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

The Market For Hearable Devices 2016-2020 – And Then There Were Airpods…

The hearables market goes back to the first Bluetooth headsets which were launched in 2001, followed by wireless stereo headphones, which arrived a few years later. Neither made great waves in the mar...

Are Voice Assistants Like Alexa Making Your Car Less Secure?

Technology companies continue to throw everything from smart door locks to remote-controlled Crock-Pots into the marketplace, but coordinating such gadgets has been an elusive goal—until Amazon’s Alex...

Nearly 50 Percent Of U.S. Broadband Households Used A Voice-Activated Digital Assistant in 2017

“Innovations such as voice have resonated with consumers, quickly creating new opportunities for companies to leverage voice as a user interface within the consumer IoT,” said Elizabeth Parks, SVP, Pa...

Google's Nest Struggles Could Set Back The IoT Movement

The smart home devices sold by Google's home automation subsidiary, Nest, represent just a small fraction of the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) market. However, Nest has become one of the most re...