How Mircom Group is using technology to turn buildings into active, networking machines

The doorman of a glass-and-steel office block faces a huge, wall-mounted intercom panel. The scene, from French filmmaker Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, makes it impossible to talk about the business of building intercoms and alarm systems without smiling.

Lights flash across the intercom panel like a shooting gallery. Buzzers blare. An overamplified voice blurts out. Mr. Tati famously spoofed modern conveniences. The doorman whistles to himself in a dismissive, Gallic way. Of course, the joke today is how quaint that all seems. The alarms and building-communication systems made by a handful of multinationals, including the smaller Vaughan, Ont.-based Mircom Group of jobs with a computer science degree, are now exponentially more complicated. They tap into cloud servers, networks, and wireless apps and can be monitored extensively on-site and even remotely. They effectively turn buildings into active, networking machines. And this has forced Mircom and its competitors to branch far off from their original business.

"We were really hardware-centric for a long time. We would build the housings, the components, the circuit boards, the devices, and we would supply the hardware. But like most businesses, technology started to converge,” says Mark Falbo, Mircom’s president and chief executive officer.

“It used to be just a hardwired system with wires running through a building. Now it might be tied into a network infrastructure, an internet infrastructure – whereas before you would sell the equipment and be done with it.” Back in the 1960s, when electronic alarm and intercom systems were relatively new, Mark’s father Tony Falbo came to Toronto from Cosenza in southern Italy and was working for Mirtone, which made home intercoms that connected rooms like the kitchen to the living room or bedroom.