PALO ALTO, CALIF. — Smart-house platform provider ROC-Connect wants to give North American retailers, manufacturers, and other companies the opportunity to become home automation service providers.
The company entered the North American market following last year’s launch in Europe and Latin America and has turned to the former VP/general manager of Lowe’s smarthome division to lead the North American rollout.
The ex-Lowe’s executive is Kevin Meagher, tapped by ROC as senior VP of business development. He developed Iris, the smart-home platform exclusive to Lowe’s.
ROC will offer turnkey solutions to manufacturers, retailers, service providers such as telcos and utilities, health-care facilities and insurance providers. ROC offers a multi-radio gateway/hub intended for DIY installation in the home along with Cloud services. System monitoring and control is available through an app for iOS and Android devices and from web browsers.
Like such platform providers as Alert Me and Zonoff, ROC could enable retailers to offer a retailer-branded home-automation system. “ROC can help with the provision of a complete product set as a white-labelled solution or, alternatively, through relationships with all the leading manufacturers, help to create a portfolio of leading brands,” Meagher said.
The ROC-Connect hub will offer “all the leading protocols to network devices in the home,” Meagher noted. The hub will be “managed by a Cloud platform through which consumers can leverage different applications to monitor and control their homes.”
ROC’s platform, compared to those of other platform providers, “provides a more complete turnkey solution that enables partners to rapidly deployed smart-home solutions that can scale to embrace the broadest range of devices quickly and easily,” Meagher contended.
Like the Zonoff and Alert Me platforms, ROC-Connect will enable retailers to offer their own-brand systems, but “there are some fundamental differences,” he said. “In particular, ROC-Connect provides a complete developer ecosystem that allows retailers and service providers to develop their own applications and unique consumer experiences.” The platform “also provides some unique ways in which partners — for example, retailers and insurance companies — can work together to provide yet more value to consumers.”
