re more powerful.”
Inside the Merger
Drako and Steve Van Till, who transitioned from CEO to president of Brivo in the merger, say the companies joining forces has been a long time coming and a common theme among customers in the decade or so since Drako became the leader of both companies.
“Our sales teams have been working together for all 10 of those years,” says Van Till in the SSI interview. “When Dean first bought Brivo, I think everybody saw how the product combination made a lot of sense. Access plus video, those are the two things that are most commonly connected to one another in the security world.
“Our field sales teams have been working often inside the same dealers. They pass leads back and forth. We do joint bids when somebody needs both. So the technical merger of the two companies at a corporate level is really a combination not only of product integration, but sales team integration and lots of other things that we’ve been practicing for a long time,” he says.
“In that respect, I think that we hit the ground running much more than two previously unrelated companies would in a typical merger scenario,” says Van Till.
How Will the Brivo-Eagle Eye Merger Change Things?
Drako expects Brivo customers will see “a more streamlined process” after the merger, noting that many of them were already working with both Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks “because they wanted the best in cloud video solution and they wanted the best in cloud access control systems.”
“We can streamline that for them and make it easier, better and faster so that they can be more efficient and they can spend more time focused on their end customers and selling to them, so I think it’s a really good thing for the channel,” says Drako.
Because the security industry has become “an enterprise software industry,” Van Till tells SSI, “there’s been a greater desire for integrating the core pieces of that so that they work together.”
While Drako has had countless conversations in the past decade about bringing the Brivo and Eagle Eye Networks together under one roof, the timing was never right for him to pull the trigger — until it was.
“Things have been changing over the past three or four years, maybe even longer,” Drako tells SSI. “Cloud adoption has obviously been increasing, but also the customers and our channel partners’ understanding and desire for an integrated solution has increased.
“(Brivo) delivered that integrated solution at the beginning of 2025, but we want to do an even better job at that integrated solution and provide not only an integrated product, but we want to create an integrated buying experience, an integrated support experience and integrated everything for those customers,” he says.
