UPDATED 10:15 EDT / JULY 25 2014

How Prodea is piecing together tomorrow’s smart home one service at a time | #CubeConversations

Prodea Although the smart home market already holds tremendous potential in its current fragmented form, Prodea Systems argues that the connected whole can be worth even more than the sum of its devices given the right catalyst. The eight-year-old company wants to be that catalyst.  Led by serial entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, who holds the title of the world’s first female Iranian space explorer, the software maker has set out to single-handedly transform the Internet of Things from the splintered mess of end-points it is today into an integrated ecosystem of complementary services readily accessible for consumers to tap.

Andrew Tauhert, the executive vice president of marketing and business development for Prodea, sat down for a rare interview with SiliconANGLE founding editor Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins on the latest episode of CubeConversations to share the inside track on how the firm is going about doing that.

Prodea takes a broad horizontal approach to the device ecosystem that embraces rather than an attempts to tame the tremendous technological diversity in the marketplace, according to Tauhert. At the heart of the company’s efforts  is the Residential Operating System, or ROS for short,  a unified platform aimed at realizing the promise of the connected home that has been in the making  several years longer than Nest, the smart applier supplier Google acquired for $3.2 billion back in January.

A solid start

 

Officially launched in the U.S. just three months ago, the software delivers a uniform interface for consuming services that effectively act as an abstraction layer between users and the providers at the other end. The latter group not only consists of cable companies and telcos, but also organizations that haven’t fallen under the definition in the past, Tauhert said, including retailers and hospitals seeking to reach their audiences more effectively.

Bringing together the many different connected devices in the modern household under a common platform offers all manner of benefits, first and foremost to the consumer.

“Whether it be through a portal on an iPad, or through my web browser or through my TV, I will have the ability to control these different services in my home,” Tauhert detailed. “As it relates to the devices themselves, we don’t want to tell the consumer that you must buy this one sensor or thermostat, we want to allow the consumer to engage on multiple types of devices.”

That freedom is afforded by the integration and orchestration capabilities built into ROS, functionality that also serves to simplify life for providers. The centralization that makes it easier for users to consume services works two ways, Tauhert explained, allowing device makers to reach customers more effectively than  through conventional channels. That can go a long way towards improving customer satisfaction, especially when it comes to support, a universal pain point for device owners everywhere.

“We have enabled that use case by giving the providers the tool they need to reach into the home, configure things for you, debug things for you and diagnose them,” he explained. “Not too different than your phone service or your TV series or your Internet service today.”

The bigger picture

 

Support is just the tip of the iceberg for Prodea.  It hopes to extend ROS across the full gamut of services that the connected home will have to offer, from energy optimization to multi-tiered use cases such as making the necessary preparations for movie night (think automated lighting settings, ordering pizza and turning all smartphone ringers off). That kind of ubiquitous automation seems largely in the realm of science fiction, but the company is making big strides towards turning its vision into reality.

Prodea claims to have poured $100 million and more than 1.5 million developer hours into ROS to date, an investment that produced over a dozen patents which Tauhert detailed constitute the architectural building blocks of its product approach. Modularity is a frequently recurring theme for the firm.

“So our approach with all of our customers has been one of ‘don’t try to sell the connected home in all of its glory today, it’s difficult and if you can there are a few early adopters who will take it but the mass market is not necessary ready for it.’ Rather, sell what’s meaningful to them, simple use cases,” he said.

Although a long journey in and of itself, bringing about the era of connected homes is just the first leg of Prodea’s ambitious product roadmap.  The next stage will be introducing ROS to the healthcare industry, according to Tauhert, where it could prove useful for an especially broad spectrum of use cases ranging from managing medical devices such as heart monitors to tracking patients after they left the hospital. The sky’s the limit.


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