With more people than ever working from home, one might assume that there’s a trend towards the convergence of traditional residential and enterprise/work systems. Surprisingly, the opportunities here haven’t really been exploited at all.
I stopped by the CEDIA Expo show in Indianapolis last week (and my first visit to that fine city in a long time; I was impressed) with three objectives in mind. The first, and most important, was to look for overlap/convergence/you-get-the-idea between residential systems, which have traditionally been all about entertainment, security, automation, lighting, and networking, and enterprise systems, which are all about communications and IT. There should be obvious overlap here, with more people working remotely from home, or, increasingly, exclusively from home. The need to extend the corporate LAN into the residence has been addressed by a number of WLAN systems vendors, with all of the security and management that implies.
CEDIA is the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association, and largely consists of the community that addresses higher-end residential systems covering the key areas noted above. So I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised that the overlap between residential and enterprise remains so minimal, but I was. Why, for example, is it still a major system-integration exercise to see computing and entertainment on the same big screen? Shouldn’t the ubiquitous home-entertainment receiver have been replaced by now with something more general (does anyone even listen to AM or FM radio anymore)? Shouldn’t we be thinking, given the end of optical media [http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/end-optical-storage-it’s-here] and the Internet now as the repository of all things information and entertainment, along different lines entirely?
Well, we’re not, at least not yet. Virtually no one I spoke with in vendor booths talked about anything to do with work. I did see one item of interest to the enterprise, though, a 4K video wall touch screen from Planar Systems/Runco. 4K is essentially a 2×2 array of 1080p displays, and this one was fed via a DisplayPort connection. Such a system is clearly the successor to the whiteboard, and, at around $70K, such a replacement in absolute terms is a ways off at present. But the image quality and fluid manipulation of information enabled by such a tools clearly point the way to the future of in-person collaboration – and beyond, when communications capabilities are added to products like this.
Overall, though, there was nothing to report on this topic at present (although I’ll keep my eye on this one), and I turned my attention to the other two objectives on my list, the first of which was to understand the market positioning of home-automation products based on the Z-Wave and ZigBee wireless technologies. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future entry here, but suffice to say for now that there is very obvious competition and overlap here, and there is no clear winner at present.
The final objective was to look for products for Network World’s annual Holiday Gift Guide, and, as you might guess, we found some good ones. More on that in a couple of months.
