Pushing the boundaries – Compatibility in the smart home
Issue 01-2018:
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Isolated solutions will (soon) be things of the past. More and more, customers want straightforward solutions. What does this mean for manufacturers?
Various manufacturers have been battling over the smart home market for years now. Different isolated solutions have emerged, which do not offer end consumers much flexibility. The objective is to tether customers to the manufacturer, or even make them dependent on their vendor. The main difficulty is that not every self-contained system provides a complete range of products (or a complete product line). Usually, they only cover one discipline, which may offer savings and a certain degree of comfort. But is this smart enough?
The tide is now starting to turn. While the primary goal used to be to find any solution at all, the most important thing now is to find a future-viable one, moving away from the vertical silo and toward interconnectable and interoperable products, as provided by the EnOcean ecosystem. The requirements are also now more concrete:
- Integration with the Big Five (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google)
- Support for the most important wireless standards
- No batteries/self-powered
- Endlessly upgradable or future-viable
- Modern and cost-effective products
In principle, all smart home products based on the same standard and possibly also certified can be combined with each other. The major players in the electronics sector, such as Apple® (HomeKitTM) and Amazon (Alexa), are suitable for tearing down the barriers and rapidly conquering the market. Product manufacturers jockey for position in the catalogs; vertical (isolated) solutions are gradually disappearing.
The Smart EnOcean Gateway from Digital Concepts meets these very requirements. In contrast to the known systems, the Digital Concepts solution is a horizontal approach, one that makes it possible to network all worlds and products with each other. The new LTE and WiFi gateway variants are expanding these worlds even further.
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