Quantify launches industry transforming cloud platform, Qumulus

Quantify Technology is pleased to announce that, following the initial showcase at the Sydney Launch, the Company’s Qumulus cloud platform has received significant industry support and positive feedback.

The Qumulus cloud platform redefines and revolutionises installation, configuration and maintenance in the high-volume smart home market. The Qumulus cloud platform transforms the methodologies traditionally used in the building industry, by facilitating installation and remote configuration of smart home, lighting control or power management systems. Previously, high installation and configuration costs, have formed a barrier to mass adoption, thereby preventing the market from implementing smart home technology as a standard feature of all buildings.

The Qumulus cloud platform removes this barrier, as it cuts through the noise of the smart home market, to deliver a Truly Intelligent Building Solution, in a way that is simple to understand, install, configure and manage. The Qumulus suite of applications ensures significant time savings for builders, installers and users of the Company’s intelligent platform. The technology also provides significant differentiation against industry competitors and this is a key factor that has driven the Company’s investment in the development of the platform.

Qumulus will result in new revenue streams for the Company, which can be achieved through a fixed price, cloud-based commissioning service for customers. This pricing model can be applied to the commissioning of the technology in a single home, to pricing per apartment for large scale deployments. The Company also aims to offer ongoing management and maintenance, which will be at a significant cost saving to traditional systems – particularly in the commercial and volume retirement living markets.

Quantify Technology CEO Brett Savill commented: “The Company’s investment in the Qumulus technology is a key competitive advantage which differentiates Quantify Technology in a market that is still striving to move away from traditional building methodologies. As opposed to competitors, Qumulus allows the Company to rapidly configure the Q-Device in 1000 apartments in a number of days, whereas the configuration time for one of our competitors may be greater than a month”.

The Current Landscape

The existing “smart home” industry has been dominated by major corporate players delivering legacy technology with methodologies that date back decades. Both time and labour intensive, the overall cost of these solutions (hardware, installation, and ongoing cost of maintenance and changes), has withheld them from the general consumer, resulting in the technology only being adopted by the elite, high-end home and apartment market, and large commercial deployments. Installation and configuration were complex, configuration applications are virtually impossible for the average user to understand, therefore all work was to be undertaken by specialist installation teams through onsite visits which resulted in high engineering costs. Specialist in the field retained their customers by maintaining control of the configuration databases, therefore making it difficult for a customer to move to another support or maintenance company.

Enter Qumulus

Simply producing the next generation technology was simply not enough: to achieve mass adoption and create a point of difference for all customers seeking to adopt the Quantify Technology. Quantify Technology needed to look beyond just the simplicity of a widget or single purpose device and an accompanying phone or tablet application. To be successful and truly make a change, every aspect of the technology adoption cycle required revision.

“Making lives better is at the heart of what we do. It’s why we create solutions that make a difference in our homes, workplaces, and communities”.

Simple. Innovative. Limitless.

Quantify Technology, as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Technology Partner Program, has harnessed the power and scale of the AWS server-less infrastructure, to provide a limitlessly scalable platform. Qumulus can increase or decrease in size as customer demand, and usage volume changes. This “elastic computing” allows the Company to scale to hundreds of thousands of customers and only pay for the micro-services it uses – saving tens of thousands of dollars in computing power. Utilising the latest enterprise security methodologies, the Company has also ensured that configuration and usage data is stored in a secure, encrypted, trusted environment. This is all backed by an enterprise grade user and permissions management model that ensures only authorised users have access where and when required.

Qumulus has been designed to be completely customer centric, regardless of who that customer may be. Planners, installers, integrators or end users of the technology have all been individually considered in the simple, scalable way,. Customers are able to build out and manage thousands of buildings, homes and apartments, with tens of thousands of devices from a single screen without leaving their desk. There is no requirement for site visits for configuration or maintenance – the power and scale of Qumulus simplifies the entire process and may change the way an entire industry works.

Quantify Technology Technical Director Mark Lapins Commented: “We have strived to develop a platform that will benefit commercial and consumer needs alike. This passion has driven our team to create something that will provide the tools to transform a stale industry that has not seen a major innovation like Qumulus before. Buildings and homes in Australia and beyond will benefit from the simplicity and scalability of this platform,”

Using Qumulus – Simply Innovative

The technology allows users to create locations they will manage within Qumulus – this can be a single home for a single user, or thousands of rooms across hundreds of locations for a large volume customer. Rooms, devices and configurations are easily added with a simple to understand, point and click interface creating meaningful and understandable representations of the installation.

The Qumulus Cloud Platform setup process creates the templates for configuration which is one of many ways in which the technology saves labour time. After creating an apartment location, adding devices and user experiences, templates are created for the “standard format” apartment variations within the building. These enable the simple set up the qDevice technology in hundreds or thousands of apartments with the click of a button. Users can also retain room or device setup and configuration as templates to build a library of commonly used outcomes for future builds.

Removing complexity – Simple customer driven outcomes

A once complex and almost arcane skill within the building and lighting automation industry was the creation of complex user experiences – or “scenes”. With its focus on customer driven outcomes, Quantify Technology has delivered a solution through the Qumulus configuration interface. Complex outcomes are distilled into a simple to use, template-driven set of outcomes that are automatically configured for the user. Qumulus does all the hard work of creating and distributing the often complex configurations with a few clicks of the mouse. These templates are being continually developed by the Company.

Qumulus – not just for Quantify Technology

Through simple to integrate plugins and open, standards-based API’s, Quantify Technology will enable a wider ecosystem of partners to harness the simplicity, power and limitless scalability of the Qumulus platform. This will provide additional income streams, through usage and licensing opportunities, as industry and market specific applications use the platform to deliver to the mass market.