Automated Home Gains in Tandem with Growing IoT, Says GlobalData Report

According to a recent report from research firm GlobalData, the automated Smart Home has been generating buzz in the technology arena in line with advancements in the IoT. GlobalData’s Company Filing Analytics platform, which is designed to identify and track major themes impacting various sectors, reportedly recently identified an increase from 2016-17 to 2017-18 in the mentions of automated home in the earnings transcripts and filing documents of tech companies.

GlobalData’s Company Filing Analytics platform, which leverages machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to scan filing documents, showed that the number of companies evincing interest in the automated home theme increased by 8.2 percent in 2017-18. The total mentions of the term by these companies grew by 22.1 percent in 2017-18. The increase is in line with the growth in mentions for IoT.

“Advancements in the field of IoT, which offer a new level of control over home appliances due to the element of interconnectedness spanning devices, continue to be a driving force behind the increase in the adoption of IoT devices in smart homes,” said Vaibhav Khera, Director, GlobalData. “The automated home is now an important sub-segment of the overall IoT market with several tech giants such as Google and Amazon already making headway and others planning to launch home automation products in the near future.”

Increasing adoption of smartphones, declining cost of home automation technologies, favorable government policies, concerns over safety and security, and growing awareness about the ability of automated homes to reduce energy consumption are among the major factors aiding the growth of the home automation market, the report says.

“With companies across domains vying for a share in the home automation market, the space is becoming increasingly crowded, forcing tech giants to compete with pure-play vendors, besides telecom operators and the manufacturers of electronic gadgets,” added Khera.

Among all the technology themes tracked by the Company Filing Analytics platform, automated home surpassed several technology themes such as autonomous vehicles, connected cars and wearable tech in terms of growth in the number of total mentions during the period.