Well from my perspective it could only improve things so I'll be optimistic.
How so? Typically when small companies get bought by huge multinational corps things just go downhill. Maybe if Apple bought AMX or something, but Samsung? My guess is they'll divest AMX.
Paul
Well, if how they handled the Galaxy phones catching on fire is any indication, it doesn't look good. Their response to what was clearly just a battering/charging issue was to completely shut down the division and stop the whole product line. Granted battery fires are a huge liability and someone was going to get hurt. But sheesh - cant you just fix the problem?
Usually when companies as large as Samsung buy it's for a specific purpose. Their purpose in this case was to buy Harman's Automotive Computing and control division with the aim of getting into the whole Smart Car and mobile technology. I also believe they'll peel off a few juicy parts of pro audio. But, the rest of the dry husks will be tossed aside.
I feel companies that large are really bad ad doing niche markets. Niche markets are just to tweaky and hard to manage since the volume of sales is so low and flaky. Niche brands seem to have a hard time in these large organizations.
Getting sold off will sever AMX from the "8,000 programmers" they are relying on for resurrecting RESI with the new AMX LIVING, said to be expected Q1 2017.
That would make it nearly impossible to meet the high goals for the quality and breadth of the product they have planned.
Shown for a couple CEDIA's now, it's the son of AMX HOME, although apparently a fresh start from zero. It's supposed to self-configure via cloud share to create code, data, and panel projects for RESI. Without programming. It shares the messages and overarching goals with what my company's product has been about for 10 years, but that's not so much a copy as it is an endorsement of the idea. If you are going to seriously sell resi today, it has to allow dealer success (a.k.a."production") using a skill set that isn't radically out of line with that of the industry leaders. I have to say that what I saw in September finally showed promise, as a platform at last instead of as a template in disguise.
Getting sold off will sever AMX from the "8,000 programmers" they are relying on for resurrecting RESI with the new AMX LIVING, said to be expected Q1 2017.
That would make it nearly impossible to meet the high goals for the quality and breadth of the product they have planned.
Thanks, John. Your comment is spot on. While we are only leveraging a couple small team of folks from Connected Services today to assist with development of the next generation of AMX Living, they will play an important role moving forward in the process. Certainly in the short term, the Samsung announcement is not expected to have any impact on our plans. The acquisition will not close until mid 2017, and at that time, Harman will be operated as a stand-alone subsidiary. Just as we have been able to leverage all of the resources that Harman has to offer to move the residential business forward in the last year, I anticipate our access to technologies and capabilities to only increase once the Samsung deal has closed. Time will tell, but the outlook is very promising.
Thanks for the info John, although if its remotely close to AMX Home then I certainly am not interested.
Hi Matt,
The only relationship AMX Living has to AMX Home is the concept. The goal has always been to streamline the process of the design and delivery of an AMX system, and take ownership of the user experience as best as we can while retaining the custom capabilities that is the power of the AMX platform. We have resources dedicated to this endeavor (3 separate dedicated teams, one for the system design tool, one for the back end code, and one for the user experience development) far beyond what we had committed to AMX home. Over the last 3 years with AMX Living we have successfully demonstrated that you can deliver a solution that satisfies the expectations of our most demanding UHNW end users while cutting out 95% of the custom development time.
I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you have, or give you a demonstration if you'd like.
I appreciate the information Adam. Its been a couple years since I have been in the resi field, but when I heard something from AMX for resi my ears definitely perked up.
What about module support for current in demand products like HEOS or Sonos. The new Wireless T-Stat, Echo, Google voice, etc. Any resi guy ist still going to have to compete with C4, Clare, Savant, C reston, etc and most have support for some or all of the current trending devices. Since this stuff changes so fast I can no longer justify the time and expense to code these types pf devices myself and this is true for most guys in resi. Plus a lot can't do it too.
How about some details on the new wireless TPs, what, when, how..... Anything else worth knowing for us resi AMX expats.
What about module support for current in demand products like HEOS or Sonos. The new Wireless T-Stat, Echo, Google voice, etc. Any resi guy ist still going to have to compete with C4, Clare, Savant, C reston, etc and most have support for some or all of the current trending devices. Since this stuff changes so fast I can no longer justify the time and expense to code these types pf devices myself and this is true for most guys in resi. Plus a lot can't do it too.
How about some details on the new wireless TPs, what, when, how..... Anything else worth knowing for us resi AMX expats.
whew...that's a lot of questions. Good ones though!
i'll try to be as succinct as I can and still cover everything you're looking for.
"What about module support for current in demand products like HEOS or Sonos"
We are working with both Sonos and Denon in order to determine the best path forward as far as integration for these devices is concerned. Sonos is a little more complex than Heos. They're just getting into the integration side of things. we have some short term opportunities to make it work, but are focused on the long term play of doing it the right way. The initial implementations are very basic, but I think there's more to come there. Heos is a much more open integration, we have a great relationship with Denon, and moving forward we will focus on delivering modules for these types of products in order to give integrators a broader solution set to build with. In addition to that, within the Harman Lifestyles division, similar solutions are being developed and are platforms we will be able to utilize.
"The new Wireless T-Stat" - which one are you referring to here?
"Echo, Google voice, etc" -
best way to address this is to point you to this article you may have seen https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/harman-health/
While this particular endeavor doesn't address echo and google voice specifically, the overarching message is that we have teams working on these technologies and how we incorporate them into our ecosystem, and are actively involved from the residential side in these efforts. We recognize the value that natural language processing has in the automated home of the future, and are finalizing our strategy for how our customers would best benefit from integrating these solutions,
"Any resi guy ist still going to have to compete with C4, Clare, Savant, C reston, etc and most have support for some or all of the current trending devices."
Agreed. I can't get into specifics, but generally speaking the current challenge is well recognized, and there are a number of opportunities for us to leverage development work being done in other areas of the organization for us to take advantage of to address this.
"How about some details on the new wireless TPs, what, when, how"
that discussion will have to wait for another day.
Aprilaire wifi, Honeywell wifi, Ecobee wifi. IMHO I rather see HEOS than Sonos if only one would be supported and having an open protocol is preferred. Nothing on the new wireless TPs so I guess I can wait until you guys are ready to go public. What about a handheld remote?
Aprilaire is done, and I believe the module is on InConcert. Honeywell is in the queue. Ecobee i haven't heard from and I haven't reached out to yet.
As far as a remote is concerned, all I can say at this time is that the regardless of what our overall strategy might be, it all falls flat without a reliable handheld remote solution and we recognize that.
Aprilaire is done, and I believe the module is on InConcert. Honeywell is in the queue. Ecobee i haven't heard from and I haven't reached out to yet.
As far as a remote is concerned, all I can say at this time is that the regardless of what our overall strategy might be, it all falls flat without a reliable handheld remote solution and we recognize that.
HEOS would be better than Sonos in my estimation as well. Denon is far more hip to integration than Sonos, and their API is pretty good, so we can customize things if need be. AMX could run away with resi if they had a really good handheld remote. R4s are getting long in the tooth these days, although they are finally reliable for the most part.
Paul
I think suggesting that a new wand remote could cause AMX to "run away with resi" an amazing leap that ignores the really good handheld remotes of some competition that haven't single-handedly changed their fortunes.
What has "run away with resi" has been lower cost options, constrained customization, rapid deployment, and lowered expectations, supplemented by the crazy theory of this generation that a dozen phone apps can pass for "integration" of the stuff that used to be integrated... you know, the stuff that was the hard part...
And truly, consumer products do a fair amount of things that used to be AV integration exclusives, like "Smart TV's" with apps, and DVR's that share their content. At disposable prices. Compare with high-end audio in the 70's and later... when coveted expensive multi-component systems were "it"... replaced by single unit AVR's, then with SONOS and blutooth speakers that drove the acceptable performance-to-convenience ratio way down.
The high profit model AMX was built on was $5000 panels, then $20,000 panels, then $30,000 switches. That just isn't ever going to be high volume consumer RESI again. It seems unlikely that AMX will newly decide that proliferation of small, cheap systems is a model they will pivot to embrace (compare mentalities with SAMSUNG.... yikes). AMX LIVING might ultimately be amazing, but if it comes with a requirement of G5 panorama panels and an ENOVA, like the last time around, it's not going anywhere, let alone dent the C4 and Savant installs.
And a new wand remote will will not change AMX unless it is truly a magic wand.
It also won't be easy to reclaim what dealers they've lost or attract any new resi only dealers since the programming expense is so great and no matter what AMX Living will be able to offer I doubt it will come close to what Savant or C4 will be able to do. I just don't see AMX making the same commitment to resi as they do. I do think it will help those that do both commercial and resi be more competitive when bidding against others in the resi market and those that do only resi that haven't been completely driven away yet by AMX itself might consider bidding projects using AMX products again. I think AMX has to be in both markets or consider the likelihood that their commercial sales will follow their resi sales. As I said before if CEO's like what they have in their homes they'd also like these systems in their corporate environments. Granted some large corporate installs couldn't be done with Savant or C4 but most jobs could and now a days it's AMX who? What do they do? Or do you do C4 or Savant, we've heard about those systems.
We still have to deal with product inconsistencies between G4 and G5, TPC likely won't ever be G5 compatible, the wireless panels that are due to be announce, what will they be? Trying to put a system together across all these platforms have also made dealers jump ship since there's no continuity it seems with the products being released.
I guess we'll see what happens and where this ride will take us.
I think suggesting that a new wand remote could cause AMX to "run away with resi" an amazing leap that ignores the really good handheld remotes of some competition that haven't single-handedly changed their fortunes.
What has "run away with resi" has been lower cost options, constrained customization, rapid deployment, and lowered expectations, supplemented by the crazy theory of this generation that a dozen phone apps can pass for "integration" of the stuff that used to be integrated... you know, the stuff that was the hard part...
And truly, consumer products do a fair amount of things that used to be AV integration exclusives, like "Smart TV's" with apps, and DVR's that share their content. At disposable prices. Compare with high-end audio in the 70's and later... when coveted expensive multi-component systems were "it"... replaced by single unit AVR's, then with SONOS and blutooth speakers that drove the acceptable performance-to-convenience ratio way down.
The high profit model AMX was built on was $5000 panels, then $20,000 panels, then $30,000 switches. That just isn't ever going to be high volume consumer RESI again. It seems unlikely that AMX will newly decide that proliferation of small, cheap systems is a model they will pivot to embrace (compare mentalities with SAMSUNG.... yikes). AMX LIVING might ultimately be amazing, but if it comes with a requirement of G5 panorama panels and an ENOVA, like the last time around, it's not going anywhere, let alone dent the C4 and Savant installs.
And a new wand remote will will not change AMX unless it is truly a magic wand.
I understand that hand held remotes are not something your company deals with, or even wants to deal with, but we do. And the competition isn't "really good". I've had no complaints about R4s from customers, never had one returned for a refund, and have customers asking for them, so it seems a neglected part of the market because its seen as a low profit product. But people still like them, and if AMX had a gorgeous new remote, that was as reliable as R4s are now, they'd be flying off the shelves where I work. We'd be stealing Savant customers instead of the other way around.
Touch panels have lost their glamor now that everyone has one in their pocket, ironically enough, and a lot of my customers want hard, good feeling buttons with tactile feedback so they don't have to look down while viewing. They also want the panel to respond on the first touch, not think you are swiping, and so doing nothing, until you hit that button just right. The whole voice command thing doesn't seem to be taking off as many suspected, and I'm not that surprised. I don't want to talk to devices, I want to talk to people. I still haven't had one customer ask about voice command , which is a surprise to me, but there you go. You have to remember that the people with the money to spend on a smart home and lots of cool AV are all older, and so you have to cater to them. This means hard buttons, large, readable text, easy to navigate UIs, etc. None that I have met want to control anything from a phone running 10 apps.
Paul
Our company and customers very much are interested in hand held remotes. And our own and our dealer's experience with R4's has been quite unlike yours. Their expense, slowness, and failure rate (fragile!) has not endeared them to us... but we certainly share your observation that a wand with hard buttons is important to resi customers. But when the customer focus is truly on the hand held remote far more than system capabilities, it's hard to sell against RTI, URC, and now SAVANT when you have to cover AMX prices and programming costs.
Aprilaire is done, and I believe the module is on InConcert. Honeywell is in the queue. Ecobee i haven't heard from and I haven't reached out to yet.
As far as a remote is concerned, all I can say at this time is that the regardless of what our overall strategy might be, it all falls flat without a reliable handheld remote solution and we recognize that.
Adam, you said that Aprilaire is done, but it does not work. Do you mean AMX is done with it, or will they attempt to make it work? I bought two and put them on the bench for testing. I have been waiting for over a month to get a solution from engineering for the wireless Aprilaire.. The problem is that the Aprilaire stats will go off line and not reconnect. If disconnected, it may take hours for a re-connection, but no guarantees. Rebooting the AMX, the stats, re-initializing the socket, nothing will make it connect reliably.
Honeywell would be a waste of time until they get their issues fixed. Just finished a job with 8 wireless stats, and they also have the same issue, falling off line. Rebooting the stat will get it back on line, but, Honeywell says they know of the problem and are working on it.
NEST I was told has a module but it does not work. Since the VST was discontinued, there is no reliable AMX solution for temperature control unless you use that 20 year old technology from the wired Aprilaire. Sorry if I sound like i'm bitchin, but I have a client that needs to replace his old AMX opi stats. I gave him a bid for 12 VST's at the AMX website price only to find the item was discontinued. You can buy the stat by itself as a part, without the weather license, at a 270% increase in price. Cost would be $1200 more than my bid price. Luckily he is a good client, but I may lose him over this fiasco. Any ideas?
Back to living, will the minimum design ever be changed from the DGX to just a NX master? Is Living by invitation only? I could not find any mention of it on the website.
Comments
Paul
How so? Typically when small companies get bought by huge multinational corps things just go downhill. Maybe if Apple bought AMX or something, but Samsung? My guess is they'll divest AMX.
Paul
Usually when companies as large as Samsung buy it's for a specific purpose. Their purpose in this case was to buy Harman's Automotive Computing and control division with the aim of getting into the whole Smart Car and mobile technology. I also believe they'll peel off a few juicy parts of pro audio. But, the rest of the dry husks will be tossed aside.
I feel companies that large are really bad ad doing niche markets. Niche markets are just to tweaky and hard to manage since the volume of sales is so low and flaky. Niche brands seem to have a hard time in these large organizations.
Getting sold off will sever AMX from the "8,000 programmers" they are relying on for resurrecting RESI with the new AMX LIVING, said to be expected Q1 2017.
That would make it nearly impossible to meet the high goals for the quality and breadth of the product they have planned.
Thanks, John. Your comment is spot on. While we are only leveraging a couple small team of folks from Connected Services today to assist with development of the next generation of AMX Living, they will play an important role moving forward in the process. Certainly in the short term, the Samsung announcement is not expected to have any impact on our plans. The acquisition will not close until mid 2017, and at that time, Harman will be operated as a stand-alone subsidiary. Just as we have been able to leverage all of the resources that Harman has to offer to move the residential business forward in the last year, I anticipate our access to technologies and capabilities to only increase once the Samsung deal has closed. Time will tell, but the outlook is very promising.
Adam
Hi Matt,
The only relationship AMX Living has to AMX Home is the concept. The goal has always been to streamline the process of the design and delivery of an AMX system, and take ownership of the user experience as best as we can while retaining the custom capabilities that is the power of the AMX platform. We have resources dedicated to this endeavor (3 separate dedicated teams, one for the system design tool, one for the back end code, and one for the user experience development) far beyond what we had committed to AMX home. Over the last 3 years with AMX Living we have successfully demonstrated that you can deliver a solution that satisfies the expectations of our most demanding UHNW end users while cutting out 95% of the custom development time.
I'd be happy to answer any specific questions you have, or give you a demonstration if you'd like.
Adam
How about some details on the new wireless TPs, what, when, how..... Anything else worth knowing for us resi AMX expats.
whew...that's a lot of questions. Good ones though!
i'll try to be as succinct as I can and still cover everything you're looking for.
"What about module support for current in demand products like HEOS or Sonos"
We are working with both Sonos and Denon in order to determine the best path forward as far as integration for these devices is concerned. Sonos is a little more complex than Heos. They're just getting into the integration side of things. we have some short term opportunities to make it work, but are focused on the long term play of doing it the right way. The initial implementations are very basic, but I think there's more to come there. Heos is a much more open integration, we have a great relationship with Denon, and moving forward we will focus on delivering modules for these types of products in order to give integrators a broader solution set to build with. In addition to that, within the Harman Lifestyles division, similar solutions are being developed and are platforms we will be able to utilize.
"The new Wireless T-Stat" - which one are you referring to here?
"Echo, Google voice, etc" -
best way to address this is to point you to this article you may have seen
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/internet-of-things/harman-health/
While this particular endeavor doesn't address echo and google voice specifically, the overarching message is that we have teams working on these technologies and how we incorporate them into our ecosystem, and are actively involved from the residential side in these efforts. We recognize the value that natural language processing has in the automated home of the future, and are finalizing our strategy for how our customers would best benefit from integrating these solutions,
"Any resi guy ist still going to have to compete with C4, Clare, Savant, C reston, etc and most have support for some or all of the current trending devices."
Agreed. I can't get into specifics, but generally speaking the current challenge is well recognized, and there are a number of opportunities for us to leverage development work being done in other areas of the organization for us to take advantage of to address this.
"How about some details on the new wireless TPs, what, when, how"
that discussion will have to wait for another day.
As far as a remote is concerned, all I can say at this time is that the regardless of what our overall strategy might be, it all falls flat without a reliable handheld remote solution and we recognize that.
Paul
What has "run away with resi" has been lower cost options, constrained customization, rapid deployment, and lowered expectations, supplemented by the crazy theory of this generation that a dozen phone apps can pass for "integration" of the stuff that used to be integrated... you know, the stuff that was the hard part...
And truly, consumer products do a fair amount of things that used to be AV integration exclusives, like "Smart TV's" with apps, and DVR's that share their content. At disposable prices. Compare with high-end audio in the 70's and later... when coveted expensive multi-component systems were "it"... replaced by single unit AVR's, then with SONOS and blutooth speakers that drove the acceptable performance-to-convenience ratio way down.
The high profit model AMX was built on was $5000 panels, then $20,000 panels, then $30,000 switches. That just isn't ever going to be high volume consumer RESI again. It seems unlikely that AMX will newly decide that proliferation of small, cheap systems is a model they will pivot to embrace (compare mentalities with SAMSUNG.... yikes). AMX LIVING might ultimately be amazing, but if it comes with a requirement of G5 panorama panels and an ENOVA, like the last time around, it's not going anywhere, let alone dent the C4 and Savant installs.
And a new wand remote will will not change AMX unless it is truly a magic wand.
We still have to deal with product inconsistencies between G4 and G5, TPC likely won't ever be G5 compatible, the wireless panels that are due to be announce, what will they be? Trying to put a system together across all these platforms have also made dealers jump ship since there's no continuity it seems with the products being released.
I guess we'll see what happens and where this ride will take us.
I understand that hand held remotes are not something your company deals with, or even wants to deal with, but we do. And the competition isn't "really good". I've had no complaints about R4s from customers, never had one returned for a refund, and have customers asking for them, so it seems a neglected part of the market because its seen as a low profit product. But people still like them, and if AMX had a gorgeous new remote, that was as reliable as R4s are now, they'd be flying off the shelves where I work. We'd be stealing Savant customers instead of the other way around.
Touch panels have lost their glamor now that everyone has one in their pocket, ironically enough, and a lot of my customers want hard, good feeling buttons with tactile feedback so they don't have to look down while viewing. They also want the panel to respond on the first touch, not think you are swiping, and so doing nothing, until you hit that button just right. The whole voice command thing doesn't seem to be taking off as many suspected, and I'm not that surprised. I don't want to talk to devices, I want to talk to people. I still haven't had one customer ask about voice command , which is a surprise to me, but there you go. You have to remember that the people with the money to spend on a smart home and lots of cool AV are all older, and so you have to cater to them. This means hard buttons, large, readable text, easy to navigate UIs, etc. None that I have met want to control anything from a phone running 10 apps.
Paul
So if AMX had a much better one, it sounds like it would sell, it seems you are saying. Which is what I was saying.
Paul
Adam, you said that Aprilaire is done, but it does not work. Do you mean AMX is done with it, or will they attempt to make it work? I bought two and put them on the bench for testing. I have been waiting for over a month to get a solution from engineering for the wireless Aprilaire.. The problem is that the Aprilaire stats will go off line and not reconnect. If disconnected, it may take hours for a re-connection, but no guarantees. Rebooting the AMX, the stats, re-initializing the socket, nothing will make it connect reliably.
Honeywell would be a waste of time until they get their issues fixed. Just finished a job with 8 wireless stats, and they also have the same issue, falling off line. Rebooting the stat will get it back on line, but, Honeywell says they know of the problem and are working on it.
NEST I was told has a module but it does not work. Since the VST was discontinued, there is no reliable AMX solution for temperature control unless you use that 20 year old technology from the wired Aprilaire. Sorry if I sound like i'm bitchin, but I have a client that needs to replace his old AMX opi stats. I gave him a bid for 12 VST's at the AMX website price only to find the item was discontinued. You can buy the stat by itself as a part, without the weather license, at a 270% increase in price. Cost would be $1200 more than my bid price. Luckily he is a good client, but I may lose him over this fiasco. Any ideas?
Back to living, will the minimum design ever be changed from the DGX to just a NX master? Is Living by invitation only? I could not find any mention of it on the website.