At Protection 1 Security Solutions, the nation’s largest full-service security company, IT does more than develop apps and keep the systems running. According to Morgan Harris, director of Enterprise Solutions, “As an alarm monitoring company, we are dedicated to the customer, and we can’t stop processing information … This not only impacts a business, this could potentially impact peoples’ lives. So alarm monitoring can’t stop. It’s beyond mission critical.”

Protection 1 prides itself on routing all calls through live representatives instead of an automated system, and with 2 million customers and 3.5 million calls a year, that’s no small task.

Improving reliability, dependability and predictability

“We need to be able to scale up resources quickly, so we use the VCE Vblock,” Harris said. “It’s been an incredible story for us because we have such great success with them.”

Switching has improved reliability, dependability and predictability thanks to the one-piece, fully tested and burned-in system delivered by VCE. This has allowed the IT team to focus on improving the business.

“We generated a new application last year called ‘SignalChat,’ which has been a revolutionary, next-generation, information-generation kind of application, where we’re texting our customers to make sure to get them the information faster,” Harris said. “And it’s those sort of things you can’t really focus on if you’re spending all your time at the back of a rack, making sure everything works together.”

IT innovations have supported the company in saving its customers money and improving the value of the service. Protection 1 collects data and runs analytics on everything from false alarms, when systems are being armed and malfunctioning equipment, Harris elaborated.

“Everybody’s got a ton of data,” he said. “But do you actually do something with it? So we’re using that data to help our customers realize returns on their investment … we’ve helped create dashboards for our customers to get them the insights that we get and make them more successful.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.