Home and building automation is the most talked about technology in recent times. It has picked up a lot of interest and also seen big investments in the recent past. We see companies offering home automation products that address one aspect or a subset of home automation, and hence serve a singular purpose. We are also witnessing lot of partnerships/acquisitions in this industry in a bid to offer more products and quickly expand. The result is the consumer would have a plethora of different apps to setup, learn and use, and all of these apps look and feel different. Another problem is that all these products may not work on a unified technology, since these products have adopted disparate protocols such as ZigBee, ZWave, BLE and more.
When we set out to design automation products in 2012, we embraced three guiding principles.
First, home automation for us is not about designing a singular solution for access control or temperature control; it is about an integrated platform that unifies devices, mobile applications, cloud services and data analytics, with an overlay of a consistent, easy-to-use interface. Orvito not only gives the customer the ability control appliances and functions individually, but also allows the customer to manage all of them in an integrated manner. Our platform covers the entire gamut of home and building automation and includes, besides automation, surveillance and security, safety, and energy management. We offer our customers the ability to adopt as much or as little of home automation as they would like, while reserving the option to scale and add additional functions or features in the future.
Second, for home automation to be effective, the solution must be easy to install, operate, use and scale up. We have, over the course of the past 3 years, engaged in discussions with and elicited feedback from hundreds of home owners, real estate developers, office building owners and facilities managers, and partners all over the globe. The common theme that emerged was that most home automation products required months of planning, were not easy to implement in existing homes and offices without expensive rewiring, and required cumbersome installation. We have addressed these issues upfront and refined our design through numerous pilot installations world-wide, in a variety of environments. Thanks to this upfront investment of time and effort, Orvito products can be installed in new as well as existing homes in a matter of hours if not minutes, they are modular, and functional modules and devices can added with considerable ease.
Third and finally, home automation must capture data from devices and usage patterns, generate insights, and make actionable recommendations to the user to better manage their lifestyle, as well as to conserve energy and extend appliance life. To this end, Orvito embeds everyday devices with a strong logic engine, provides them the ability to communicate with each other, generates data, and provides actionable insights that equips the user make better decisions on a day-to-day basis.
All Orvito products are based on Wi- Fi® technology
In the recent years, wireless systems such as WLAN have become ubiquitous in home and office networking. So harnessing this trend and technology seems to be the next logical step to provide low cost, secure, ubiquitously controllable, and auto-configurable solutions. And we have harnessed Wi-Fi in such a way that we minimize the bandwidth usage, as well as energy consumption for ‘always-on’ apps such as monitoring and surveillance.
Orvito has leveraged this technology to smoothen installation and setup process. With just a few clicks, one can build an entire smart home or office!