Home Automation Firms See Apple’s HomeKit Debut As Industry Validation

Established home automation companies are looking to secure footholds in the rapidly evolving connected home market, which they said received weighty affirmation last week when Apple announced its HomeKit framework to connect smart devices in the home. “It’s great news for everybody in the industry,” Jim Carroll, president of Savant Systems, told Consumer Electronics Daily.

Citing comments circulating last week among industry watchers, Carroll said the home control industry “has gone from being measured in billions of dollars to trillions of dollars,” a figure also forecast by IDC (CED June 4 p7). After being around for 35 years “and never really stepping into the spotlight,” home automation is coming into its own “as a broad application,” Carroll said.

Apple has already had a tremendous impact on the connected home market through the iOS ecosystem app platform. Home control was once reserved for the luxury market where a touch-screen controller cost well into four figures. The iPhone turned a $500 cellphone into a handheld touch-screen controller, and now every major manufacturer with a connected device has an app available at the iTunes store.

An upcoming WeMo LED lighting starter kit ($129) from Belkin -- with a module and two bulbs -- will enable consumers to control up to 50 lights from a free smartphone app on the iOS, Android and Kindle platforms. Users can access and control the bulbs from anywhere there’s a data connection. With the app, users can dim the bulbs, flip them on or off, put them on a schedule or set them to go on and off according to sunrise and sunset, the company said.

As the public face on the home automation market following the launch of its IPO last summer, Control4 is watching the Apple moves closely and had team members at the Worldwide Developers Conference where Apple announced its move. Apple’s arrival in home automation is “huge validation for our industry and the future growth thereof,” CEO Martin Plaehn told us. Recent entries by ADT, Comcast, Lowe’s, Staples and Verizon already created “tremendous awareness,” Plaehn said, but “when Apple enters an industry, that’s a major statement.” HomeKit has the potential to be a “game-changer,” he said. The existence of HomeKit indicates that Apple views home automation, “or the Internet of Things, as a major industry with significant potential going forward,” he said.

While it’s “hard to speculate” on Apple’s plans, “we all should take it seriously and we all should study the APIs [application program interfaces] and the capabilities that Apple rolls out,” Plaehn said. Control4 has long-standing developer relationships with both Apple and Google, he noted. Plaehn called the connected home market “a broad domain” with many implications, opportunities and varied approaches. With Apple, “there’s a ton of things we can do,” he said. “We have a powerful application that lives on an iPhone that supports 7,000 devices,” he said, though not all of them are for the home.

Savant, which was Apple-dependent when it launched, branched out to offer Android app control last year and is now running a notice on its website for an Android platform software engineer with a “solid understanding of Linux internals.” On the day of Apple’s HomeKit announcement, Savant announced updates to its Savant Sound product line including an app-controllable media server and amplifier for multiroom music.

Android and Linux are at the heart of a Savant push announced last summer to offer a more mainstream home control solution (CED July 1 p2). Price of entry to Savant under the lower cost Smart Series, which uses a Linux-based processor rather than a Mac mini, is about $1,600, Carroll said, compared with a $4,000 starter package for Savant’s original series of Apple-centric products. The Smart Series does most things the higher-end system does, Carroll said, but on a smaller scale. “We still use the Apple environment to generate the software configuration,” Carroll said. The upper-end system is scaled to be able to control a 30,000-square-foot home, while the Smart Series is modeled down to an 1,800-square-foot home with fewer “speeds and feeds,” he said.

Carroll wouldn’t give a peek into Savant’s product road map, citing a new policy put in place by CEO William Lynch, who led Barnes & Noble’s Nook launch, saying no products will be announced more than 60 days before delivery. On Savant’s evolving approach to home automation, Carroll broke the industry into do-it-yourself (DIY); managed services from providers including ADT, AT&T and Comcast; the mainstream market through integrators and the luxury high end. “We see ourselves at some point in time in all four segments,” Carroll said, noting the only home control segment Savant doesn’t play in today is DIY. “I'd be lying if I said we don’t see that market,” he said. “We're trying to understand it, figure out how to get to it.”

Both Savant and Control4 are hoping to stake claim to national homebuilders as the home control market expands. Control4 announced a program with Toll Brothers earlier this year (CED Feb 5 p1) and plans to explore additional opportunities once it has nailed the logistics of that program, Plaehn said.

Savant reportedly is on verge of signing an agreement with another national homebuilder to add to its Lennar signing from March for an 1,800-unit community in Doral, Florida. In Florida, Savant Smart systems start at $1,599 and can include options such as security systems, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, security camera remote access, lighting, smart thermostats, energy monitoring and management of media and entertainment equipment, said a news release.

Carroll expected to have to sell the value proposition of home automation to homebuilders, “but they told me, ‘Yeah yeah yeah. … We already get it, everybody’s asking for it, we need to put it in,'” he said. Instead they asked how Savant differed from other companies, he said. Home control gives builders a point of differentiation in addition to profit, Carroll said. “We have to keep it as inexpensive as possible as a standard feature, and then we want to sell upgrades and options,” he said. Operating over Wi-Fi and no specialty wiring “plays very well into our business model,” he said. “That allows them to wire the house the way they would whether there’s home automation or not."

Lutron also took advantage of the Apple home automation spotlight last week to announce its own Smart Bridge that connects its smart dimmers and shades to other devices incorporating Lutron Clear Connect wireless technology (CED June 3 p7). Honeywell and GE have signed on to the platform for thermostats and a smart light bulb, and Lutron is seeking other partner companies “that share our values” on quality and reputation, said Product Manager Jeremy Kleinberg. Lutron, too, wants to offer a “complete solution,” he said.

Kleinberg said Lutron’s announcement is “an acknowledgment that a broader base of consumers is interested in the connected home,” along with an opportunity enabled by what he referenced as the 56 percent of adults in the U.S. who have a smartphone. “That’s millions of people with touch-screens in their pockets who are interested in learning what more they can do with those touch-screens,” including interacting with their homes and “controlling their environment,” he said. While Lutron has sold its high-end lighting control systems for several decades, “the market is ripe to bring a connected home solution to the masses” now, he said.

Education and reliability are key to making the most of the connected home opportunity, said the companies we spoke to. Competition will be fierce, as existing companies and innovative startups vie for consumers’ attention.

Timed to Apple’s announcement last week, a company called tado° claimed it had reached its $150,000 funding goal for a Kickstarter campaign six days early and extended the investment goal to $200,000. The product “makes any remote controlled AC unit smart and saves its users hundreds of dollars every year in electricity costs,” the company said. If it reaches its funding goal in time, it plans to integrate with HomeKit by fall. With HomeKit integration, users could change temperature with a Siri voice command such as “Going to bed now” which would select a preset temperature associated with the voice command, it said. In addition, tado° users will be able to create combined scenarios with other connected device manufacturers that will integrate with HomeKit, tado° said.

An industry challenge is “getting people to try” home control, said Kleinberg of Lutron. National providers such as ADT, AT&T and Comcast are driving awareness, which is helping, and Apple and Google will take awareness to the next level, he said. It’s just as important that consumers have a “great experience” with home control the first time out, Kleinberg said. Lutron has a long history in the lighting market of “selling stuff that works,” which should give it a leg up, he said.

"It’s very important that when people try their first connected home solution that it’s very positive so that they want to share it, go buy more and expand into other categories,” Kleinberg said. In a viral world, a bad experience can quickly turn into “negative momentum” for the category as a whole, he said. Some early lighting control products from competitors “weren’t as reliable” as Lutron would like so the company went out and “paved the road with Clear Connect,” he said. “In some cases we had to re-convince customers that wireless control could be reliable,” he said.

Crestron, known for ultra high-end home control systems, plans to stay at that level, although it has already signed up to work with Apple on Home Kit, said Sean Goldstein, vice president-marketing. Crestron already tried to move in a more mainstream direction some years ago with a system called Prodigy, but it’s “not a path that we're actively pursuing,” Goldstein said. Crestron plans to stay focused on its core competency, the custom luxury market, he said.