Aditya Pendyala, Head of Growth, mnubo, provides insight on several key industry trends for Parks Associates’ 20th-annual CONNECTIONS Conference, which will be held May 24-26 in San Francisco:
How is your company engaging consumers through new technology solutions?
The connected home is at a tipping point. Home is where consumers spend the majority of their time, and the profusion of connected objects is generating a massive amount of data. But home data is completely under-utilized; IoT analytics are an essential requirement to delivering a personalized smart home experience. mnubo’s IoT analytics enhance the overall product - capturing product usage feedback, detecting anomalies, extending the lifetime of the products and so on. Smart replenishment and predictive maintenance reduce truck rolls and unplanned downtime. User engagement profiles create security profiles, uncover data-driven upsell opportunities and reduce customer churn with targeted recommendations.
What is the biggest change you have seen in the past year in the connected home and entertainment industries?
The need for personalization, data-driven services and a seamless experience are forcing smart home product manufacturers to rethink their product strategy. The market is flooded with dozens of similar products, and ‘in the box on the shelf’ they offer little to no competitive differentiation. Smart data analytics create a bi-lateral connection with customers - user profiles, product usage feedback and asset health scoring – empowering manufacturers with data-driven business insights and an overall better understanding of who their customers are. Moreover, real time data-driven insights are disrupting existing business models where products are no longer sold in isolation, but rather as a service - smart replenishment as-a-service, security as-a-service, appliance usage as-a-service, etc.
What do you think is the biggest driver for the connected consumer market?
Connected devices that enrich the overall smart home experience and that are simple to use. Consumers want more than remote access and monitoring, they want products that learn from their usage behavior and proactively adapts, providing a personalized, seamless experience. Operating in the “I want it now” era, customers want to realize the immediate benefits of connectivity. User engagement profiling allows manufacturers to monitor product consumer engagement. A reduction in engagement, alerts product manufacturers, prompting them to take action and reduce customer churn. For example, if a customer is not using the connected object correctly and as a result is not receiving the benefits of connectivity, the product manufacturer can send a targeted marketing campaign educating the consumer on its numerous features.
What is the greatest challenge for the connected home industry in the next year?
As a whole, interoperability presents many challenges to the players closest to the field – object makers, chipset manufacturers, etc. There are too many companies coming up with closed environments, which adds to the complexity of the ecosystem and limits the options available for the end users. While there are a number of initiatives underway to address this challenge, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before consumers can benefit from a seamless experience. In the IoT data analytics space, privacy and security are a recurring challenge. Consumers are apprehensive when it comes to sharing their personal information because they don’t understand how their data is used and protected. Transparency between ecosystem partners and consumers will help overcome this concern.
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Pendyala will speak on the session “Smart Home: Making Products Interoperable and Easy to Use” on Tuesday, May 24 at 4:15 p.m. Other speakers on the panel include CEL and Flex.
For more information on CONNECTIONS, visit www.connectionsus.com or register by clicking here.
