May 2016 – One of the big issues for the Smart Home was addressed at the Parks Associates Connections Conference. What does interoperability mean for the smart home, and how will it enter the market? The panel discussion consisted of software, cloud, hardware and device providers focusing on a number of issues. One of the major points was that there is no dominant wireless technology that would rule the connected home with 100% marketshare. At this point in the game, there are several major technologies that are entrenched with vendors and the customer base : the ULE Alliance, WiFi, Zwave, ZigBee, and Zonoff.
The solutions provided are more than just technology, they are full ecosystems supporting developers, support and customer education models. The key for the solution or device to being adopted by an end customer is the education and understanding of the technology and the resulting customer experience. This diversity in the solution space makes interoperability a challenge, as the solution is not a set of software or hardware for testing with. The majority of developers (64%) look at interoperability as being a common language or API that unifies the creation of products. Customers however, look for being able to choose vendors and products that simply work together to bring them the experience they are seeking.
The rush into the IoT space and the resulting smart home space has been disrupted from a unified plan due to competition, fragmentation of the components in the smart home space and multiple defined standards that each has separate and incompatible supply chains. Even though they are computing devices, they do not benefit from the dominance of a technology such as the “Wintel” ecosystem for PCs.
For true interoperability to take place, the decision on what functions need to be performed, and by what sort of device as well as what the control devices will be to give an expected quality of experience, will be required. This means the IoT market will have to overcome price commoditization and competition to focus on the end user and applications in order to make the impact on creating interoperability in the smart home.
