HTINews Interview

Interview with Dennis Ford
President, Savoy Automation

QUESTION 1 - In his State of the Union Address, President Clinton gave the nation 1000 days to have a PC in every house and internet access for every child. How does this vision affect the Home Automation industry and where will we be in 1000 days (Year 2000)?

We share the vision and hope it comes to fruition. At Savoy we have a concept called "virtual Presence" which allows a person to interact with and control the environments he/she typically inhabits. Generally this means local which is the primary home, mobile (cars, boats, or mobile gadgets) or remote typically office, hotel, or vacation home or camp. When we look at the living space as local, remote or mobile communications becomes a pivotal issue. Coming from the computer side of the world we have a bias for seamlessly integrating the network in our products. Our product CyberHouse was architected to blend infrastructure (The HouseHold Web) with information (The WorldWide Web). Dave Nelson the founder and CTO of our company has been involved in networking for several decades, he designed CyberHouse with a strategy of openness and adhering to standards. The two standards we stay very close to is the Windows/Intel PC and the Internet. This allows us to concentrate on incorporating "off the shelf" third party panels controllers, and devices into our core product CyberHouse.

QUESTION 2 - Keeping with the 1000 day theme ... will the Protocol Wars be resolved by the year 2000 and who will win (X10, CEBUS, LONWORKS, OTHER)?

I like to use the lessons learned from the computer industry and apply them to the HA market. First, competition is good and second, the market will determine who dominates. There are some prerequisites like low cost, shipping products that can be easily configured and used by homeowners and installers. Oh! did I mention reliable. Obviously, there is much work that needs to be done with the above mentioned protocols. Personally I believe they will all be around in one form or another and that is why we will support all three. Last year we demonstrated X10 and CEBus running together in the same application on the same powerline. Savoy's basic philosophy is to support and integrate the emerging standards thus protecting the users investment in our products. Dave Nelson has spent many years developing a product architecture that from the bottom up designed to be open and support multiple standards and third party products.

QUESTION 3 - Do you think the average consumer will accept Home Automation as a way of life and if so who do you see as leading the way to this acceptance and awareness?

Automated environments acceptance will be based on security, comfort, and convenience. We accepted the IR remote, push button windows in cars, E-mail etc. all of which seamlessly made it into our lives. So the question to me is not if but how and when. The big issue that we encounter is giving the folks who want to control the house through devices like remotes, touch screens, key pads etc. that option; while providing seamless integration for the folks that just want to have the house run by itself preprogrammed with virtually no interface. We make our CyberHouse products flexible enough to suit both types of people. The ultimate acceptance will occur through the proliferation of applets that perform applications that prove there value "out of the box" for instance the the applet that will turn your house "green" when conservation is needed during peak energy consumption times. Applets that monitor your medicine cabinet door alerting you if you forget to take prescribed medicine (as we all do the second we start to feel better). These applets will pave the way and some of them will turn out to be indispensable parts of our future lives. There are over 2 million C, C++, Visual Basic and Java programmers on the planet they will create these applets as the needs surface. Savoy has created a software developers kit for these programmers to use. Once again our strategy of openness will help foster these applets.

QUESTION 4 - OK, I'm ready to get on the HA bandwagon now but am concerned about investing in equipment which may be redundant tomorrow. How can I protect myself from the upgrade squeeze (perfected by the PC industry)?

Once again the PC industry provides a template for answering the question. The speed that technology travels and the MIPS it gobbles up along the way is the main reason that we have hardware that becomes redundant. However by maintaining a closeness to the Win/Tel and Internet standards you can hedge against obsolescence. Compatibility is as important as performance that is why we choose industry standard platforms. The days of proprietary solutions are coming to an end in the HA arena. The advent of PC based software was the first wave, Internet will be the second, openness works to benefit everyone that's why it always wins out. Protect yourself from proprietary vendors by asking key questions about upgrade path, third party support, and migration path from today to tomorrow.

QUESTION 5 - In your opinion, what is the ultimate HA Interface and when do you think it will be available to the marketplace?

I'm a Star Trek fan so I like all the interface capabilities presented to us via the show. When you think about it "voice" has to be the easiest way to operate and communicate with environmental infrastructure and to get and receive information. In the future voice will be the primary interface and a large part of our home world will run intelligently by itself with little or no intervention at all. I see voice, video, and data integrated tightly into personal devises that we will carry which will provide the "virtual presence" we referred to earlier. As far as time goes I think we are in for a very exciting five years. When the brunt of this next wave of HA will hit is sooner than later and we can thank the microchips that are starting to populate the new generation of home devices.

Biography

I have been involved in marketing and sales of computer software for about twenty years. The last five years I have been involved with technology that centered around distributed applications running in heterogeneous platforms in client/server environments. My main "value add" is trying to figure out how to take new technology and commercialize it. Dave Nelson, Chairman, Founder and Chief Technical Officer, William Frank, VP Sales and myself have been building on Dave's vision of HA for about a year. Dave has been working with CyberHouse for four years. Between the three of us we have all been involved at the executive level in at least 15 companies that have been acquired or IPO'd. Dave has received industry acclaim as founder of Apollo Computer and Fluent Inc. which he sold to Hewlett Packard and Novell respectively. Savoy Automation has 12 employees, 400 installs, and about 100 dealers we are experiencing rapid growth and having fun. We just published a book the HouseHold Web and a Video called "The CyberHouse".

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