Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
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Smart East April 6 news, just yesterday, Samsung officially announced that it will reach further cooperation with ABB, which ranks among the world's top 500 companies, in the smart home control program. Specifically, ABB's free@home smart home solution will integrate Samsung's SmartThings service, which means that Samsung mobile phones can directly control many of ABB's smart home devices, such as smart door locks, refrigerators, cameras and even solar panels, through the smartThings service integrated by the system.
As a leader in the field of power and automation technology, ABB's cooperation with Samsung will not only further promote its own convenience technology and integrated smart home control system to the market and consumers, but also for Samsung, SmartThings services will usher in a new open cooperation, and its ecological territory and available range will be further increased.
First, ABB, which is "born in science class", embraces openness under the outlet of smart home
Speaking of ABB, it goes hand in hand with Siemens, Schneider, Legrand, GIRA, etc. in Europe, and the scenery is unlimited, but in China, if it is not a particularly in-depth understanding of the smart home field, or engaged in related work in the electrical automation industry, it may be somewhat strange to this Fortune Global 500 company founded in 1988.
Once known as the "Gege of Europe", ABB was able to enjoy unlimited scenery at the beginning of its establishment. Its predecessor was the merger of two companies with a history of more than 100 years, assia in Sweden and BBC Brown Boveri in Switzerland. At the "Smart Home and Audiovisual Audiovisual Exhibition (CEDIA)" held in San Diego, USA from September 6 to 8, 2018, ABB officially released the "ABB-free@home" smart home system that simplifies smart home control and integrates various functions into an open platform.
▲ABB i-home series products
This solution can achieve intelligent upgrades to ordinary families through simple wireless gateways, home appliance controllers, wireless remote controls, wireless sockets, smart switches, intelligent dimmers, wireless curtain switches, wireless doors and windows magnetic sensors, etc., and can remotely control the smart devices in the home through mobile phones, tablets and other mobile devices. After landing in China, ABB has mainly launched two smart home systems, "i-home" and "e-home", to meet the requirements of Chinese families for a higher quality of life.
However, for ABB, a company with a very strong engineer culture, the products it designed inevitably encountered some negative evaluations such as "simple operation interface" and "operation thinking is too scientific and engineering man", so "open innovation" and embracing more partners have become a new direction for ABB's development in the field of smart home.
The earliest return to ABB's cooperation with Samsung can be traced back to March 25, 2015, when ABB and Samsung SDI signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish a global business alliance to develop and promote the modular and large-scale development of microgrid solutions using lithium-ion battery energy storage technology. Now that the two sides have once again launched a deeper cooperation on the smart home field, Samsung said that the integration of SmartThings and ABB-free@home will create a "one-stop service for IoT solutions" for monitoring building technology. The two companies also plan to develop cloud-to-cloud integrations that would give customers of both products greater access and control. Once this integration is complete, it is expected to enable Samsung users to access their ABB smart home features from anywhere.
Second, the "big cake" of smart homes, Samsung wants to use SmartThings to divide a piece
"Internet of Everything" seems to be the end of the incubation ecology of major manufacturers at present, and "electrical intelligence" is a crucial link in the "Internet of Everything", for the intelligence of traditional electrical appliances, it is not to be fine to "install AI chips on every light bulb" such an exaggerated point, but to put the final data computing power in mobile phones, tablets and other high-computing equipment vendors, a large number of home appliances rely on computing power together, is the so-called "Internet of Everything". Obviously, Samsung has a layout in this regard, but it is not "deep" enough.
SmartThings was acquired by Samsung in August 2014 for $200 million, it was originally headquartered in California, the United States, the beginning of the establishment of smart home and Internet of Things as the core of the business, in 2012, it raised 1.2 million US dollars from Kickstarter to start, gradually growing stronger. On November 8, 2018, Samsung held the 2018 Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, USA, and released Samsung Electronics' new SmartThings platform, while in China, SmartThings appeared in the public eye under the brand name of "Samsung Connect".
SmartThings is based on an open IoT ecosystem, SmartThings is Samsung's important layout in the era of "Internet of Everything", according to the news disclosed at the press conference at the time, SmartThings will be brought to more than 200 countries around the world, facing different devices and scenarios, through an application to bring IoT technology from smart homes to more scenarios including cars.
In fact, throughout the development of Samsung's business empire, it has a unique advantage from the beginning of its involvement in the IoT field, SmartThings has had more than 120,000 smart TVs, 700,000 home appliances and more than 500 million active mobile phones access to the cloud, as the endpoint of the "Internet of Everything", Samsung's hardware can support enough, then design a set of "let hardware devices collaborate with each other to create greater value" mechanism, It has become a key problem that Samsung wants to solve if it wants to go deep into the field of smart homes and even the entire field of Internet of Things.
But perhaps it is precisely because of a large number of "original hardware accumulation", or SmartThings Samsung's positioning of it is a set of Internet of Things solutions, so the smartThings "brand itself" product update does not seem to be very positive, the most recent is the Galaxy SmartTag that appeared with the S21 series in 2021, and then there is the smart camera SmartThings Cam in 2019. As well as a light bulb and a smart socket.
Today's SmartThings includes SmartThings Hub as a "home data center", as well as a variety of supporting smart door locks, remote controls, sockets, etc., but it is more characteristic that it integrates support for IFTTT so that users can easily configure linkages, and it also provides developers with a web-based development environment, so that developers can easily add new application rules to the SmartThings App. With the Bixby system as the control portal, SmartThings wants to build a comprehensive open platform that allows third-party developers to create their own related smart products or applications on the platform.
Prior to ABB, on March 18 of this year, Samsung has joined hands with CommScope RUCKUS to empower real estate developers and tenants with next-generation network technology. Both companies provide builders and property managers with future-oriented solutions that rely on a single ecosystem. The cooperation with ABB is the best result of Samsung's in-depth attention to "home appliance intelligence", through the SmartThings device control tab integrated in the Samsung mobile phone pull-down notification bar, The smartThings ecology not only covers a wider range, but also allows ABB to find another more "universal" way of existence, "open and integrated", making ABB more "wide" and making Samsung more "deep".
Conclusion: Terminal integration is the direction of the industry, and "painless transition" takes the lead
In fact, like Samsung and ABB, the open cooperation model of "accessing the mobile phone system to the third-party smart home ecology" actually has a precedent in China, such as Huawei's Hongmeng has now accessed the intelligent ecology of traditional homes such as Midea, Casarte (Haier), colmo (Midea), Aqara (Green Rice) has long become a domestic head smart home solution manufacturer covering Android and Apple HomeKit ecology, and Xiaomi is simpler and more direct. Through a smart switch access to small love can achieve the whole house intelligence of the Mi family, and now in this regard has been "poor heat" Samsung, this choice and ABB cooperation, but also reflects the trend of "Internet of Everything" has entered the accelerated stage, the promotion of traditional home appliance intelligence has also entered a period of rapid development, "smart home" has become a key point in whether the manufacturer's ecological layout can stand firm, this is the direction of the whole industry, the key lies in who makes the transformation more "painless".
The so-called "painless", is more grounded, the conversion process is more insensitive, the threshold is lower, SmartThings helped Samsung create a "smart home appliance ecosystem" to make the home smarter and more efficient, and ABB provides Samsung with a positive environment to promote the SmartThings experience to new customers, the two blessings, Samsung is very promising in the future smart home field to catch up with the "giant brand" that has been formed, coupled with Samsung's own strong financial resources and research and development capabilities, The ecology that truly belongs to Samsung, with a distinct Samsung style, does not seem to be far away.
Source: Gsmarena