Having presented his Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) platform OliverIQ to CES 2024, Eric Smith has just earned himself the CTA Smart Home Leadership Award for 2024.
Presented by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the Smart Home Leadership Awards honor U.S.-based individuals who help to grow and expand the smart home industry. Recipients of the awards are described as exhibiting strength and vision in the home automation industry through industry participation, innovation and pioneering vision.
A smart home innovator and veteran, Eric Smith originally helped co-found Control4 in 2003 and served as the company’s CTO for nearly 12 years. In 2020, he was also appointed to SAVI Controls’ Board of directors as technology advisor and board member.
In that same year, Smith founded smart home startup OliverIQ, a venture that extends his dedication to, and impact on, household efficiency. A first in the industry, OliverIQ combines subscription services with a simplified, app-based setup so homeowners can more easily and cost-effectively manage basic smart home features.
In a recent Q&A session with CTA after receiving his leadership award, Smith has stated that he believes that the SHaaS model is the path of the smart home moving forward.
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“The SHaaS model is going to dissolve many of the objections the smart home industry faces today – steep learning curve, lack of interoperability, unreliability, planned obsolescence, etc.,” he says in the interview.
“This is going to have a snowball effect: With greater benefits and less hassle, more people will adopt smart home technology. Existing systems will grow. And, as the industry scales, smart homes will bring important new benefits to our lives.
He then goes on to say, “We’ll have the freedom to stay in our homes longer, adapting environments to suit changing physical needs, with help only a word away. People will be able to rely on and enjoy their homes more, and these benefits will be accessible to everyone, not just the wealthy.”
Smith goes on to note how when he and his partner, Will West, first founded Control4, home automation was “stratospherically out of reach” for nearly everyone except the ultra-wealthy. For this reason, he new goal with OliverIQ is to make home automation accessible to everyone, while also including an always-on service to prevent what he calls “automation decay.”
The topic of affordability has been a longstanding critique of the broader, more professional industry, though, in recent year, newer, up-and-coming integrators have managed to find niches in middle-market offerings, which have categorically been underserved by the greater channel.
Currently in beta testing, the OliverIQ platform is only available to select partners in the U.S. at present time. It is expected to be on the market Q2 2024.
“I’ve built my career by stepping outside industry paradigms, tackling technical challenges that most people thought of as part of the natural order,” Smith concludes in the interview.
“I hope I can inspire others to keep pushing on the hard problems. Don’t do what’s easy: Do what matters. Realizing your vision may take more years, more partnerships, and maybe even more companies than you originally planned, but it’s worth it. This is how we build the future we want to live in.”
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