People often talk about the sea of change brought about in security by technology innovation but when you step back and observe the big picture, realizing the impact things like internet-connectivity have had on even the simplest of devices in the industry is staggering. Just two decades ago, the keyed deadbolt was the standard lock you would expect to find on the exterior doors or homes, with a few exceptions.
Now as we enter a new decade, analog deadbolts find themselves being pushed further and further down the shelf as today’s generation of smart locks become the preferred access control methodology in both the residential and commercial markets. The convenience provided by connected locks, which can be controlled remotely by consumers on their phones, has also become cheaper over the years and has subsequently made it more attainable for the mass market.
To keep up with this trend, manufacturers have also had to adapt their business models to remain flexible enough to address the varying needs of the industry and, in fact; many traditional lock manufacturers have evolved to the point that they are now considered leaders in the smart home space. Such is the case with Allegion, whose myriad access control brands have become synonymous with connected home and IoT technology.
Earlier this month, Allegion acquired IoT cloud platform developer Yonomi, which the company had been an investor in since 2017. SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) recently caught up with Vince Wenos, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Allegion, to discuss what the acquisition will mean for their smart home product roadmap and how they plan to leverage the Yonomi platform for applications beyond the residential market in the future.
SIW: What made Yonomi an attractive acquisition target and how did the opportunity come about?
Wenos: Our vision, as a company, is to provide seamless access and a safer world. As we think about our ability to do that, certainly there are devices – door locks, closers, exit devices, card readers, and other software solutions as well for access control – that are important in order to realize that type of a vision and for us, the growth areas, the opportunity areas are in software. Yonomi brings some extensive technical capabilities, some extremely skilled resources and technologies, particularly around cloud and cloud-based connectivity, which support our vision and will enable us to produce solutions that bring those types of values to customers. When we were thinking about what we could do to enhance our ability to deliver on our vision, Yonomi popped to mind as an organization that had the right things. We were looking to bring value to Allegion, of course, and value to Yonomi as well, but ultimately to our customers as we go forward.
We had been a customer and partner of Yonomi for some time. Starting around 2015, Allegion decided to launch its first residential, connected smart lock – it happened to be a smart deadbolt – and in order to do that we had a lock, we could do an app on the mobile phone, but we needed a partner that could provide the cloud connectivity to the phone and back to the database for permissions and so on and so forth. We reached out to Yonomi, who had been in the business at that point for just a few years as a startup, to see if they would be interested to support us, they were, we launched that product later that year and that started our partnership. We grew from there to the ability of our locks to talk directly via Wi-Fi back to the Yonomi platform for remote management and control even when you’re not at home or on-premises and so our partnership expanded. The residential offering, we provide today for connected electronic deadbolts is solely on the Yonomi platform and so when we looked around for a partner and potential acquisition target that could augment that gap we saw, if you will, in our portfolio from a technology capabilities point of view, they were a somewhat natural (fit) for us to look at what they had, bring it in house and then continue to grow on it as we go forward.
What kinds of expanded capabilities does the Yonomi platform provide you with?
They saw a problem on the home front, which was there were many, many devices, many, many applications, but it was very difficult to coordinate and put all of those pieces together to control them in a simple way or even make it easier for somebody who had a device – somebody like in our case that just produces an electronic lock – to get access to cloud capabilities, which would allow that device to be part of, let’s say an Amazon ecosystem, a Walmart ecosystem or whoever it happens to be. To do that required the ability to architect solutions and deliver solutions around cloud software leveraging, whether it is AWS, Microsoft Azure or any other infrastructure as a service provide, and it’s not a skill that everybody has and certainly not a skill that everybody would need. For us, when we thought about expanding our capabilities in the home – bringing that capability inside, having the ability to work with cloud solutions, optimize those and then bring other third-party devices and/or applications to be part of our ecosystem – it became very attractive and that is why we went and got them and brought them in house and we are certainly pleased where we stand today.
How important is the residential market in Allegion’s plans for continued growth and how do you expect it will continue to evolve?
The residential market is a very meaningful and material part of the Allegion business, certainly in the Americas, but globally as well. We were pleasantly surprised in 2020 to see the resiliency in the residential market. Some of our commercial institution markets, as you might expect, experienced some uncertainly with the pandemic. A unique variety of circumstances – some driven by the pandemic and others just by more supply and demand in single-family housing – really fueled a lot of great growth opportunities in and around single-family housing, particularly in the Americas but elsewhere as well. As we look forward to 2021 and beyond, we like that market because we still see a balance between supply and demand that has existed since the 2008-2009 timeframe and we’ve never really caught back up relative to producing new single-family homes based on growth in the population and demand. We see that growth continuing this year and we’re just pleased that market has been as resilient as it has been over the last 12 months or so.
Looking beyond the residential market, how will Yonomi’s platform give you the ability to potentially innovate and grow outside the smart home space?
They clearly drove their innovation and thought process starting with residential, but I would say there are four key capabilities or features of the Yonomi platform that apply to virtually any vertical you want to serve, particularly when think about it from our point-of-view in the security industry and thinking about seamless access. The first cornerstone feature is permissions and privileges, making sure that the right individuals, i.e., the right devices, have access and can manage them securely. Discoverability, the ability to find a device on a network, an IoT appliance, and understand its capabilities and what you can do or can’t do with that device, is a cornerstone feature. Control of those devices, which is a natural, is also a cornerstone piece of their capability and then data – meaning the ability to learn about the device, its current state, its operation and then extract data that hopefully can provide insight to either your solution or partner application – those four cornerstone features of the Yonomi platform are really very broadly applicable and so we will see those taking hold in Allegion product offerings outside residential as we go forward.
How do you plan on integrating Yonomi into Allegion?
We brought Yonomi in as a complete business unit and, for now, that business unit is reporting to me as the CTO and we were also very fortunate that every person, all 25 people or so with Yonomi, have elected to come with the company as it becomes part of Allegion family. We secured all of the technical talent as well as the leadership. It won’t’ be bringing them in and breaking them up into little pieces; it is going to keep them intact as a business so that we can continue to serve their existing customer base as well as leverage their technology for the better of Allegion and lots of our other customers as we go forward.
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
