Control4 to Seek ‘Measured’ Investment in Smart Grid—CEO
Moving into its next phase, Control4 will be “very focused” on advancing its core business through the custom installation channel in North America, Europe and pockets of Asia, newly named CEO Martin Plaehn told Consumer Electronics Daily Tuesday. It was his seventh day on the job. Plaehn succeeded co-founder Will West, who said in April the company was seeking a new CEO while he slipped into the new position of chief strategy officer. Under Plaehn, Control4 will enhance product lines to be “more consumer-experience focused” in areas including lighting and media and will expand its presence internationally, Plaehn said.
Regarding Control4’s smart grid business, Plaehn said the company will continue to invest in products and business development, “but we need to look at those in a measured way” to ensure that the rate of our investment and expectation “is aligned with the rate of absorption.” That doesn’t reflect a de-emphasis of the company’s smart grid projects with utility companies where Control4 has several “incubator-class opportunities,” Plaehn said. The company will continue to invest in product and business development in the smart grid area, but “we have to look at how fast some of these incubator projects actually deploy and be used by consumers,” he said. He cited the political climate and the rate at which utility companies and service organizations install new technology -- and “whether it’s their core competence, saying “we're looking at all of these things."
Plaehn praised Control4’s “courage” in getting into the smart grid area to “learn by doing” rather than “theorize.” As a result, the company has a lot of experience and “first-person knowledge” about the smart grid pilot projects. “We're going to make sure those are scaled right and in proportion with our core business and not get overly optimistic about one piece or another,” he said.
Prior to joining Control4, Plaehn did two tours of duty with RealNetworks, including a charter to bring audio and video to the Internet. He described transitioning from the “wild wild Web” to commercial-grade “always-working 5-9” services for mobile operators, which is applicable to Control 4 as the company seeks to make home automation an “always works” service. Also at RealNetworks, Plaehn was responsible for B2B licensing to large portals and carriers at a time when the company decided it had to open its platform “so other companies could build on our technology and embed it in network caches, devices and mobile phones,” he said. He sees a parallel moving from a company with a vertical solution to a company with both a vertical solution and an ecosystem of partners that have Control4 interoperability.
Mobile connectivity is a broad-based reality today and “we need to participate in that,” Plaehn said, saying Contro4 has apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, with an Android app on the way. Mobile connectivity is like broadband in that “no one turns it off,” he said. People want to extend control of their home beyond the home and the workspace to have interactive control from wherever they are, he said. While prompt-based control from phones has been part of the home automation experience for many years, today’s graphical user interfaces take that control to the next level, he said.
On the day when Apple announced the much-anticipated iPhone 4S and the Oct. 12 launch of the iCloud service, Plaehn commented on Apple’s role in whole-house music and video and its relationship to Control4. “Apple does a fantastic job at delivering really great consumer experiences in a vertically integrated way” and it “sets the bar” for other companies to raise their awareness for how consumers want to interact with electronics, he said. Control4’s role is to “up its game” and provide services that work within the Apple world and across other vendors, he said. Regarding cloud-based services in general, he said, “When connectivity becomes really reliable and ubiquitous, cloud services will become a natural extension of that. The cloud is not going away.” A Control4 spokeswoman said the home control aspect of home automation “is never going to be in the cloud.” Because from a response time perspective “you want immediate response when you turn on a light or pull up a security page,” she said. While audio and video content will likely move to external storage, and integrators will have remote access to a control system for monitoring, automation for now will happen “in the home because that’s what makes most sense for homeowners,” she said.
At this transition point in Control4’s timeline, co-founder West said the company is at the center of what’s happening in the connected home market. “We're growing at 20-30 percent-plus per year while the rest of market is headed in the other direction,” he said. He said the company is “just scratching the surface of the potential in this space.” The world “is waking up to the connected home” and it’s hard to buy consumer electronics that don’t include some kind of IP connection “whether it’s a smart TV, smart door lock or fridge,” he said. With large brand name companies entering the connected world, “Our job is to make those things to play nice together,” West said. The market is “only beginning to heat up, and we needed to bring in an all-star and build management team so we're ready for the future,” he said.