Five Questions for Brivo’s Steve Van Till

CSAA welcomed Brivo, Inc. as a new associate member earlier this year. Read on to learn a little about the company and CEO Steve Van Till.

What is your company’s mission and how does it intersect with the alarm industry?

Brivo CEO Steve Van Till

Our mission is to provide the best cloud-based hosted access control in the world. For the alarm industry, this means an opportunity for an RMR-based business model that is completely parallel to the way monitoring services have been delivered for many years.Both the technology and the financial model strengthen the relationship between central stations and their dealers and end users.

Share a personal experience you’ve had with alarm monitoring or public safety.
I was once working in a high-rise building on the weekend, and became trapped in an elevator when I was leaving to head out for lunch.  Had it not been for the emergency phone that dialed into a central station, I might have been stuck there all weekend.  As it turned out, they were able to dispatch someone to let me out, and fix the elevator so that it didn’t happen to anyone else.

Why did you join CSAA — what are your goals for your membership?
We joined CSAA because we see an increasing convergence between alarm, access and video surveillance services. Customers really want to have all three in a single package, from a single provider. As a cloud service provider, we also see many commonalities of interest between central stations and the work we do. We have many valuable “cloud lessons” to share, and look forward to more and more alarm services migrating to this type of platform.

What makes your company special?
Our company has always been known as the first Software-as-a-Service company in the physical security space. We actually launched our cloud-based access control services in 2001, which was long before anyone was talking about “the cloud.” We achieved another “first” in 2009 when we added fully integrated cloud-based video to this same offering.  Just this past year, we launched Brivo Mobile Pass, a cloud-based mobile credential that works with no change-out to existing field hardware, and was therefore immediately available to all 8,000,000 credentialed users in the Brivo system.

Tell us something about yourself that drives the way you do business.
I’ve always had a lot of outside interests, from running and cycling and music to photography and reading and motorcycles. I’m avid about acquiring new skills, and I learned something different from each one of these activities. The biggest thing, though, is getting to know and interact with the fairly different kinds of people that tend to surround each of these areas. The perspectives I’ve gained from that are useful every single day in thinking about how to shape our corporate culture for the best.

Steve Van Till is the Founder, President and CEO of Brivo Inc., the leading worldwide provider of cloud-based access control and Software-as-a-Service solutions for physical security. He has previously served in a variety of senior management roles in high technology companies spanning Web development, healthcare, and satellite communications. A Board Member of the Security Industry Association (SIA), he also currently serves as Chairman of the SIA Standards Committee. He is a frequent author and speaker, as well as the inventor of numerous patents.   Steve has been honored by Security Magazine as one of “The Top 25 Most Influential People in the Security Industry.

— Elizabeth Lasko, May 2, 2016