Digital Home for the Rest of Us

Controlling the Coffee Maker?

All technology has the potential to misbehave, of course, and integrators with long-range ambitions know that expert tech support needs to be available round-the-clock. EI has more than 525 dealers nationwide, and its dealer training classes are booked a solid four months in advance. Moorer and other EI executives promise that the company will never outsource its customer support service, and that every company representative will be fully informed not only about EI technology, but also about how to communicate with customers -- a lesson that needs to be learned by many old-line corporations.

Not everyone wants or needs the hallway thermostat and kitchen appliances to communicate with the living room lights and flat-panel TV. The desirability of monitoring and controlling an electronic driveway gate from anywhere in the home is pretty obvious, but how many people really need remote control of a coffee maker? The beautiful thing about next-generation home integration is its scalability: you can connect as many or as few devices and systems as you want. Home integration in the twenty-first century can be as elegantly simple or dazzlingly complex as homeowners wish.

"We wanted to solve the problem of complexity in home automation systems, where people use only about 50 percent of the functionality," says Ilya Billig, vice president of Lagotek, a new company that builds a wireless home automation system based extensively on Microsoft software. Lagotek only sells a few pieces of hardware -- a wireless interface hub and a touchscreen control pad -- and the rest of its platform consists of software to control third-party components that support the Z-Wave wireless technology. "We [the founders] all came from Microsoft and learned that you want to build a system that is extensible -- you don't have to build everything yourself," Billig explains

New Homes, New Opportunities

The market for home automation is still dominated by new homes, where customers can fold the system price into their home loan, and homebuilders are flocking to integrators such as Control4 and EI because, as Moorer notes, the smart home is "very desirable now," and ease of implementation improves almost daily. High-tech fashion isn't the only driving force. Rising energy costs are an equally important factor in giving home integration its tremendous consumer appeal, he believes. Building a smart home from the ground up is easier and cheaper than retrofitting an older one.

Even so, as new systems evolve, existing homes are sure to become a bigger part of the business plan.

"Today's home automation market is based on new construction and rich people, but this is only one or two percent of the population," explains West. "We think the group below the ninety-ninth percentile is much more interesting." Moorer agrees, citing 2007 as the "breakout year" for the smart home. He predicts continual 50 percent growth year-over-year for EI and doesn't expect to see a "leveling out" of the home integration market for at least ten years.

With all the newcomers in the home automation space, does this spell the downfall of the high-priced, highly customized systems that AMX and Crestron sell? Not so fast. As in any market, there is a high end, low end, and middle ground that are all able to find an audience. When low-cost sports cars came on the market, Lamborghini and Ferrari didn't close up the shop, and the same is true for AMX and Crestron.

As with everything home-related -- landscaping to massive remodeling -- stalwart consumers will certainly tackle home integration in growing numbers. The march of technology is making it cheaper and easier than ever.