Comcast is in line to buy the Austin division that built the platform powering the MSO’s Xfinity Home service, and Alarm.com set to acquire Icontrol’s Silicon Valley and Ottawa business units, which together include a platform used today by ADT and Icontrol’s retail-focused, do-it-yourself Piper product line.
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“As this business becomes part of Comcast, we will strategically invest in its technology and technologists, so that we can deliver new features, products and services to both individual Xfinity Home customers and enterprise-level Converge customers”, said Dan Herscovici, SVP and GM of Xfinity Home, in a blog post.
The new business units will better position Alarm.com to offer products in the fast-growing “internet of things” category, as well as complement Alarm.com’s existing home security platform.
The Icontrol Converge software platform has been the system behind Comcast’s Xfinity Home system for touch-screen panels and works with servers in the background.
Comcast has announced that acquisition of Icontrol Networks, a company specialized in home automation and security services.
Connect, based in Redwood City, Calif., provides an interactive security and home automation platform that powers several service providers’ solutions including ADT Pulse with over 1.6 million subscribers.
Achieving tight integration with such an approach has proved hard, and in some cases, such as Alarm.com building its own smart thermostat, companies have decided it’s easier to develop the ideal product for integration in-house. Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, recently acquired by Charter Communications, have also relied on Icontrol for their respective smart home services.
Alarm.com reports its transaction purchase price at approximately $140 million.
Alarm.com also pointed to the ability to scale research and development by purchasing Icontrol.
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“We look forward to welcoming the Icontrol team and to building upon the solid relationships within their customer base”, Steve Trundle, president and CEO of Alarm.com, said in a statement. “Now that we have Icontrol as part of our own technology portfolio, we are committed to continuing to invest and create great new customer experiences that we will of course want to offer to all of them and their customers”. It did not say whether it intends to keep the two teams independent-which are now based in Redwood City, California, and Ottawa, Canada-only saying that Connect and Piper will “compliment” the Alarm.com platform. Given Alarm.com’s dominance over Icontrol in the dealer’s market, one less player could impact pricing.
