EnOcean's "Stealth Attack" in the Home Automation Market
"Key benefits of energy-harvesting in the context of building automation are the elimination of the material costs and the operational expense and complexity of maintaining a large number of batteries in the deployed sensor and actuator nodes. Clearly, in a large commercial building with thousands or tens of thousands of end-nodes, this can be a very desirable benefit.[...]
Rather than the direct technological benefits offered by EnOcean's energy-harvesting technology, ABI Research believes it's the business aspects of what EnOcean is doing that give it the most potential for levering its way into the home automation market. Most directly, EnOcean announced at LightFair that Masco Corporation, one of the world's largest manufacturers of products for home-builders, with 52,000 employees and $11.8 billion in 2007 sales, would be incorporating EnOcean's technology into a lighting control offering.
While this offering could simply be deployed as a wireless replacement for wire-based light switches, it is also extensible to a full home automation solution, and EnOcean believes that in many instances this fuller functionality will be enabled - not only for lighting control but for other aspects of home control functionality as well, such as door and window contact sensors.
Given Masco Corporation's size and reach into the US home-building industry, this instantly puts EnOcean's automation-capable technology in front of a large portion of US home-builders. This access to the US home-building market is an important win for EnOcean. As ABI Research has stated in previous research reports, such as the recently published "Home Automation and Security: The Opportunity for Wireless and the Line between Automation and Security Blur", a key challenge faced by the home automation market has been the simple lack of knowledge about the benefits of home automation on the part of a mass-market audience.
Home automation technology vendors are trying to make in-roads into the mass-market by expanding beyond the traditional CEDIA custom installers and Web stores targeting technophile DIY hobbyists, to include high-touch retail, broadband, and wireless service providers...and home-builders. Because of this one announcement with Masco Corporation, EnOcean has gained significant traction in this new channel. ABI Research also point outs that EnOcean is far from unknown in its home European market.
The company has been fairly successful in gaining traction there, particularly in the commercial building automation market. It has announced close to 500,000 nodes deployed in over 10,000 buildings, including the headquarters for Siemens, SAP, and IBM in Europe.
An "EnOcean Alliance" was launched earlier this year with the participation of 50 member companies who will help develop the technology and ensure interoperability between products. While EnOcean will face stiff competition from ZigBee and Z-Wave - along with others - there is little doubt that EnOcean has launched itself into the home automation market in a big way."
(Source abiresearch.com, 27.06.2008)
