Centralite Sees Consumer Initiative as Extending Smart Home Offerings to Cable
Centralite’s move to the direct-to-consumer channel (see 1606090059) is complementary to its cable customers rather than a competitive move, Sean Bryant, Centralite vice president-sales and marketing, told us. Centralite supplies connected devices to cable customers including Comcast, Charter, Cox and Rogers, but the providers don’t necessarily want to carry Centralite’s full 30-product line, said Bryant. Giving consumers access to the lineup independently allows them to have the products and features they want to expand their smart home systems, while bringing in more revenue for Centralite and giving providers a way to offer their customers an upgrade path without having to expand offerings themselves, said Bryant.
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Centralite will continue to add to its multilingual product line that speaks Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee and Z-Wave. It plans to add a garage-door opener, something a cable technician wouldn’t want to stock on a truck, that consumers could order directly from Centralite’s online store, Bryant said. “It gives [cable providers] a place to send their customers to buy additional connected devices, which ultimately makes their solutions stickier,” he said.
The direct-to-consumer move follows an initiative Centralite launched last fall when it announced Jilia, a developer framework for the IoT. Jilia makes it easier for developers to get to market quickly with an IoT solution “without having to know what Z-Wave or ZigBee is,” said Bryant.
Centralite is also leveraging Jilia for its commercial energy management business, which it launched in 2010 as a connected platform for Schneider Electric's Cassia brand. Centralite saw an opportunity to update that solution and create application program interfaces (API) to make it simple for other companies to add Centralite’s 30 devices to their offerings, said Bryant. “If a startup had a great IoT idea, they can leverage Jilia to build it out" without having to design the connectivity portion, he said.
Jilia has cloud and local device elements, said Bryant, and that brings the data benefit to customers. Centralite is working with hotel chains to offer guest benefits through a loyalty app, he said. He imagined an experience where a guest checks into a hotel online using the smartphone app, and then “owns the room. You like the thermostat set to 72 when you get to the room and for these three lights to be on,” he said. Guests would be able to adjust the room temperature and light settings, he said, and hotels could see those settings through the app. Customers who opt in through a loyalty program could have the preferred settings kick in each time they enter a guest room, he said.
The hotel would benefit from the data it received from guests interacting with the app. With the data, hotels could get a better handle on energy usage and manage it through customer incentives, Bryant said. “When you leave that room and the thermostat automatically shuts off, maybe you get reward points for being an energy-conscious guest,” he said.
In May, Centralite signed a distribution agreement with Arrow Electronics to further extend the Jilia platform, said Bryant. Arrow works with thousands of manufacturers, but many don't have the resources to get their solutions connected easily in the IoT world, he said. Jilia gave Arrow’s distribution channel a way to get a connected solution to market, extracting ZigBee and Z-Wave communications to an API layer “where any of the 20 million application developers can come in and create a connected solution in a matter of days or weeks,” he said.