A simple smart home would probably look like this. Two sensors, one camera, and a voice assistant. But, in reality, the owner of this smart home has to use three apps to manage these devices. If they belong to different operating systems and IoT protocols, this consumer’s life can get even more complicated. The devices cannot communicate between them and nor can they interact with the app ecosystem. Even worse, this disintegrated smart home cannot promise data security. 

CSPs and Telcos can solve this. But, what is stopping?

This disintegrated smart home problem would apply to the growing smart home consumer base. Research predicts that by 2025 the number of connected IoT devices and apps would reach 41.6 billion. Each day there are smarter devices being launched in the market. But, there are no smart networks to connect them. The corresponding branded or third-party apps developed to manage either a single or suite of smart devices add to the complexity of a smart home consumer’s purchase decision.

The backend story is that while there are common communication standards that can consume data from all endpoints such as apps, devices, sensors, OSs, etc., there is no one prevalent standard. The voice assistants have achieved some degree of aggregation, but consumers continue to fear for their privacy and security. A valid concern is given the business models that these companies have relied on in the past. Consumers are now looking to their CSPs to become the aggregator, because unlike digital disruptors that have commoditized consumer privacy, they trust their CSPs with their private information.

But for CSPs, and other smart home service providers, penetrating a consumer market with disintegrated choices is a challenge. The Smart Home market has to deal with smart device partnerships,  brand collaboration, and further business partnerships to provide a seamless customer experience. In our estimate, a typical smart home platform is complex to create and could cost anywhere between $3M-$5M to develop with 2 years of time in effort, not to mention the long term maintenance costs that are incurred due to the ever-evolving marketplace.

This complexity discourages CSPs, Telcos, and other service providers from delivering Smart Home services, making it a huge lost opportunity. 

IoT Platform as Middleware solves this.

Simply put, both smart home consumers and the service providers need middleware. Middleware that is packaged as a smart home platform, can be customized with marginal investment and it amortizes the cost of development of a smart home platform across multiple service providers. The IoT middleware allows a bunch of isolated systems or functionalities to interact. It tackles the intricacies of distributed applications, heterogeneity of hardware, operating systems and protocols, and the communication between different layers of the IoT architecture.

IoT middleware helps in creating a dependable and interactive smart home ecosystem.

How to launch your Smart living Ecosystem?

COCO provides an IoT Middleware that has been packaged as a Smart Home Platform and Solution that can be whitelabeled. It provides SDKs for apps and devices using a decentralized architecture for smart home solutions.

COCO as an IoT platform has everything that you need to enter and extend services within the smart home market.

SDK Ready-to-launch SDKs that lower the development costs. Client SDK for interoperable apps and Device SDK for devices.

A ready-to-use suite of interoperable smart devices with built-in security and encryption.

Flexible pricing models that can be used to launch scalable and customized business models.

An exclusive IoT app store that further provides an opportunity to explore B2B target markets, diversifying your profitability.

With AR, VR, autonomous vehicles and other future technologies that depend on 5G, middleware that connects between complex programs that were not initially designed to be connected, makes it indispensable within any IoT architecture. With data security and privacy leading the priority of smart home consumers, the IoT platform as a middleware is the way forward to build Smart living ecosystems.