IoT Moves Beyond ‘Things’ To Create Harmonized Connected Home Experience

Consumers are getting more connected by the day. According to the latest edition of the PYMNTS/Visa How We will Pay survey, 32.6 percent of Americans own smart speakers, 52.7 percent own smart televisions and 30 percent own a connected car. And they’re using those connections for an ever-increasing number of day-to-day activities that used to be decidedly analog.

But for all the opportunities associated with connected devices, Plume Chief Commercial Officer Tyson Marian told PYMNTS, there’s a problem. Most of how we think about connectedness is tied to individual pieces of hardware, meaning the experience is doomed to be entirely too fragmented.

“Where the Internet of Things [(IoT)] has fallen short is that everybody’s focused on the hardware that goes into these homes because that’s the only business model anybody’s really been able to capture,” Marian said. “Just sell a piece of hardware, you make a margin and whether or not it really provides added value for the customer is a whole different story.”

Plume bills itself as the “first [Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)] platform for communication service providers.” It’s a business model that raised $270 million in late February. As such its mission statement says “that a device will only ever be as smart as the network it’s connected to.”

Sometimes, Marian said, those devices really do provide value, sometimes not. But no matter how well individual pieces of hardware do, Plume is still taking a very different approach to connectedness and the IoT. Because despite the naming, the “things” aren’t really the point. To capture the connected futures properly and be able to bring its true benefits to consumers, requires a holistic view of the whole connected system. It’s something that is only possible with a cloud-based, software-centric point of view, not a device-based hardware orientation.

Plume is designed to be a software platform that works between devices to connect data from inside the home, organize it for a purpose, and then leverage it to deliver value back to the end user, the customer or their service-provider client, he said.

“That allows us to offer digitally-focused, smart home services like cybersecurity, parental controls, sensorless motion detection and adaptive Wi-Fi,” he said. “Where we think that there’s some disconnect, and lagging behind is that none of those companies who’ve been providing hardware have the holistic view into the home that Plume does. And so, they’re not set up for the ability to leverage that data and create cross-device experiences; they’re just not set up to do it.”

That holistic view can make a major difference in unexpected ways. Marian used the example of a customer service call to a cable provider he’d recently heard that illustrated the story perfectly. After over an hour on the phone that went through three different levels of customer service and technical support, the company realized the reason they couldn’t help the customer was that the customer had essentially called the wrong company. The problem the customer had with the picture on his screen had nothing to do with the company as he was not using its service in any way at the time the problem occurred. The hour it had taken to determine that, he said, cost that company $100, and the consumer was still every bit as unhappy at the end of the experience as he was at the beginning.

Marian said that same call using Plume’s service would have seen in the first few minutes what device the customer was using and that it wasn’t actually connected to the company’s service at the time of the complaint. Further, that firm would have had the opportunity to solve the customer’s problem, keep him more engaged with the service itself, and turn $100 of loss and frustration into revenue and a happy ending for all involved.

And that kind of flexibility and visibility is only possible when one separates the software from the hardware itself and relocates all of the routing functions and services to the cloud, he siad. It’s a system that is geared and pre-built to adapt to change specific needs. Hardware approaches have the weakness of being calcified out of the box; to change them means physically changing the machine itself.

Moreover, he said, if the changes are automated, one may be dealing with more than one kind of machine. That only necessitates more synchronized change among independent parties. It’s a level of parallel action that borders on impossible.

“What’s important is that it’s almost future-proofing against what will happen in the market when you separate the software and move it to the cloud,” he said. “From there we can make changes and account for new things as they come into our worlds. No hardware-centric solution can ever do that.”

And the ability to provide a version of connectedness that is made truly interconnected by a software platform holding it all together will only become more critical as the “game of speed” currently in progress is changing its shape, he said. Consumers are getting smart when they are offered things like 1 gig of speed for their devices because they are realizing that in truth their devices have a hard cap of 250 megs of processing power. They are less awestruck by those impressive sounding speeds than they once were.

The metric that counts now is the speed at which service providers can roll out impactful connected services for their customers, he said. A software-based system operated in the cloud can offer that immediacy because to do something new, all that needs to happen is a new algorithm needs to be input. It’s seamless and unlikely to interrupt the consumer’s experience. Consumers are turning to connectedness for convenience, which means they always have to be getting easier to operate.

“Consumers are now in this on-demand world,” he said. “They want more, and they continue to want more, and so long as you give it to them, they’ll be happy to pay you more money. So, the game now is how quickly can you actually offer new services across your base to capture or justify rate increases or capture new revenue.”