DICE Corp. gained a UL listing of its hosted monitoring center platform under the new UL listing standards for hosted alarm centers.

DICE has been providing hosting solutions for monitoring centers in the U.S. and around the world for about three years. DICE provides hosted users with the alarm receivers, monitoring software, monitoring servers and PBX with phones, all from their data centers in the U.S. The hosted monitoring user and each of their monitoring agents simply log into the DICE Hosted center with a secure, password-protected login through a VPN to access their monitoring solution and its data. The hosted monitoring center simply needs PCs, phones and monitoring agents to manage their business.

Users can have access to all 70 of the DICE automated, end-to-end monitoring and business services that DICE delivers. The DICE automated products are designed to allow a monitoring center to do more work with fewer employees. “This simply lowers the operating costs of companies that use the DICE system, and it especially reduces the costs of companies who use the hosted system,” said Cliff Dice.

Over the past few years Dice has significantly grown its account base of hosted central stations by offering these services, and the company believed that providing a UL listing for hosted clients was the next logical step. DICE has a redundant, mirrored data center 400 miles away from Bay City, Mich., which sits on different power grids and uses different carrier services, the company described. If its Bay City center were to go down, DICE would simply failover to this second center. This safeguard was key to receiving the UL listing for the company’s hosted solutions and hosted clients.

“Over the past five years our company has built and expanded our fully owned and operated data centers which provide hosted users with a series of benefits,” Dice said. “First, there are no more server costs, server maintenance fees or server replacement fees, and no more IT headaches that go along with managing an internal network. New monitoring companies have zero startup costs in what is normally a very costly investment to build the infrastructure needed to start and operate a central station. And lastly, we’ve been transitioning DICE clients and other monitoring providers’ clients from their fully owned and operated central stations to the DICE hosted services as this simply reduces their operating cost. Dice owns and operates four additional non-UL data centers within the United States and has co-location centers in Europe and Asia to help in Web application and portal deployment around the world.”

One of the biggest savings to monitoring companies comes from using hosted Dice PBXs and from DICE providing users with all of their telecom services. One of the major expenses for any monitoring company is its communication costs. “Dice usually reduces these communications costs as our provider connects directly to the communication backbone, which provides telephone services to other middle-market service providers. Plus, DICE provides PBX redundancy delivering multiple paths to the telecom networks that a center is connected to,” said Dice, “whereas most traditional telecom services provide just a single path. So you receive additional benefits, and cost savings. Your costs savings come from the fact that all your computer hardware, software and advanced networking solutions are provided in the hosted solution.” Dice has even invested in all types of receivers from every manufacturer, both for IP and legacy telecom products.

Dice said, “What we have done with our hosted solution significantly reduces the operating costs of any monitoring company, large to small. It would be hard for any alarm company to provide what we have built here in the hosted center. From our prospective the industry has moved way beyond needing just a software solution. The industry has been looking for financial help for some time now as costs go up, and RMR per client goes down. Something had to give, and we are very pleased to provide the industry with the support they need through our UL listed hosted monitoring and business service offerings.”

 For information, visit www.dicecorp.com.