Will Hosted/Managed Services Eliminate Small Central Stations?

A recent conference exposed diverging views of the impact that managed/hosted security services will have on the central stations that monitor and respond to security alarms. An SSN article provides a survey of the views on the matter. 

Severin Sorensen at Sikyur believes that the "death of the small, mom-and-pop central station business real estate model " will come from a combination of "scalability of monitoring through cloud computing that is enabling mega-acquisitions" and that "before it was central to the operation to have your own central station to run the data, now you can move back one more layer into the cloud, where you can still handle and transfer all the exchange, but you no longer need all the real estate that was required before."

The Central Station Alarm Association had a another perspective emphasizing that the traditional model will be around for a long time as they will provide increased value by pulling together multiple propriety systems.

We found this to be an interesting trend to consider but do not have sufficient expertise in central station economics to comment.