Startup Sendal Aims to Unlock and Share Smart Home Data Value

Despite strong smart home growth, much of the value and appeal of smart home is currently lost through the cost and inefficiencies in collecting and leveraging smart home data. Sendal, a U.S. startup, is looking to change that by providing a platform capable of managing a multi-vendor smart home environment but geared toward making data available to application developers and service providers, bringing greater innovation and interoperability to the market. Sendal CEO and founder Jim Carroll also co-founded long-time smart home stalwart Savant, and in a market with limited data exchange capabilities, Sendal’s approach targets a key industry issue.

Sendal’s cloud-based smart home platform aims to act as a “networked exchange” for smart home data. Through its management of basic functionality in a customer smart home, Sendal will deliver access to that for third-party service providers and developers to leverage to deliver additional, value-added services. These services would pull from a range of smart devices in the home to deliver a higher-level, integrated subscription service that end users could opt in to.

For example, air quality sensor data could combine with window sensors, the HVAC system, and the robot vacuum cleaner to ensure that the impact of each is managed to cooperate. Working in unison would ensure that the air in a room is cleaned only after a vacuum has operated, as the vacuum agitates dust into the air, rather than just beforehand. Another example would be in enabling smart home motion sensors and other home security devices to underpin additional ambient assisted living services.

To entice OEMs to connect to its platform, Sendal intends to deliver a percentage of subscription revenues paid for the greater service management to the OEMs whose device data supports the application. This will both help defray the ongoing costs OEMs face for maintaining service across their installed base, but also to develop functionality to support popular and emerging high-value applications.

On the north side of the Sendal platform, Service providers and housing developers can connect with any supported OEM’s hardware through the Sendal platform. Sendal presents control to device types through an abstracted API which masks individual requirements of competing OEM devices of the same type. Sendal has APIs for the different user’s access, device controller API, software service API, and gateway API.

Sendal’s approach tackles two key issues at the heart of the current smart home market: data silos and smart home data monetization. Without data sharing between OEMs or a platform to pool data from across the home and make that data available to additional service providers, smart home players are limiting the value of their customer base. More typically, smart home platforms are not sharing data with service providers north of the platform itself, which limits interoperability and stymies additional monetization.

Smart home remains a fragmentated industry. That fragmentation will increasingly prohibit OEMs from developing products with greater functionality and capable of wide interoperability, and value. The ability to leverage a single device to support multiple applications unlocks value in that installation but currently provides no direct long-term incentive for OEMs to develop to. Managed smart home platforms do enable more integrated control across devices, but these require API investment in connectivity and maintenance from OEMs.

Currently, OEMs are broadly not benefiting from the data their offerings are bringing to the smart home market. The value of OEM device data is largely serving smart home platform players, but the largest of those are focused on leveraging smart home data internally rather than bringing that value to third-party developers or back to OEMs.

As a startup, Sendal clearly has a long road ahead to build a user base that can reform the smart home market, but it is focusing on construction companies and the growing popularity of embedding smart home capabilities in new homes. By taking on management of the smart home systems in those homes, the company provides an route to enabling smart home for those developers. In pushing to make greater use of the data in those homes to drive its business and deliver new revenue streams to both OEMs and system developers, the company has the potential to succeed. It could also provide impetus for existing smart home providers to look to giving smart home application developers access to their own smart home install base to both maximize value and bring additional functionality to their smart home subscribers.

The smart home market is entering a new period of transition, and how data is collected, managed, and distributed will be key to its evolution. Sendal’s approach faces challenges, but it may provide a valuable step forward in driving the industry to a more collaborative and, most important, more feature-rich and valuable smart home market.

ABI Research’s Smart Home Service will shortly publish Smart Home and Data Exchange (AN-5382), an in-depth examination of how data produced, collected, and managed within the smart home can develop and address the demands of the smart home industry and smart home consumers alike.