Wayne Alarm Systems adapts with technology

LYNN – Annie Roderick, central station manager at Wayne Alarm in Lynn, remembers a day a call came into the station from a woman who couldn’t figure out why her home fire alarm kept going off.”Then she said, ‘My two twin babies haven’t woken up,'” Roderick said. “She had twin newborns and it was a carbon monoxide leak. Fortunately, they’re all fine today.”Helping to prevent tragedies like that is what Roderick, who has 20 years of service with the company, and others say has kept them loyal to Wayne Alarm for decades.Jeff Kahn has been in the industry for over two decades but just recently joined the company as general manager.”It’s not just burglar-alarms, we monitor every environmental situation; carbon, smoke detectors, water, temperature,” Kahn said. “We’re a life-saving company, and that’s the reason I came to Wayne.”And in an industry that has seen fast-paced consolidation and scores of companies move out-of-state and many overseas, the company’s namesake, Ralph Wayne Sevinor, said Wayne Alarm is committed to remain independent and at its 242 Essex St. headquarters, or central station. He said managers from Lynn will be among the company’s second and third-generation leadership team, including Lynn Tech graduate Todd Gaito, marketing and sales manager who supervises five sales representatives and has been with the company for 10 years; and English High grad Jim Keighley, technical operations manager who supervises 21 technicians and has been with the company for 18 years.Building the company that today serves 11,000 customers – 50 percent residential and 50 percent commercial/industrial – inside the Interstate 495-belt, has been a personal avocation rather than a vocation, Sevinor said.”My parents’ house was broken into when I was a kid, 13-years-old, and all my mother’s jewelry that my dad had given her when they were engaged and were married as taken, and I saw how traumatic it was.”I was a tinkerer and loved electronics and electricity, and I thought, there’s got to be a technological solution (to help prevent burglaries),” Sevinor said, adding that with his parents’ encouragement, he went to work designing and building a basic home security system for his family’s Marblehead home.”Then I created a system for my uncle’s house. You learn slowly by doing and I made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “It was pretty basic technology, everything relay-operated, most of it was taped-telephone dialers which were just devices that would record and play a pre-recorded message ? and back then (alarm) bells were made out brake drums.”He said at the time home security systems weren’t mainstream.”I like to solve problems for people and try to give people back piece of mind,” said Sevinor, who after installing several systems from friends and family launched Wayne Alarm in 1972 from in the basement of his parents’ home.After earning a degree from Wentworth Institute of Technology, he moved the business to Lynn, in the Broad Street Professional Building, in the late 1970s, hired his first full-time employee in 1979, and incorporated as Wayne Alarm Systems in 1986.The company moved to its current Central Monitoring Station in 1988, on property that also includes the massive tower Sevinor owns, but leases to major telecommunication companies and for Lynn’s 911 service.Wayne Alarm, meanwhile, remains focused on adapting new technology into its services, including Critical Event Video Monitoring – Internet-based camera video of critical events that can be sent in real time to Wayne Alarm, or to the customer, or to police and fire or rescue personnel if necessary.”There are 168 hours in a week. When you record (security or monitoring) video, all you care about is that 10-second clip of the event,” he said. “There are businesses recording 24/7 but they don’t have the time to check all that video.”The new technology allows the camera or cameras to begin filming only when particular events occur – be it a burglary or when an employee enters a res