Jul 28, 2025

Becklar Shares the Credit in 2025 TMA/SSI Technology Marvel Award The Monitoring Association and SSI bestow Technology Marvel for monitoring center excellence to Becklar and Actuate for cutting-edge tech. Published: July 28, 2025D. Craig MacCormack [display_gallery_copyright_text] Photo courtesy of Becklar In its eighth year of celebrating innovative technology implementation and monitoring center excellence, the 2025 Monitoring Center Technology Marvel Award made some history, with two companies — Becklar and Actuate — teaming up to earn the honor for their partnership. For those who aren’t aware, the Monitoring Technology Marvel Award , which is co-sponsored by SSI and The Monitoring Association (TMA), recognizes “professional monitoring centers and solutions providers for the innovation and/or implementation of cutting-edge technology,” according to the online application for the annual award. It was created in 2018 by TMA’s Technology Committee, with a dual mission: recognizing monitoring centers that create and/or use innovative technology and raising awareness of those new technologies. Innovative Use of Technology Marvel Award winners use technology in innovative ways to introduce new levels of efficiency or effectiveness within the business; additional, innovative video verification, artificial intelligence, home automation and cloud-based services to customers; and a heightened level of protection or privacy (physical and cybersecurity). Judges review applications based on innovation and originality, effectiveness and efficiency, client impact and market response, evidence-based results and scalability and adaptability. Becklar Video Remote Guarding won the 2025 award by implementing Actuate’s artificial intelligence-powered surveillance software to improve both the accuracy and efficiency of their remote video guarding services. By leveraging Actuate’s object detection and classification capabilities, Becklar automatically detects potential threats and filters out irrelevant motion (e.g., animals, foliage), reducing the false alarms that typically inundate monitoring centers. Daniel Forrest, the president of Becklar Remote Guarding, sees the Technology Marvel Award as a nice validation of the work that his global company has been doing for 40 years now. “On the remote guarding side, everything revolves around technology and partnerships,” he says. “We’re only as good as our people and our partners and the technology that we can bring to our dealers [to help in] supporting their customers, especially on the video side,” he says. “We’ve been doing the video piece for the last 25 years and have seen just astronomical growth in what technology’s allowed us to do, whether it be just from the available bandwidth to get to areas that we couldn’t get to before with 5G and satellite Internet and just the infrastructure of broadband Internet,” says Forrest. Advanced AI Helps Becklar Win Technology Marvel Becklar, says Forrest, used to have to rely on motion detectors and outdoor beams when monitoring customer sites. It transitioned to video motion and then advanced video motion, he says. And now, the company and the industry as a whole is getting into AI and advanced AI, which is where Actuate comes into the picture on this year’s Technology Marvel Award. “We’ve just seen over the last five years that being able to utilize great partners and great technology has allowed us to give our operators the most effective alarms that we can give them,” says Forrest. “We don’t outsource any of our operator labor overseas. We do it all in-house.” “We train all of our operators to be video-specific and how we want them to handle those events,” he continues. “So, it’s our job on the technical side to find the best technology available so that we can make our operators the most successful.” Actuate, which builds cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions that enable existing security cameras to detect threats to safety and security, works with about 85 central monitoring stations, remote guarding companies and control room operators, says president and co-founder Sonny Tai. About 80% of Actuate’s business is in North America but “we’re definitely starting to have a meaningful presence in Europe, South Africa and Asia,” deploying more than 20,000 customer sites. “We’ve seen a lot of growth and we’re really lucky that partners like Becklar were willing to take a chance on us early in our company’s development and we really grew together a lot,” says Tai. “We’re grateful and honored to have an opportunity to win the award alongside Becklar.” Actuate and Becklar first got together after former Becklar subsidiary Avant Garde acquired Eyeforce. Becklar’s Seth Barcus introduced Tai to Forrest, and they discovered they were connected by a former high school teammate, Leon Wiggins, who played with Tai in high school and with Forrest in college. “Through that connection, Daniel and I became friends,” says Tai with a laugh, noting that Actuate had also been pursuing Avant Garde for an extended period as a customer before it became a Becklar affiliate. “Of course, we started talking about business, and they tested our product thoroughly and signed up about five years ago,” he notes. Becklar, Actuate Join Exclusive Technology Marvel List With its Technology Marvel Award win, Becklar joins a two-time winner, National Monitoring Center, as well as one-time honorees ADT, Affiliated Monitoring, CPI Security, Elite Interactive Solutions and USA Central Station. “TMA was honored to present the 2025 Monitoring Center Technology Marvel Award to Becklar Monitoring and Actuate,” Steve Butkovich, president of The Monitoring Association, says. “Together, they are redefining what’s possible in remote video guarding by seamlessly integrating cutting-edge AI with proven monitoring expertise.” “Becklar’s deployment of Actuate’s dynamic slicing technology and intelligent threat filtering marks a major leap forward for our industry, delivering exceptional accuracy, dramatically reduced false alarms and scalable monitoring at a level never before seen,” he adds. “This kind of innovation doesn’t just enhance operational efficiency — it transforms how we protect people and property.” Forrest is proud of Becklar’s “strong emphasis on our culture of protecting lives and property when it matters the most.” “We’re monitoring all critical events, [which could be] your mom or your grandmother and they have a personal health and safety panic button,” he says. “We want to be at the top of our game so that we can protect those lives. Then, on the video side, we’re protecting property first and foremost. Their livelihoods are at stake, and we want them to wake up and not be broken into.” “We really strive to make sure that we are offering the best product in the game, whether that’s technology we created ourselves or we’re using a partner to give to fast-forward and get that technology out there quicker for our dealers,” says Forrest. Don’t expect to see Becklar doing anything different as a result of winning the Technology Marvel Award, which pairs nicely with its Monitoring Station of the Year Award from a few years ago. While the accolades are nice, Forrest says the company is committed to excellence regardless of whether they earn another piece of hardware to display in their offices. “The awards are nice but, at the end of the day, we’re going to bust our butts to do the best that we can do and that pressure is going to stay on us every day,” he says, noting the company celebrated the Marvel Award win with its technical operations team. Winning the Technology Marvel Award “gives a little credibility to what it is that we’re doing,” says Forrest. And that, he adds, is especially important since video surveillance is only monitoring about 10% of its potential market. Becklar earns industry bragging rights for the year with this award, Forrest says, and it increases the friendly competition across the security industry. “There’s so much business out there for everybody that we just want to make sure that, as we grow as an industry, that we’re all doing it the right way,” says Forrest. “We’re trying to provide the best service possible. Since we all are protecting lives and property, it’s important to do it the right way.” The Actuate Difference In its Technology Marvel application, Becklar credits Actuate’s dynamic slicing data science technique for setting its monitoring apart from others in the industry, noting it subdivides high-resolution images into smaller “slices” for focused analysis, boosting long-range detection without hampering performance. Rather than sending an entire large frame for processing—which could slow down detection—dynamic slicing ensures that each segment is examined thoroughly and efficiently. The result is more accurate threat detection at greater distances, consistent performance and minimal computational overhead. Actuate’s solution stands out in detection accuracy and false alarm reduction, says Becklar in its Marvel Award application. “From a business and operational standpoint, these benefits translate into both enhanced profitability and heightened competitiveness for Becklar,” according to the application. With Actuate’s solution deployed, Becklar staffers can manage more cameras without compromising quality, meaning they can scale their client base and offer lower costs for high-quality services. “This operational efficiency not only cuts down on overhead but also enables Becklar to reinvest in further innovation, refining their service offerings and securing stronger footholds in existing and emerging markets,” according to the application, noting Becklar can more quickly deploy updates. Actuate’s AI-powered surveillance software is “delivering measurable gains for Becklar Video Remote Guarding by driving improvements in four core areas,” according to the application: improved security outcomes; operational efficiencies; increased monitoring effectiveness, including fewer false alarms; and heightened profitability. Tai is flattered that Actuate was considered part of the team that won this year’s Technology Marvel Award. Bringing Value to the Table “The value that we bring to the table is that we help you use the same number operators to effectively monitor more cameras,” he says. “Most video monitoring companies in the industry that use us would vouch for that, that our accuracy rate is much higher than the other incumbents in the market without exposing additional risk to your customer sites in terms of missed detections.” “It’s very humbling that Daniel gave us a lot of credit, but I’d say I have to give his team a lot of credit as well. One thing that I hear a lot from our engineering team is how technically apt and technically competent the Becklar team is. They really know their stuff inside and out,” he says. “They run a tight ship to understand how certain settings and certain camera placements and certain permutations would affect site performance and they spec each site in a very scientific manner, understanding the capabilities and limitations of technology to be able to deliver reliable alerts into the monitoring center,” Tai says. Actuate takes pride in its customer service, with Tai saying he stole the philosophy of customer service permeating the entire company from the founder of Zappos and that approach makes them stand out from others in the AI world. “When you talk to monitoring companies that use us, yeah, they’ll talk about our technology, talk about how reliable it is, how it’s got more features than some of the other players out in the market,” he says. But the one thing that they’ll harp on even more, I’d say, is our support. “We’re technically knowledgeable, and we work hand in hand with our partners, such as Becklar, to ensure that the sites are set up for success,” he says. “So, hopefully that’s helpful.” ‘Very, Very Professional’ As for what makes Becklar stand out from Actuate’s other clients, Tai answers quickly, saying, “They’re very, very professional.” “They’ve been doing this since 2009, when the technology wasn’t even matured yet,” he says. “All the times that they’ve been punched in the face helped them learn those lessons in the early days. [That] means that their operation now runs like a well-oiled machine, and they have a really strong understanding of the capabilities and limitations of technology.” “They set their sites up for success, and they collaborate with our team very, very closely to do so,” Tai says. “It’s a little bit of a blend of art and science. I think they do a really good job at de-risking their sites, while maintaining maximum efficiency of their operator camera ratio. And that’s just because they have so many lessons learned.”