Sebastian Popovic, CEO at Zipato, provides industry insight on key home automation protocols:

What is the most important next step to engage consumers in smart home solutions, connected entertainment services, and/or value-added services like tech support and connected health?

In Zipato, we strongly believe in aggregation of sales/marketing channels. Smart home and IOT is wide area of different products and services, and even in case all of them are simple, together they can be difficult for end consumer to interact with. Most powerful promotion capabilities for mass market adoption have retailers and services providers, while only professionals have the ability to upgrade and maintain these system to the level which will make end consumers happy. Traditionally, cooperation between these channels doesn't exist, but the size and complexity of the home automation market (especially if we include connected entertainment services), requires the full power to ramp up.

Modern smart home platforms should provide huge interoperability possibilities, and they should be easy and affordable for initial setup. This will make them interesting for promotion within the retail channel, as well as suitable for upgrades and maintenance by professionals. These platforms should initiate this cross channel synergy effect.

What is the biggest challenge your company faces in 2015?

Home automation and IOT are becoming the mainstream "buzzword" these days, causing everyone to act in this direction. This is certainly causing a big noise which is making promotion for the single solution to be more difficult and expensive. In this kind of environment, it is easier for big companies to play, as their promotional power is stronger, thus their solutions could be easier recognized. Promoting our system and getting recognition by end consumers in this environment, is our biggest challenge right now.

What is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?

People are surrounded by many solutions for security, safety, energy management, entertainment, health care, and so on... Integration of all of them, would make them easier to understand and manage, as well as more useful for the end-user. Probably most of people would like to get out and turn off the music and lights, activate the alarm, and set the air conditioning to economy mode by using a single button (or not using it at all). This wish for simplicity and unlimited possibility, is the ultimate driver for the connected consumer market.

What are the most important initiatives your company is taking in 2015?

Zipato is aiming to integrate with all popular home automation protocols providing an ultimate platform for connecting all these devices under the single programming and controlling environment. In this way, we already integrated more than 25 popular protocols worldwide and we plan to integrate more than 10 of them more in 2015. This will allow to all of our partners to create various creative solutions which will simplify lives of their customers and ramp up their IOT business activities.

Describe your vision for the smart home and entertainment markets in 2020.

Interconnectivity will be "out of the box", and won't be the issue any more. Management and programming tools will compete by providing more options, and sales of smart devices will still grow significantly comparing to proprietary based devices. People will be able to control their homes from any devices, buy even using various control tools for the same system.

Sebastian Popovic will be speaking on the panel “Integrating IoT into Smart Home Platforms” on Wednesday, May 20, at 1:15 PM during CONNECTIONS™ in San Francisco, CA, alongside speakers from Alarm.com, Amdocs, PlanetEcosystems, and Wink Inc.

For more information on CONNECTIONS™ speakers, sessions, or topics, visit www.connectionsus.com. Register today!

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