Opportunity in the smart home market is being...

a webcast. Kerber said there’s swelling interest in the category as participants on the manufacturer, service provider and retailer sides all look for ways to profit from the nascent, but growing, category. Kerber said interest is growing worldwide, as Tuesday’s webcast included attendees from North and South America, Africa, Asia and throughout Europe. As the number of smart home devices grows “exponentially,” companies in the market are challenged to “scale to keep pace” with the number and breadth of smart devices available, Kerber said. Consumers increasingly want those products to be interoperable, but most aren’t because interoperability “is rather difficult to accomplish,” he said. In most cases, customers who have bought a networked camera and thermostat, for example, find “those products don’t work together,” Kerber said. Another hurdle to smart device interoperability is the “growing number” of home network standards, Kerber said. “It seems like every month there are announcements of new groups that are working together to expand interoperability,” he said, citing Open Interconnect Consortium, Thread Group and ULE on the home network side and Allseen, DLNA and UPnP on the peer-to-peer side. Interoperability also is occurring in the cloud where services and business data are exchanged between partners to create new value-added services, he said. “The challenge is bridging between the multiple protocols and communications standards.”