Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

Residential Security: Beyond the Walled Garden

For the independent security dealer, all of these changing customer and technology profiles is already happening. The appeal of the walled garden’s closed system is convenience and usability; however, that point of distinction is being eroded by those same factors.

Parks Associates recently mapped the smart home’s competitive landscape by looking for cues and harbingers in user reviews. What Parks’ Tom Kerber found was that walled garden automation was already showing signs of dying off.

“The breadth of [open] platforms is much more substantial,” Kerber says. “It will be hard to maintain a [vertically integrated] approach, or even, for that matter, a highly curated approach, when a very open approach can provide a similar user experience and provide much more access…to whatever product you may have or want to own.”

If there’s a key takeaway from the Parks Associates study for your purposes, it is this: The move from vertically integrated to open “could happen relatively quickly,” according to Kerber. “Our recommendation to smart home platform providers, as well as service providers, is to plan for that eventuality.”

This means security dealers may need to consider offering a broader range of products, he adds.

From the article "Residential Security: Beyond the Walled Garden" by Shawn Welsh.

Previously In The News

Why MDUs Are Helping Expand the Smart Home Market

Parks Associates estimates that 30% (36 million households) of U.S. broadband households live in MDUs, 66% (79.5 million households) live in single-family homes and 4% (4.8 million households) report...

Sleep Trackers Offer Money Making Opportunity

According to sleep research from Parks Associates, nearly 29 million U.S. broadband households currently own a product that helps them track their sleep quality, representing less than half of the nea...

Amazon Details ‘Custom Home Service’ Featuring CEDIA Smart Home Pros

Why are integrators important to Amazon? Quigley calls custom integrators “the new architects” of the smart home. He cites data from Parks Associates that even though 60 percent of consumers say th...

Top 5 Home Tech Trends and Opportunities for 2017: From Voice Control to VR

Parks Associates research indicates 40 percent of U.S. smartphone owners use voice-recognition software, generally eclipsing the use of phones for streaming music to speakers or video to a second scre...