EMS for the home.... are we ready?

This quarter Advanced Telemetry will be releasing its first residential version of the EcoView energy management product. This will not, however, be the first time our product will have been deployed in this venue (the home). Our private label distributors (GE Smart Commander,  Breezeplay Enviroscene) have been at this for a while now with mixed success. We do get regular inquires from our commercial EcoView dealer-installers about the availability of a residential product and so last quarter (2009) we decided that we needed to accommodate these requests and launch and EcoView branded residential solution. This product was exposed to the world at the recent AHR tradeshow in Orlando.

Its definitely exciting to be releasing a new product, don't get me wrong, but in this case I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation about getting back into the residential market directly. Ive been here before. My years at Coactive Networks, an early pioneer in residential device network gateways, were characterized by  largish residential installations that we did in Sweden and here in the states with Enron, Detroit Edison and others. From personal experience I know that the home is an unforgiving environment for new technologies in general and homeowners tend to have high and/or unreasonable expectations for this type of product. All things considered, the residential market can be a real meat grinder, as the long list of failed companies that have attempted this market in the past clearly attest.

So what has changed to make me willing to get out there with our own branded product at this time? As it turns out, plenty. First of all, the device networking technologies, in particular wireless RF solutions, have matured considerably in recent years. At one time not too many years ago the only viable wireless technology was based on powerline communications, which presented a host of challenges that were difficult in some cases, if not impossible, to overcome. The new generation of wireless device technologies, including Zigbee and Z-Wave, appear to be much more reliable and straightforward to configure. Add to all of this the fact that residential broadband availablity and reliablity has improved markedly over the past few years and we may have a recipie here for large scale residential EMS rollouts after all.

Of course the growing public "green consciousness" doesn't hurt either. Anyone who has a TV knows that green is everywhere and personal responsibility for consumption of resources, in particular energy, has rapidly become a self-evident principle. Products like EcoView Residential enable behavioral modification in a way never before possible by displaying real-time and recent historical consumption trends in a convenient and attractively designed display unit.

And finally there is the cost factor. Through aggressive value engineering efforts we have achieved price points for basic residential EMS packages in the sub-$500 dollar range. In the end this might be the most important factor in stimulating the market for this type of product.

I guess time will tell how receptive the general public is to basic EMS products like EcoView Residential. Our distributors and dealer-installers will have to make the case to their residential customers that there is a sensible value proposition in this case. I have confidence that they will, at least to some degree, find success in this endeavor. Time will tell.