IControl Vows More Aggressiveness Seeking Home Automation Partners

As big-name players begin to stake out positions in the fledgling retail home automation market, work is under way to clarify the branding those various players and platforms use. IControl Networks is the software platform behind home automation offerings from cable companies such as Comcast, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable -- and for ADT Pulse. It’s working with cable providers on multiple-layer “seals” that will identify the cable provider brand along with an “umbrella mark” that indicates compatibility with the overall platform, Jason Domangue, vice president of ecosystem development at iControl, told Consumer Electronics Daily.

The first phase -- developing a process to govern the issuance of a mark -- is complete, Domangue said, and now iControl and its customers are working on “rules and engagement” for the marks. Domangue was reluctant to go into details because discussions are ongoing, but he expects a stronger retail push from Comcast’s Xfinity brand and Time Warner Cable’s IntelligentHome later this year, he said. “It’s fair to say” Xfinity Home and Time Warner IntelligentHome customers will see some mark above those brands “that lets you know it will work” with iControl-based systems, Domangue said. That retail push for lighting, thermostat and other connected devices will start “heating up” in Q3 and Q4, and “rolling out in a big way” next year, he said.

As part of the expansion of the iControl platform, the company will be more “aggressive” at next CES from an ecosystem partnership standpoint, Domangue said. In years past, the company “hid behind” the cable brands and ADT “and let them drive partners to us,” he said. To date, product integration has been a slow, deliberate process, he said. “So we had to be careful about how much excitement we generated with device partners.” Now that the product integration process is more streamlined, “the ecosystem can accelerate,” he said. “We want to speed partners through the pipeline of certification.” That’s a next step for iControl, which in the past focused on efficiency and scaling the platform. “Now we're ready to roll with the category of devices,” he said.

IControl’s goal is to have as many partners in as many categories as possible in the connected home environment. The platform supports ZigBee, Z-Wave and Wi-Fi-based standards, and iControl encourages open standards. It’s strict about how those standards are executed. “It’s one thing to say ZigBee and have interoperability,” said Domangue. “But that doesn’t dictate range or battery,” he said. “Adding as many devices and as much breadth and depth in the catalogue that we can have” will generate a larger user base and more revenues for iControl, “but I don’t want to have a bunch of partners in a category to the point where I have a partner failing,” he said. Its goal is to be one of the dominant players in the market, he said.

We asked Domangue how much of iControl’s urgency to grow its partner and device base has to do with AT&T’s entry into the connected home market with the telco’s Digital Home product. AT&T’s arrival “doesn’t hurt that urgency,” he replied. “It certainly timed out well.” Domangue said he wishes iControl’s partner expansion plans had been able to gel earlier. “What we're working on has taken 12-15 months, so it wasn’t like we could turn on a dime if we hadn’t started these strategies already,” he said. Putting the infrastructure in place to let partners interoperate and build devices within a platform requires “a whole lot of work,” he said.

Time Warner Cable’s IntelligentHome service bumps up against AT&T’s Digital Home in Texas, which AT&T selected as one of its early rollout markets. “It was strictly a coincidence that we launched in Texas almost the same week that they launched,” Adam Mayer, vice president at Time Warner Cable’s IntelligentHome, told us. “Clearly, they're a competitor and we're going to respond accordingly.” The arrival of AT&T in the connected home space “hasn’t affected any of our strategies,” Mayer said, adding that TWC’s strategy has been to roll out to its entire footprint by the end of this year (CED April 26 p1). Wanting to avoid a comparison with AT&T’s Digital Home, Mayer chose instead to position the wireless IntelligentHome security and home automation solution as a superior option to traditional wired security systems due to free cellular backup, security cameras accessible from mobile devices, email notifications and lighting and energy management options.

Time Warner Cable pushes price as its biggest advantage. Once consumers pay the upfront product prices for hardware, the monthly monitoring and management fee holds to $33.95, Mayer said. Competing security companies add fees as a consumer adds a camera or a sensor to a system, he said. Minimum buy-in price is $99 price for a touchscreen and a window and motion sensor, along with the remote access and monitoring under the service fees. Adding lighting and thermostat could add up to “a few thousand dollars,” although most systems sold today average $300-$400, he said.

Time Warner Cable’s competitive focus has been on the security customer, where industry estimates peg household penetration of security systems in the U.S. at 20 percent. As an extension of security, “cameras have been a huge advantage for us,” Mayer said, as customers use the ability to snoop into their homes to check on kids, pets and elderly parents. “We'll have better cameras in the near future,” he said. Interest in thermostats and lighting products hasn’t been as high, although the customers who do add those services “love it,” he said. “We need to do a better job of getting those out there, because it reinforces the value of IntelligentHome,” he said. “If it’s just a home security product and all we're doing is getting people who were considering ADT, then that’s not a success in my mind.”

Mayer’s goal is for Time Warner Cable to bump the traditional home security penetration rate, of 20 percent, to 40 percent of households in the next five years. He believes that’s possible through a new segment of customers that wants “a next-generation security product” that also manages lights, temperature and cameras from outside the home. The interaction consumers have with the thermostat and lights will increase the value of a home automation system, he said. “The more that we can reinforce the value outside of home security, the stickier these customers will be and the broader the market will be,” he said.

IntelligentHome uses Wi-Fi cameras from Sercomm and ZigBee-enabled thermostats from Radio Thermostat of America. ZigBee compatibility and iControl’s open platform are important parts of the strategy, Mayer said. “It’s an open network which allows a lot of vendors to come and add to the space.” That was a strategic decision to ensure that multiple vendors would stimulate innovate and keep costs down, he said.

On how IntelligentHome hopes to keep pace with fast-changing technology, Mayer said iControl’s flexible, open platform will allow the company to “quickly follow where the customer is going or where we think the market is going.” Time Warner Cable has limited vendors now, but Mayer referred to iControl’s efforts to broaden the platform of partners. Mayer’s vision for the future is that customers have an IntelligentHome platform. He said all the major cable companies are launching similar platforms around iControl technology, and referred to a “generic name” customers might see at a Home Depot-type store for a thermostat, light, pet door opener or garage door opener. “Maybe it has a little symbol on it saying that it works with this platform,” Mayer said. In that future scenario, “We stay out of it and let the customer buy whatever retail they want,” he said.

As long as such a product is compatible with the iControl platform, consumers can “self-install or have a professional install it,” Mayer said. Installation models have to be worked out, he said, but the hope is to give customers “as many choices as they'd like as long as it doesn’t infringe on the quality of the product,” he said. That’s where iControl’s certification program comes in. “There is a home security element,” Mayer said. “I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to come in and cause any issues with the overall system."

Interoperability across devices is one of the “stickiest” things the industry faces, Domangue said. While iControl’s system is open and supports standards including ZigBee, Wi-Fi and Z-Wave, not every product that is ZigBee or Z-Wave will receive iControl certification, he said. “We might have a higher bar than others on how well an antenna works” and iControl “may or may not” allow a product to be part of the ecosystem because of that, he said. “If someone implements ZigBee [home automation] badly, I might refuse it,” he said. “The thing that will kill all of us -- myself and our competitors -- is the stuff not working,” he said. “We're very careful to hold our ecosystem partners to a level that protects them and us.”