The DT report explores the potential of the smart-home market, how start-ups and other businesses can take advantage and the barriers it must over-come to be successful. But DT did not write the report as some academic exercise. The company believes that commissioning, publishing and promoting the report will help the nascent sector grow. And of course the sector growing will, in turn, help DT’s bottom line.
This is because DT believes it can play an integral role in the future of the sector and that if it takes its own advice and puts the sector at the core of its future overall business strategy, smart homes can drive impact all aspects of its future business. It has started to do so by developing an open-source, unbranded platform that can connect multiple different smart home devices and systems. This helps to address one of the major hurdles facing the smart home sector - the issue of future-proofing, says Holger Knoepke, vice president of Connected Homes for DT.
“The platform features an interoperable, expandable and scalable architecture that makes it easy for companies from all industries to realize their connected home products and services and integrate them into a larger ecosystem, DT says. “The platform supports the OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), Eclipse Foundation/openHAB, and open source software is a core component of the architecture. It is also aligned with the Home Gateway Initiative architecture and standards.”
The company successfully launched the platform in Germany in 2013 and it is now available internationally. DT expects it to advance the smart-home sector by providing a method for various components and systems to communicate with each other - similar to how Android and Applie’s iOS provide an underlying operating system that enables other companies and designers to produce apps for consumer use. This allows for a degree of future proofing, says Knoepke, as smart homes would be able to continue to grow and adapt in a changing market with no clear leader. Its open-source status also means that the system could continue even if some of its founding designers ceased to participate, he adds.
“Deutsche Telekom is actively engaged with Eclipse SmartHome and is keen to support open source software communities and alliances,” the DT report says. “Deutsche Telekom will obviously also support the most popular devices which work on
DT is also incorporating different device communication methods into its system in order to ensure it is compatible with the widest possible number of devices and platforms and to future-proof it, and thus help to future-proof the sector.
For example, smart-home systems and devices are communicating through systems such as pre-installed wires, Bluetooth, WiFi ZigBee and others such as Z-Wave and HomeMatic, DT says. “Whilst different technical approaches may be beneficial for covering different application scenarios in the best way possible, the challenge increases as the range of incompatible technologies grows,” the company adds. “Deutsche Telekom will adopt the most relevant technologies within its connected home platform to ensure all these diverse technologies can communicate with each other and offer a seamless customer experience and consumers do not become frustrated managing a heterogeneous set of connected devices.”
The company also hopes that the open-source operating system will help to cut down on silo-thinking in the industry. There is a significant amount of it between companies working on complementary smart-home products and even internally between different divisions of the same company, says Knoepke.
If companies put smart-homes at the centre of their overall strategies, they’d find it has an impact on multiple different areas - some of which would never had occurred to them otherwise, he adds.
These alternative sources of business could also be generated through partnerships, which would help cut down on silo thinking between businesses working on complementary smart-home ideas. DT has signed over 30 partners up to its platform including companies such as:
Eventually DT reckons the smart-home market will come down to five-seven platforms including ones from Apple, Alphabet (Google), a Chinese-focused company or two and - hopefully - DT, says Jon Carter, UK head of business development for connected homes at DT. If this were to be the case, it would be essential for these different systems to be compatible in a way that is not seen in parallel markets such as smart-phones, he adds.
But for now the sector is still in a growth and experimentation phase and such maturity in the market is still a while off. Still it is something worth bearing in mind.
