Security Systems News

Smart home offerings have boosted residential security by more than 15 percent in the past two years, according to Parks Associates in its report, “The New Face of Home Security—2015 Edition.”

Smart home offerings also lower attrition rates, CEO Trisha Parks told Security Systems News. “Attrition is the enemy,” she said. “The industry is facing its monsters.”

About 21 million U.S. homes have professionally monitored security and another 1.5 million have monitoring in a s ...read more

It has been a year since reports surfaced that Alarm.com owner ABS wanted to exit its investment. The wait may have been worthwhile, according to experts who spoke to Security Systems News. Now is a good time for Alarm.com, a fast-growing, market-leading provider of interactive services, to go public, they say.

“There’s a lot of excitement and energy around the smart home right now, and to a certain degree the timing of this IPO may reflect that,” Tom Kerber, director of res ...read more

Enter the dreaded counterconcept to the user-friendly, interoperable, smoothly functioning smart home: the Internet of Broken Things. Used in a recent Parks Associates webinar, the term may lack the infectiousness of its opposite, but according to a recent SSN News Poll, it’s no less relevant to the discussion about the connected home.

From the article "Customer service and the Internet of Things" by Leif Kothe.

Both companies have home security/home automation offerings—AT&T has Digital Life and DIRECTV bought LifeShield Security last year. And according to Tom Kerber, director of research, home control and energy for Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm, the acquisition of DIRECTV “just makes AT&T that much more of a powerful competitor” when it comes to the connected home.

Kerber believes there will be bundling opportunities for AT&T in the deal. He pointed to a ...read more

The Internet of Things, the connectivity of devices, systems and services in today’s interactive world, makes the connected home possible. But if those smart home devices don’t work because of even just one glitch in the connected system, attrition rates will rise.

That was the concern voiced in a webinar this spring titled “Supporting the Connected Home: Preventing the Internet of Broken Things.” The basic message of the webinar, hosted by Parks Associates, a market researc ...read more

Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s homeowners with broadband at home—about 5 million households—considered purchasing a home security system over the past year but didn’t acquire one, according to a new report from Parks Associates, a market research firm based here.

However, Tricia Parks, the firm’s CEO, told Security Systems News that with the right strategies, such “fence sitters” can turn into customers.

That’s because the research—resulting from multiple 2013 consume ...read more

In an April, 2009 interview with Security Systems News, Parks Associates CEO Tricia Parks suggested traditional security companies needed to begin offering more value to compete with telcos who were undoubtedly ready to move into the security space. "Anybody who is already getting into the house has the potential to do security as one more thing when they get there," Parks said in April. "They're looking around, if not for this year, then for years ahead, saying 'Where's the next ...read more

A January report from Parks Associates, an international market research and consulting company specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services, finds security system monitoring revenue is likely to be very stable despite current economic conditions, and customers may even tolerate a rate increase.

The report, "Home Systems: Home Security Update," finds the number of monitored security households intending to cancel their service is only 4-8 percent higher t ...read more