The Ikanos Fusion™ Platform Offers Scalability, Security, and Ease-of-Use for a Plug-and-Play User Experience, Integrating Profiles for the World’s Most Popular Smart Home Devices, Making Home Automation Accessible to the Mainstream Market
FREMONT, Calif. – June 1, 2015 – Ikanos Communications, Inc a leading provider of advanced broadband semiconductor and software products for the connected home, today announced Ikanos Fusion™ Smart Home Control (SHC), a new software platform designed to facilitate the deployment of smart home devices and home automation applications by telecommunications carriers and consumer electronics manufacturers. The first of its kind, Ikanos Fusion™ is designed to tackle key barriers to wide-scale adoption of home automation, including scalability, cross-protocol integration, multi-standards conformance, security, and ease-of-use. Ikanos Fusion™ combines technology from Ikanos and Candi Controls, an IoT data services firm that enables businesses to easily connect to disparate machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. Ikanos will be showcasing its Fusion SHC platform at its private suite at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, during the Computex show from June 2 through June 5, 2015.
A key challenge facing the IoT industry today is the numerous standards bodies, protocols, and product options that are forming across the ecosystem, effectively fragmenting the market and slowing down mainstream adoption of home automation services. The partnership between Ikanos and Candi was built on a philosophy of taking the focus away from proposing yet another IoT standard, and shifting it to creating a flexible and scalable platform, architected to evolve with the IoT industry as it grows yet to offer immediate solutions to the toughest communication challenges faced by mixed-device, mixed-protocol ecosystems today. The result is Fusion SHC, a turn-key cloud services/embedded solution that enables rapid creation of custom products and services for both carriers and retailers alike, without requiring IoT device manufacturers to change their product designs, and without forcing carriers and application providers to adopt any single IoT communications protocol or standard, now or in the future.
The Fusion SHC platform is optimized for OEMs seeking to create differentiated IoT solutions based on a unified smart hub or gateway architecture, and to bring those solutions to market quickly through their existing retail channels. For carriers, Fusion SHC enables new revenue-generating opportunities with services that can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively, including built-in measures for substantial operational cost savings through the integrated network monitoring and diagnostic services. For consumers, Fusion SHC offers more choices of smart home devices, with hundreds of today’s most popular devices already supported, and an enhanced user experience through a unified control mechanism customizable to run on any mobile device or PC platform. Altogether, Ikanos Fusion™ SHC marks the first unified system for home automation that offers this level of flexibility, security, and scalability.
Integrates Powerful Diagnostics
Carriers and operators also benefit from the platform’s integral software-based diagnostics, a strong differentiator from competitive home automation solutions. Diagnostics are provided by the inSIGHT Broadband eXperience Manager (BXM), an innovative software suite provided by Ikanos that enables visibility into the health of the home network and proactively reports issues, often before consumers even become aware of them. inSIGHT BXM not only enables carriers to realize significant operational cost savings through rapid and accurate detection of service disruptions and their root cause, but because it resides on the home gateway, it also speeds problem resolution, improving users’ quality of experience.
The components of the Fusion SHC platform include:
- IoT Control Device: Ikanos’ Fusiv family of network processors enable a range of IoT control devices from high-end fully integrated gateways to small, low-cost IoT hubs that can connect to an existing modem or home gateway.
- User Apps: Unified, customizable user applications for managing and controlling all smart devices around the home supporting Android, iOS, and Windows devices.
- Cloud Service: Enabling secure remote access, management, network monitoring, and analytics.
- inSIGHT BXM: Ikanos’ industry-leading diagnostic and analytics software, designed to monitor the IOT network, ensure reliable connectivity, and automate problem resolution.
“The Internet of Things is arguably one of the world’s leading growth markets in recent memory,” said Kourosh Amiri, VP of Worldwide Marketing, Ikanos. “However, in the short term, the industry continues to get more fragmented through the multiplicity of standardization efforts across the ecosystem, which in turn threatens progress. Ikanos proposes a better way, offering a platform that is essentially standards- and protocol-agnostic, and allowing carriers, OEMs, and even retail customers to build and deploy differentiated home automation systems from the devices they already know. And the design of our Fusion SHC platform with Candi Control’s IoT Server(™) and Network Operations Cloud(™) delivers the performance, scalability, and operational headroom to allow for growth with no loss of original investment.”
“Ikanos and Candi Controls enjoy a strong partnership, and we share a common vision of developing systems that will remove barriers to applications and services for smart homes and buildings,” said Steve Raschke, CEO of Candi Controls. “Today’s plethora of platforms and competing IoT standards can be a daunting obstacle to carriers wishing to deploy and monetize smart home services uniformly across their customer base. Together with Ikanos, Candi is enabling carriers to transcend the uncertainty of standards to offer widespread smart home services today, allowing their customers to choose from an incredible array of IoT devices and smart home applications.”
