Transform 14: Digitalstrom harnesses Tibco cloud to power 'all-in-one smart home solution'

Digitalstrom CEO Martin Vesper explains how scalability and low latency were key reasons for selecting Tibco to power its products

Digitalstrom, the Swiss-German firm behind what it calls an "all-in-one smart home solution", has selected Tibco Software's cloud-based platform to power its technology.

Digitalstrom CEO Martin Vesper said during a presentation at Transform 2014 in Paris that 280 million homes across Europe will one day be smart homes, and that the cloud will be key to enabling this.

"We use the cloud to have even more computing power and also relay additional services to customers, like weather services and other things," said Vesper.

"We use a Tibco platform to individually connect the house to the cloud and ensure processes running between the different services are reliable, scalable and very fast. Latency is our big issue, in order to keep things working for the customer very, very quickly."

Vesper said the low latency service that Tibco can provide is essential to making the smart home resident feel comfortable that they can live in this way, rather than relying on switches and other circuits.

"If you want to automate in a house, there are certain things you have to consider with a customer," he said. "For example, latency is an important thing in order for them to be comfortable. They won't want to press a button and it takes 25 seconds – or even two seconds – they will feel uncomfortable. We've seen that the customer feels comfortable with reactions under a second, if you get bigger than that, it's difficult."

Vesper added that Tibco's "fast data" philosophy was another attraction, highlighting the huge amount of data a smart home can generate that needs to be analysed.

"We generate processes for the customer in the home based on data from other customers, based on all types of information we get," he said.

"We believe cognitive systems will be there in a couple of years, taking a lot of information together and putting it there. So we have to have a structure where the processes of what's happening to the data is there and not in code."

Scalability is another key factor, said Vesper.

"If you have a lot of homes and you have even more devices then you might have stress moments. We're currently having the World Cup and when is everybody going to the bathroom? It's all at the same time, so you'll have stress moments where suddenly everyone is doing something at the same time."

Vesper added that for Digitalstrom, working with a company that provided an open API was "very important" and one of the key reasons for selecting Tibco.

"People they are very flexible, they use different types of device," he said. "And the Internet of Things means they are accessible for other services and that's why we took this system, so we can provide for other rooms, other machines with an open API so other ideas that come up can run off this infrastructure," Vesper concluded.