Prodea Systems is seen as a promising company when it comes to the great potential found with the Internet of Things (IoT).
One reason is that the U.S.-based company was able to raise some $100 million in funding. It came from the company’s founders and from Mubadala, a sovereign wealth fund set up by the government of Abu Dhabi.
Prodea Systems has seven service customers employing its Residential Operating System. The customers include Smart Village/MultiChoice, Azerfon, StarNet, Terra, Sterlite and MyHD, GigaOM reported. Customers include Fort Capital, a Miami real estate company, and Canal Sur, a Latin American cable network, as well.
Several sectors are targeted by the company. The Residential Operating System makes “it easier for service providers, retailers, real estate developers and other companies to offer home-automation technologies to consumers,” according to The San Jose Mercury News. It works with security systems, cameras, smart thermostats, light dimmers, health monitoring devices and Internet-streamed video, the report said.
"We've been working on cracking the code for the 'Internet of Things,’" Anousheh Ansari, the company's CEO, told the newspaper in an interview.
There is a positive outlook for residential home automation devices, too. ABI Research says sales will jump to more than half a billion by 2018. Consider too that sales of wireless home automation devices were 17.23 million as of 2013, ABI said.
Still, there are some challenges that the market will need to overcome. The Mercury News reported that the home automation industry “is still fragmented. There are few widely accepted standards for networking or communicating with smart devices. So apps designed for one device or system often can't talk with other devices or systems. And the websites or apps that consumers use to interact with their security systems often can't be used to interact with their TV service – even when both come from the same service provider.”
The Residential Operating System may be able to resolve some of these issues, however. “The base software is designed to run on a variety of devices in the home – set-top boxes, networking hubs or computers – and will allow users to interact with it over their televisions, computers and handheld devices,” the newspaper reported.
Meanwhile, the company is confident about its future as more residents opt for IoT offerings.
“We applied carrier-grade thinking to the connected home and came up with a platform you’d see from bigger companies,” Prodea CTO Amir Ansari told VentureBeat. “We really feel with our platform, we’re the only one who can deliver the connected home.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
