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.
Still, many customers appear drawn to cheaper sticks and pucks made by Roku and Amazon, with the companies commanding 80% of the streaming device market, according to new research shared by Parks...
That’s according to Parks Associates, which said that 25% of U.S. broadband households use an antenna to watch local broadcast TV channels, up from 15% in 2018. The firm said those figures could incre...
Using its OTT Video Market Tracker tool, Parks Associates has found that the number of OTT services in the United States has reached nearly 300. The firm said the total is more than double the amou...
The early support for Thread may even hint at where Eero is going next. Tom Kerber, an analyst for Parks Associates, notes that one of the main features of Thread is that it’s decentralized. Instead o...
