Keyscan’s Steve Dentinger says managed access control provides opportunities for greater RMR without the high cost of entry, which includes hosting infrastructure like servers and IT staff.

Whitby, Ont.-based Keyscan, a provider of integrated access control systems, and Affiliated Monitoring of Union, N.J., are collaborating in an effort to allow security dealers to offer cloud-based hosted or managed access control solutions to their customers.

Though the collaborating between Keyscan and Affiliated goes back several years, the formalization of this partnership is intended to take the concept of managed access control to a wider audience, and to remove some of the risks dealers have to take to get started with managed access control, said Steve Dentinger, Keyscan’s director of sales and marketing.

“With access control, you have the ability to drive RMR similar to the intrusion model dealers have been accustomed to for years. When dealers who love the concept want to enter the market, it’s a big decision with a significant barrier to entry,” he believes. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Dealers are faced with investing in hosting infrastructure, including servers and IT to support the solution, up front without a business model and without a stable of customers. Those dealers are either afraid to do that or don’t even get started because it’s cost-prohibitive and the business model is not there yet. So it dies on the vine.”

For security dealers, RMR is the name of the game, and taking just one step up from traditional access control can have a significant impact on revenues, Dentinger described.

“Hosted access control is the entry level of RMR, but it doesn’t need to stop there. The fee for that varies by customer and by market, but it’s usually somewhere around $25 to $30 per month per reader,” Dentinger said. “The end user doesn’t have to focus on software that doesn’t make them money; they can focus on their core competency and what they can do to grow their business.”

In addition to potentially boosting RMR, the two companies believe their offering will open new markets for dealers by allowing them to be more competitive primarily in the smaller market (1 to 12 doors), but also larger installations. The smaller customers often want or need access control for their facilities but do not have the capital on hand to operate or manage their own systems. By reducing up-front access control costs, Affiliated’s dealers will be more competitive in this smaller space, said Daniel Oppenheim, vice president of Affiliated.

Keyscan and Affiliated Monitoring believe that their partnership to offer managed access control will allow dealers and integrators to be more competitive in the 1- to 12-door market, which often wants and needs access control but lacks the capacity to operate or manage their own systems.

“Many customers — especially smaller customers — don’t want to take on the responsibility of managing their solution,” he says. “The average customer for a commercial installation is less than eight doors. In that market, they don’t want the headache of it, so managed access control gives our end users — our dealers — an easy way to offer it to their customers.”

Because of the high cost of entry for hosted or managed access control systems, many dealers opt for traditional access control systems where they install equipment, leave a dedicated computer at the premises, train someone to use the software and leave a stack of access cards with that person — all of which is fine, but isn’t the best way to do it, Oppenheim believes.

A hosted solution places the software to make changes on a Web server, but the customer still has to know how to use it. To get the most out of access control, Dentinger said, “you want someone who lives it, breathes it and understands it.” That’s what Keyscan and Affiliated are offering.

“With managed access control, you take the entire responsibility out of the hands of the end user. Dealers can tell them, ‘When you want to do anything, contact us and we’ll do it for you,’” Dentinger said. “It’s recurring revenue without the burden of service calls.

“We’ve ultimately made the solution extra-simple to deploy in the field. Whether you’re looking at two, three, four doors and panels, you only need to open the kit and connect to the cloud. There is no software and no configuration. This takes the product level up tenfold and keeps teams out in the field installing revenue-generating systems,” he added.

Under the managed access control model, Affiliated offers a dedicated access control desk that processes changes and supports dealers and end users 24/7. “They just call us and tell us what they need and we take care of it for them,” Oppenheim described.

The partnership presents dealers with a range of options to present to their customers, whether traditional, managed or hosted access. Having worked together for several years, Keyscan and Affiliated have done the necessary legwork to create a business model that dealers can rest assured will work for them, Oppenheim says.

“We’ve been with Keyscan for three years and have a massive embedded base. We’re doing managed access control every day. It’s not something we fell into. We’ve had a close partnership for years and have been very successful in supporting dealers,” he said.