Dealers Say They View Crestron Home as Home Control Platform for Future

Miami-based custom installation firm AHT Global pivoted to the Crestron Home residential control platform for nearly all projects, Principal Al Reinhard said on a dealer roundtable at the virtual Crestron Next event Wednesday. He called it Crestron’s “platform of the future.” Crestron organized and sponsored the roundtable, but didn't pay the dealers to participate, emailed Vice President-Residential John Clancy. "They are just fans of Crestron Home who told two different versions of the same story really well -- from two very different ends of the spectrum."

Reinhard compared Home favorably with other manufacturers with similar platforms, saying it’s “repeatable and predictable.” Crestron launched the latest version of Crestron Home in February, calling it a “complete package for any size project,” with fast configuration and deployment for integrators, and Crestron hardware. Unlike traditional Crestron home control offerings, no programming is required.

AHT began its transition to Crestron Home because “we don’t want to wait around too long before we pivot," Reinhard said. "When you’re a large company, it’s very easy to get caught up in your old ways,” he said, “and you’ll see all your competitors pass you by.” AHT Global also has offices in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Naples, Florida.

Crestron Home “changed our business,” said Mosey Levy, owner of Brooklyn-based Backstage AV. “I no longer have to personally be at every job to commission these systems,” said Levy, who handed that off to technicians, giving them best practices manuals. That freed Levy to spend more time on sales and project management, and Backstage can do more jobs per year, resulting in “more profit,” he said. It also has more confidence it can complete systems on time.

Home is a more “finite” platform, making it easier to arrive at the end of a job, said Reinhard. True customization enabled by the traditional Crestron system has “so many variables”; Home delivers a “unified” customer experience.

Though there will still be applications where the custom programming of a traditional Crestron system is required, Crestron Home has been able to fit all of Backstage’s jobs since it took on the system, Levy said. It’s able to scale to $60,000-$600,000 projects but uses the “same device recipe” for every job. It uses Sony TVs and AV receivers, avoids cable boxes that don’t have discrete power, and uses TiVo boxes with IP control. Levy uses Crestron hardware wherever possible: “When you control what hardware gets designed into a system, and you heavily test it in your personal systems first," it’s much easier to deploy a "solid" system, he said.

Reinhard said it’s important to know the limitations of Crestron Home, calling it a “box.” Integrators need to know their clients’ needs: “You don’t want to get 90% down the road and all of a sudden, the client asks you for something special, and now you tell them, ‘I can’t deliver that.’” With traditional Crestron programming, “you can always deliver,” he said, because of the customization it enables. Most jobs, except marine jobs, can fit into the Crestron Home platform, he said.

Frequent feature updates are a benefit of Crestron Home, said Reinhard. Clients know they’re not “stuck with whatever you gave them from day one.” Upgrades can be very expensive with a traditional Crestron system, requiring reprogramming, he said. Levy described such Crestron systems as “frozen in time” due to time-intensive, costly programming. Updates give customers new features for free, he said, comparing them to iPhone updates.

On favorite features, Levy said the iPad demo shows customers how the integrator interacts with his system, making it a persuasive sales tool. Reinhard referenced the simplicity of adding a product to a system. Adding a touch screen to a Crestron Home system recently took “longer to unbox” than to add to the system, he said. In years past, that would have taken “a weekend” to get done, said John Clancy, Crestron vice president-residential.

Levy, a Crestron dealer for over a decade, has heard before about its new systems that claimed to be the wave of the future but didn’t live up to promises. That the control company has put up the resources and updates for Home “makes it the future of Crestron,” he said. Clancy called it “by far … the biggest single effort inside the product development team.”