Alarm.com on Wednesday announced that it has entered into an agreement to settle the antitrust lawsuit recently filed against the company by Honeywell and that it has subsequently closed its acquisition of Icontrol Networks’ Connect and Piper business units. In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Alarm.com said that the settlement agreement became effective upon the closing of the acquisition and that both companies have agreed to keep the terms of the settlement confidential. Click here to read more about the lawsuit and Alarm.com’s response to it.
According to Dan Kerzner, chief product officer for Alarm.com, the completion of the deal means that the company will be able to significantly ramp up its R&D efforts by combining the efforts of the Piper and Connect teams, located in Silicon Valley and Ottawa, Canada, respectively, with their existing R&D offices throughout the county.
“The motivation behind doing the deal was our belief that there is a secular trend going on around the smart home and Internet of Things. These are all things that Alarm.com has been leading in since 2000 when we got started and we feel there is going to be both more opportunity and competition moving forward,” Kerzner says. “We see this as an opportunity to double-down on the research and development investments that we’ve always made and extend the offerings that we can bring to the industry.”
The completion of the acquisition also means that Alarm.com will be adding ADT to its customers list as the residential security leader currently leverages the Icontrol remote services platform. Kerzner says this is yet another reason they will be accelerating R&D.
“We worked with the Protection 1 management team for a long time and so we think it is a great opportunity to scale our development efforts across an even larger base of customers because we think there is even more to be done,” Kerzner adds.
In addition, Kerzner says the combination of the R&D capacity between Alarm.com and Icontrol will help it meet the ever-evolving needs of the smart home market.
“There is probably more activity and more changes happening today than in the past and we believe you have to invest even more,” he says. “Alarm.com has been sort of growing it’s R&D spending faster than revenue has been growing for the last couple of years because we felt like we needed to invest for the future and this allows us to accelerate that even more because we have a larger team and s larger customer base to support.”
As a company, Alarm.com has experienced transformative growth in recent years with the rise of connected home technology. The company, which started out as relatively small, niche player in the security space, has grown to become the leading provider of remote services in the industry. Bolstered by that success, the company launched an initial public offering on the NASDAQ in the summer of 2015 and has seen its stock price nearly double over the last year and a half.
Kerzner attributes the company’s growth primarily to two things: their dedication to developing innovative and differentiated technology offerings and the strong support of their dealer partners through the years.
“We think the security industry is the best engine for bringing smart home technology into peoples’ lives. It has been a busy couple of years and this deal is an opportunity for us to take that even further,” Kerzner concludes. “I think the technology industry is a place where you always have to be going forward and figuring out how to invest more and innovate faster and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Comcast Closes "Converge" Acquisition
Cable giant Comcast also announced on Wednesday that it has officially completed its acquisition of Icontrol’s “Converge” software platform. In a blog post, Daniel Herscovici, senior vice president and general manager for Xfinity Home, said that like Alarm.com, the acquisition will give them control over their R&D roadmap.
“By owning the part of Icontrol that brings the core home security technology platform to life, we can invest more strategically for the future and accelerate the pace of innovation for Xfinity Home, particularly in the area of connected home security,” Herscovici writes.
In addition, he says the acquisition will enable them to establish an “IoT Center of Excellence” in Austin, Texas, that will serve as a hub where the company’s engineers and developers will design new technology innovation to support their various IoT businesses. The deal will also open up a new wholesale line of business for Xfinity Home, according to Herscovici.
“For all these reasons and more, we’re not just excited about what this means for Xfinity Home today, but also about what this could mean for the future of connected home security,” he writes.
