Stone Security: Scaling New Heights

“The goal of this acquisition was to become one of the largest and most trusted end-to-end security and critical communications integrators for our enterprise customers,” says Hubert de Pesquidoux, executive chairman and interim CEO, Stone Security, and executive partner at Siris. “When we acquired BearCom, we knew we wanted to expand in the security space. It was part of the overall end game. BearCom was just the first milestone. We knew that in order to deliver what was missing to our enterprise customers, we needed to acquire a company like Stone Security.”

Stone was not looking to be acquired. In fact, the company had never experienced an acquisition from either side. While they had been approached before by other security integrators, the fit never felt right. From the first meeting, BearCom was different, says Aaron Simpson, vice president, security business processes, who was president and CTO of Stone at the time.

“When we met BearCom, they were essentially telling the same story we do, just in a parallel segment of the security industry,” Simpson recalls. “We were crossing over the same spaces but didn’t talk to the same people. When we looked at how well our offerings complement each other and what that could do for our customers, we walked away from that first meeting saying, ‘This might be the right one.’”

The alignment went deeper than market opportunity. Stone Security had built its business around close, loyal relationships with a smaller group of trusted vendor partners. BearCom operated with a similar philosophy in critical communications. Both companies valued deep specialization, long-term relationships and disciplined growth over simply chasing volume.

Brent Edmunds, then CEO of Stone, and now chief marketing officer and senior vice president-security, adds, “Once we got to know their team and understood how they operated, and we saw there was a good cultural fit and a tech story that was different and powerful.”

The BearCom team saw the same potential. “BearCom has a 40-year history of being very loyal to our partners,” says Stan Cameron, vice president, enterprise sales. “The thing that attracted us to Stone was not just their total addressable market, but their loyalty to their technology partners. The culture of loyalty and focus was consistent across both companies.”

What emerged was a clear combined value proposition. BearCom brought the critical communications expertise, and Stone brought a proven security integration platform. Together, they saw a way to close the loop between awareness and action by helping customers detect what is happening, communicate it to the right people, and coordinate a response quickly enough to matter.

The results are already visible. Stone Security grew to $106 million in security integration revenue in 2025 and ranked No. 17 on the 2026 SDM Top Systems Integrator Report. This year, the combined BearCom + Stone Security organization is expected to exceed $500 million in total annual revenue and has a clear go-to-market strategy, along with cross-selling and cross-training avenues for both sides and a merged back-end support system — all while preserving the best of both companies in terms of business culture and vendor relationships. In the process, the company has rolled out new converged offerings and is one of the few security integrators in the country able to provide these types of combined services.

“I feel like we are the integrator of firsts,” says Joey Edmunds, vice president, business development, Stone Security. “We didn’t come from the security industry when we started the company in 2006. We wanted to be that fresh, new integrator. It is the same today. We are always looking one step ahead. A true integrator brings new ideas and experiences for the customer.”

One Mission

The bones of a good partnership were certainly there, but like any acquisition, there were a lot of things that needed to happen to make the two companies work as one and go after new, combined opportunities.

The strategy, de Pesquidoux says, was to focus on the end goal first. “You start with key market drivers, customer needs, and your talented teams. Of course you need to do the integration with the back office to make it easier for customers to partner with you as an enterprise. But if you start with the customers, your technology partners and your employees at the core of your vision, then execution is a lot easier.”

That people-first approach showed up early. Siris and BearCom made retaining Stone leadership and employees a priority, keeping all but one person in senior leadership (who left for another opportunity) and 100% of Stone’s director and general manager-level leadership.

One of the first steps was bringing in a chief operating officer from outside either organization, Ramnik Kamo, who has integrated close to 20 companies over the course of his career. “When I came in, Stone was fresh into the organization. There was great culture on both sides,” he says. “One of BearCom’s core principles has always been delivering the same quality of service to customers, regardless of which office they are working with. With that in mind, we focused first on getting that right in every market, then on how we support our people, and finally on the tools and processes needed to support them. We are now all on common systems and attrition didn’t spike.”

The process was also helped by the individuals involved, Kamo says. Most of the leadership from Stone came in and were put into bigger roles, allowing them to grow. The BearCom/Siris side was careful to show that they respected what the Stone team brought to the table. “We didn’t say, ‘We are the bigger company and we bought you,’” Kamo adds. “They have great ideas, too. When you see great people sitting across the table, it sort of starts clicking.”

The new roles on the Stone side brought challenges, but also great learning opportunities, Brent Edmunds says: “It has been a huge change. We were pushing 300 employees, and now, combined, we are close to 1,400. BearCom has been incredible to allow our culture to have some influence on the overall organization. They acquired a security integrator because they really want to deepen their investment in physical security, and they see the value of this combination. Although we maintain strong independent divisions, bringing those together was the goal, and I think we are well on our way to doing that in a meaningful way.”

When it comes to the day-to-day office culture, the Stone team are unanimous in saying there hasn’t been a huge change. They still operate much the same way with their partners and customers, just on a larger scale. “Is there more reporting and more systems and processes to implement? Yes, but that was coming anyway,” Brent Edmunds says. “We needed to upgrade systems and have more transparency to keep the wheels on the bus. Yes, it is different, but we have been able to maintain a culture our team is still proud of.”

Simpson adds, “BearCom and the PE group behind them have done what they said they would do, which was to let Stone do what Stone does. It is the same leadership as before, but the cross-over is very real. You see it and people do feel it as one company now.

“It has been an evolution,” Simpson continues. “We learned very quickly that nobody was coming to take over our tasks and responsibilities. We started to think more strategically about how to leverage BearCom and their resources. It has really been very much the same, while, at the same time, feeling like we are playing in a bigger sandbox with more tools and resources.”

The mutual sharing of knowledge and resources has benefited the BearCom side as well, Cameron says. “One thing I have learned is [Stone’s] relationships with their customers are long-term. Sometimes, on the critical comm side, it is very transactional. I am trying to bring my team along to that approach as we combine them together.”

Beyond that, Cameron says the company is now unified. “I walk into a Stone office, and it feels no different than a BearCom one,” he says. “They have more treats, but, in terms of the culture and the way we treat people and the way we serve customers, it is the same, and it is a lot of fun.”

‘The Last Stretch’

Now that the BearCom + Stone piece is unified and in place, the summit is in view, with discussions taking place with customers on both sides, as well as CONNECT2026: The Americas Tour, a multi-city event series designed to bring the new technologies and strategies directly to the customers.

The tour highlights several new combined technology offerings that have been rolled out in the past year, including the patent-pending StoneConnect portfolio of repeatable integration solutions that leverage both Stone Security’s and BearCom’s strengths. These include LMRConnect, which connects security cameras and other devices directly to land mobile radio systems through an automated alerting engine, as well as several other, similar connections across HR, access control, video and more.

The tagline for StoneConnect, “Give Your Cameras a Voice,” actually came as a suggestion from a BearCom member, says Andy Schreyer, vice president of technology, Stone Security. “It perfectly described what we were trying to accomplish: a camera already knows something happened,” he says. “Why should it need a dispatcher watching a screen to tell somebody? LMRConnect gives that event a voice. Our patent-pending rules engine can take an event, apply logic and automatically announce what happened and where it happened to the appropriate radio talk group.”

Philosophically, the concept is bigger than cameras. “It could just as easily be ‘give your access control a voice, or radar or intrusion,’” Schreyer adds. “If a security system knows something important happened, we believe it should be empowered to tell the right people.”

Filling in that gap is what the BearCom + Stone Security combination set out to do. “I believe that is where physical security has to go next,” Schreyer says. “Detection is mature. Automation is improving. Now we need to automate the connection between awareness and human action.”

Brent Edmunds adds, “We are one of very few, if any, security/critical communications integrator in the country now. … We are differentiating ourselves, showing we can do both sides. We have always handled the front end of security where you detect, protect and alert, and that is where our competition says, ‘Job well done.’ But we now have the other half of that equation, which is: once the alarm is received, you have to coordinate the response in real time, and there is really no better way to do that than radio communications. That is still the technology that allows multiple human beings to communicate and respond in the field. We now own that last stretch of road. … It gives us the chance to redefine what is expected of a security integrator.”

Customers on both sides are responding favorably. “Our customers are saying, ‘About time,’” Cameron says. “Our message is: We have the total package. Customers already know they need security and critical communications. The ability to converge the technologies is a tremendous value prop that is resonating with every single person I talk to. When I bring Stone in, it opens up the market for me and my team. I am excited about it.”

That is happening on the security side as well, says Patrick Kilbourn, vice president, marketing, Stone Security. “We have been finding really good use cases directly from the end users at the events we have been holding,” he says. “They are saying, ‘Oh, can you help us do this with our radio system?’”

Kilbourn says the tour has initiated discussions with customers that both teams would not ordinarily reach. “A new audience has emerged that we can potentially be exploring more as an organization as we unify security and critical communications,” he explains.

Partners are also excited by the possibilities, Schreyer says: “They all wondered if BearCom was going to change the business model, but once we started explaining what we were trying to do, the reaction changed pretty quickly from curiosity to, ‘OK, how do we do more of this together?’ That is the part I think is really fun. We are not trying to replace the VMS, access control system or analytics platform. We are trying to make those systems more useful by helping the information they already generate actually reach the people who need it.”

Looking Ahead

The past two years have been about getting the people, processes and back-end systems in place. BearCom and Stone are now taking the show on the road and getting the word out to customers and vendors. But all of these efforts have been just the start, de Pesquidoux says. The company’s “North Star” is to become a $1 billion combined company with each side evenly represented. Currently, the mix is 60% critical communications. “The goal is to have as many customers as possible interested in the full end-to-end portfolio,” he says.

In the very near future, the company will also roll out a unified name and branding, which was still in discussions at the time of this writing. “It won’t be BearCom or Stone Security anymore; it will be one new company with one new brand, one new logo, respecting the great heritage of both brands, and a company that offers these end-to-end solutions that bridge security and critical communications,” de Pesquidoux says.

Another goal is to become the most trusted and sought-after integrator in the world, Brent Edmunds adds. He says they are already seeing the cross-selling opportunities but believes this will continue to take shape and increase over time.

“We see significant room for growth,” Simpson says. “Since launching the cross-selling initiative last October, we’ve been generating new opportunities every day. And as we continue to make the experience more seamless across both organizations, we believe there is considerably more opportunity ahead.”

Kamo adds, “I am so excited for our teams. We all feel very proud of our achievements and the journey. There are more achievements to come.”

Schreyer agrees. “What has been the most exciting for me to see is what can happen when two very different areas of expertise genuinely collaborate. Stone brought a security integration mindset. BearCom brought deep critical communications expertise. And together, we are finding new ways to connect detection to response.”