President’s Message

The Monitoring Association (TMA), as a trade organization, exists to provide collaborative support through member services to alarm monitoring companies and companies that support our industry. TMA focuses on providing member services that drive member value. One very valuable member benefit is the ASAP-to-PSAP (ASAP) service. There has been considerable momentum for the program over the last few months and I am pleased to update you on our recent progress. For those who don’t know, the vision for ASAP was inspired by the desire to improve upon 100-year-old technology in the form of a voice phone call to share critical information with 911 centers or PSAPs. With the creation of ASAP, we were able to leverage more modern data exchange capabilities that remove the necessity for the voice call and deliver the critical information faster and more accurately than ever before. For example, on average it takes about 90 seconds to create an alarm-related Call-for-Service, a dispatch in alarm industry terms. The process primarily consists of a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) tele-communicator transcribing verbal information from a monitoring center agent. By replacing the 90-second phone call with a human-less data exchange, ASAP drives efficiencies in both PSAPs and monitoring centers. In the monitoring center, agent time to create a Call-forService is reduced to a simple mouse click. In a PSAP, ASAP inserts the Call-for-Service directly into the PSAPs Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, eliminating phone call handling. Human error resulting from transcribing a voice call is virtually eliminated. A PSAP is essentially a call center that provides critical Public Safety functions where uninterrupted communications capability is essential. When a hurricane followed by an earthquake disrupted PSAP voice telephony capability in Virginia, ASAP was the only consistent path for monitoring centers to create a Call-for-Service within the impacted PSAPs. ASAP has also proven to be helpful to PSAPs dealing with staffing issues which are especially important these days given their challenges with COVID and civil unrest.

First responders are increasingly challenged with having accurate location information for Calls-for-Service. PSAP directors often tell us how pleased they are with ASAP’s process of verifying customer addresses in our monitoring automation systems to match the

ASAP-to-PSAP... Finding its rhythm

addresses in the PSAP’s CAD databases. One of the more complex challenges faced when ASAP was created nearly a decade ago was connecting hundreds of monitoring centers to thousands of PSAPs. That challenge was met by establishing a partnership with Nlets, a nationwide network that securely connects every state, local, and federal law enforcement and public safety agency. In addition to providing existing connectivity to over 4,000 PSAPs, Nlets provides hosting facilities for our ASAP servers. The Nlets partnership was key to getting the ASAP service up and running and as we continue to upgrade the ASAP infrastructure, Nlets, as an innovative service provider to public safety, continues to be key to our success.

Although cloud services were in their infancy when ASAP was first launched by TMA (previously CSAA), a lot has happened since then, and I’m proud to announce our new commitment to leverage this technology for ASAP with our next upgrade. Our new cloud architecture will also facilitate replacement of the current hardware, ie. VPN routers, with software-based SSL and eliminate the need for additional hardware investments in the future.

Along with this transition to the Nlets cloud architecture we will establish an additional cloud architecture with a

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