The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) has released its first Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) research report, commissioning Habor Research to examine all aspects of SHaaS.

The new bundling of service-based ecosystems represents a shift from device-based functions to managed services and will usher in a new user experience which is more in-line with customer needs.

Seeking to understand how use cases, customer environments, buying behaviours and evolving ecosystem interactions all impact and influence the development of the connected home environment.

Some of the top insights of the report are that suppliers need to address consumer data privacy, technology suppliers with closed ecosystems are precluding SHaaS, shifting business models to SHaaS unlocks new revenue streams for smart home suppliers, SHaaS will leverage devices with open network communication protocols and more.

It says that the proliferation of smart home devices requires interoperability with a smart home hub. However, as the hub’s role as the chokehold of the Smart Home ecosystem diminishes, devices will need to interact and share data with other devices as well.

“Traditionally, OEMs have built devices that interact only with other devices manufactured by the same OEM,” the report notes.

“This model coerces customers into only buying products manufactured by the same vendor, resulting in vendor lock-in. As SHaaS emerges, a similar trend must occur for users to be able to effectively plug-and-play devices that enable overlapping service ecosystems. To meet this challenge, a number of open network communication protocols have begun to emerge.”

The full report can be found here.