Chris Larocca, president and CEO of Nortek Control, says that one of the things he’s always loved about the Nortek Control security market businesses is the deep technology they produce. And, according to Larocca, after doubling down on research and development during the pandemic, the company is ready to release its most technologically advanced product to date: the 2GIG EDGE Security and Automation Panel.

“The launch of the 2GIG EDGE is the most innovative and disruptive panel in the industry,” Larocca said. “It’s embedded with a lot of analytics, including face recognition — I’m really excited about it.”

While the product didn’t launch until March, it’s already an award winner, receiving the Consumer Technology Association’s security and surveillance product of the year award at the virtual CES show in January.

And consumers aren’t the only ones that will benefit from the panel — the 2GIG EDGE was designed with systems integrators in mind. 

“We’ve made it really easy for our installers to go in, get the product installed, set up quickly and move on to the next project, because we know for our installers, time is money,” said Nortek Control Vice President of Product Management Quinto Petrucci. “We made it as flexible as possible and retained a lot of the features our dealers love. It fully supports all the existing sensors and devices out there. It supports up to four partitions in one panel, which gives them four independent security systems with one control panel. And from a programming perspective, it’s the same intuitive panel, so if you’re familiar with our existing panels, this will be really easy to learn.”

Petrucci says the 2GIG EDGE is meant to be the center of the smart home, where end users interact on a daily basis. This is why the Nortek Control team put so much effort into the design of the panel. Compared to the 2GIG GC2e, the EDGE is 50 percent thinner; the screen size is twice as big; the resolution is five times better; the 1.6 GHz quad-core processor is four times faster and more powerful; and the audio is twice as good, with double the speakers and microphones, and added noise and echo cancelation. 

This is also one of the first smart home panels that can be disarmed using facial recognition technology. 

“It’s not just a panel,” Petrucci said. “What’s special about this product is all of the technology that went into this to essentially create a new platform. And Nortek Control can continue to add new features technologies allowing dealers and integrators to offer a panel that continues to add value to their investment.”

The product was also built to enhance privacy — a growing concern for end users since the increase in cyber-attacks during the pandemic. It’s fully encrypted, and users can turn the cameras off whenever they would like. In addition, all of the biometric data is stored and evaluated on the edge, so no private information is sent over the internet to the cloud. Once the user profile is deleted from the device, that information is gone forever. 

“We built this from the ground up, so it’s fully encrypted from how we communicate to the internet and to the devices,” Petrucci said. “And this is not something you design once and forget about — this is an ongoing thing we test to meet the latest and greatest cyber standards.”

To introduce 2GIG EDGE Security Panel, the Nortek Control team has put more effort into marketing than ever before. This, along with offering training every day for more than the next two months, should be of benefit to integrators and dealers.

“Another first we’re providing to our dealers is our PRO portal,” said Nortek Control Vice President of Marketing Richard Pugnier. “This is the first time we’ve offered something like this to our dealers where they can log into a system and gain complete access to all of the marketing assets they will need to be successful in the field. 

“One of the great things about this is that a lot of these dealers are the small businesses without big marketing teams to create all these assets for them. With the PRO portal, dealers are able to customize every aspect of these materials by adding their own logo. … plus, we’re really giving this the full court press supporting them with additional marketing and high-impact advertising.”

Learn more at www.2GIG.com.