Interoperability remains up in the air. Solid cloud platforms provide a feasible way to unify the fragmented smart home landscape. Unified smart home solutions provide consumers convenience; fragmented smart home market provides business opportunities for players.
Interoperability remains up in the air. Solid cloud platforms provide a feasible way to unify the fragmented smart home landscape. Unified smart home solutions provide consumers convenience; fragmented smart home market provides business opportunities for players. The platform providers try to monetize by creating value for their customers and speeding up time to market.
Software and cloud platform providers are developing solutions to enable interoperability among devices, regardless of what protocols their customers are using. They are protocol- and device-agnostic, and seek partnerships for cloud-to-cloud interoperation because they believe cooperation can enlarge the ecosystems of connected products and expand distribution channels. Manufacturers of connected products and service providers benefit from cost savings and time to market. They can expand their distribution channels to include additional retailers or service providers; the retailers and service providers can quickly add connected products to their portfolios.
To accelerate time to market and ensure compatibility, they offer reference designs for hardware companies. Zonoff creates hardware reference designs for hubs and gateway devices, enabling consumer electronics companies and OEMs to accelerate the manufacture process and ensure those hubs can communicate with any IoT device. They also work with semiconductor companies like Atmel, Marvell, NXP and Sigma Designs, and offer reference applications. For example, Zonoff provides Z1 Software Suite to chip vendors who can demonstrate their reference smart home solutions to the market with the software.
David Friedman, CEO and cofounder of Ayla Networks mentioned that manufacturers realized the IoT is not a technology issue but rather a transformational process for all aspects of their businesses. Zonoff and Ayla Networks established IoT cloud-to-cloud partnership to accelerate the transformation for manufacturers, retailers, service providers, and other players in the marketplace.
Interoperable on common platform
CentraLite Systems introduced Jilia, a cloud-based IoT framework that allows developers to create IoT connectivity between smart devices using a single API framework. It is challenging and costly to build a cloud-based infrastructure to link a large number of connected devices.
Jilia provides an affordable way via a single API. Jilia is brand- , platform- , and protocol-agnostic, so that connected devices and apps developed with Jilia can communicate with all other devices via any existing protocol like ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Thread.
To allow products from different brands to sync seamlessly, DSR has developed s portfolio, which acts as a platform to provide cloud and gateway management as well as iOS and Android apps for controlling and monitoring smart devices. The company’s ZBOSS 3.0 supports IEEE 802.15.4 chipsets that operate at either the global 2.4 GHz frequency standard or regional sub 1GHz frequencies.
The Icontrol Developer Program provides a common platform for device makers, app developers, and service creators to create interoperable devices and services. Developers will benefit from a streamlined integration process and increased flexibility while maintaining controls over any cloud-based, ZigBee, Wi-Fi or Z-Wave device and Icontrol-powered solutions.
How to create value
Selling additional services like video monitoring and cloud storage has been a popular way to generate new revenue streams. ADT Canopy was launched as a Security-as-a-Service solution at CES this year to strengthen its presence in the consumer market, to be available this spring. It is a flexible month-to-month and contract-free 24/7 professional monitoring services to popular wearable devices, connected hubs, life safety products and point devices. By working with hardware suppliers like LG, Samsung SmartThings and Wink, users can access ADT Canopy directly through those vendors’ mobile app for the services. ADT Canopy will offer three services – Panic for immediate emergency response, Intrusion for intruder alert, and Life Safety for fire, smoke and CO2 detection and notification. Users can have instant access to emergency assistance with in-app panic buttons.
Data analytics service becomes a noteworthy ways for monetization, enabling more effective product development and resource allocation. Zonoff Insight and Arrayent Connect Platform provide big data analytics to help their customers to understand consumers’ behaviors and interests. Zonoff Insights can identify marketing and up-sell opportunities, enable better risk management, and reveal geographic distribution of products and channels. Arrayent Connect Platform is designed to create unified connection capabilities among end devices, software and the cloud.
The platform provides target marketing and advertising based on consumer’s usage patterns and products. Also, the platform helps customers to find new market opportunities by analyzing consumer buying behaviors and product usage patterns. With the platform, companies can understand customer demands for new features and product updates.
Creating great user experience could be essential. The end users don’t really care about the brand and manufacturer of a door lock; what they care about is the experience that door lock provides. PlumChoice’s indicated that the end users are more likely to purchase the smart home products when they can imagine themselves benefiting from that solution.
The company's strategy is to help companies reduce the number of returns that are coming back to retails due to lack of understanding of those particular solutions, and minimizes no-fault-found returns. Those can help the companies create unique user experiences and brand equity. The company helps their partners to provide unique customer engagement, particularly around pre-sale and sales engagement, and tells them how to bring these products to market in a manner that the end user can understand the value.