Matt Scott is with Jeff Singer at Crestron’s stand to discuss Crestron Home and the evolving story of the smart home.
Crestron gave us a sneak peak of Crestron Home last year, but the company brings it all together at ISE 2020 with expanded support for industry protocols, new partnerships, and more.
Jeff Singer reports that Crestron Home’s impact on its dealers has been huge, allowing them to get in and out of installation projects faster as well as commit to more projects thanks to the limited programming the platform requires.
Crestron Home OS3 represents an evolution for the company in its approach to the smart home concept, because, as Scott points out, Crestron has had a few platforms (Pyng, for example) dedicated to the space before.
“We have dedicated a tremendous amount of engineering resources to develop this software. For years, I don’t think anybody disputed the quality of our hardware … what was the challenge was the programming,” Singer says. “Getting everything set up. Getting everything programmed. Like you said, all custom. You had to be a certified Crestron programmer to do it, so dealers would invest a lot of time and money getting them trained. Some times those programmers would stick around, sometimes they wouldn’t. But at the time, given the technology that was available, that’s how you did things. As a pioneer in the industry, that’s how we did things. So it took a lot of time and effort, which we invested, to come up with a new way of doing things. So we have the same hardware that everybody knows and loves, the same technical support and customer support, only now we’ve got software that meets the quality of the hardware. And it just makes it so much faster and easier for the dealer to provide a great user experience. … They don’t have to rely on a certified programmer for those jobs, so they are able to do more of those jobs.”
Singer and Scott also discuss giving customers more control over their smart home control systems, including with Crestron Home, the value of cloud backup for integrators, and Crestron’s ability to rollout new features every four to six weeks via the cloud.
