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ROC-Connect: Forging Ahead with IoT and Smart Homes

CIO VendorKevin Meagher, SVP Business Development
ROC-Connect is a leading provider of smart home services. They have developed an open IoT platform that enterprise partners can use to deploy simple, affordable, and scalable smart home products and services that compliment their core offerings.

ROC-Connect has a different approach to the smart home and IoT market. They work to provide turnkey solutions that focus on delivering innovative smart home solutions that can be branded by channel partners. ROC-Connect believes that leveraging to deliver services is the key to the future. They offer channel partners such as insurance companies, retailers, utilities, and telcos the ability to deploy a range of new value added services that can be used to improve consumer engagement and generate new revenues.

At the heart of their offering, ROC-Connect has an enterprise grade cloud platform, reference designs, SDKs and APIs for integration and management, secure access interfaces, app development and customization, an impressive suite of data management tools, and a host of other support services.

Their platform is already deployed supporting major home improvement retailers. More recently, insurers in the US and Europe are working to exploit their platform because the way it can redefine how they measure and mitigate risk is seen as a potential game changer.

According to Kevin Meagher, SVP of Business Development, ROC-Connect, “The main consumer driver for the adoption of smart home devices is safety so we have worked use the IoT give consumers simple, affordable, and scalable products with value added services that give them real peace of mind.” For example, ROC-Connect offers insurers low cost home safety and security kits that monitor for fire, flood, frost, and occupancy. Insurance companies can bundle these kits with policies and incentivize customers with discounts for installing devices like security sensors and water leak detectors.

We offer turnkey solutions for partners who want to leverage the value of the IoT and smart home


“This changes the basic nature of the consumer relationship for an insurer; they can move from being purely reactive and paying claims to becoming proactive by providing consumers with solutions that help to prevent them,” Meagher explains. In addition, by leveraging the IoT data they are taking a different approach to risk assessment. In the US they are working with CoreLogic, one of the world’s largest property data companies, to develop new data models. Their platform allows insurers to combine traditional data-like location and property size-with data from devices to create what they call a Safety Score. The Safety Score can be used by insurers to better assess overall risk but it also helps engage and educate consumers by highlighting what they could do to increase their rating.

These innovations in the home insurance arena have significant implications for other industries such as utilities. Meagher illustrates his point by referencing Californian ‘demand-response’ programs where customers agree to relinquish thermostat control during a few key peak hours in exchange for a discount so that providers can better manage threats to grid integrity. These are important benefits but ROC-Connect believes utilities will get broader adoption if demand response programs are offered as part of a wider smart home bundles that delivers more value by, for example, enabling insurance savings.

Similarly, in retail, Meagher predicts the IoT will drive a fundamental shift in the way consumers shop for devices. Instead of focusing on physical features of devices Meagher believes consumers will become increasingly focused on the services that connectivity enables. Over time, Meagher believes the question they will ask before committing to buy will be, “How does this device work with all the other devices in my home and what services come with it?”

Ultimately, Meagher believes businesses that partner with ROC-Connect can “use the IoT to reinvent the consumer relationship by offering new products and services that improve engagement and move from what can be an annual transaction to a daily interaction with the brand.”