Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Deutsche Telekom's Visionary Excellence in Leveraging the Dynamics within the European Connected Living Ecosystem
- QIVICON enables companies from different industries to converge and synchronize their products to provide sophisticated solutions
LONDON, June 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on a recent analysis on the future of connected living by its Visionary Innovation team, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Deutsche Telekom with the 2014 European Visionary Innovation Leadership Award.
Having identified a huge white space in the connected home space, Deutsche Telekom has rightly leveraged the need for an integrated connected living platform by developing QIVICON. QIVICON is an innovative, open platform that offers a multitude of smart applications and devices across different technologies and partner companies for connected homes.
Deutsche Telekom's vision of a future home is one that is set up and controlled through smartphones, tablets and/or PCs. The company also offers a solution that can constantly evolve with updates and find applications across the spectrum of consumer needs.
Through easy-to-use applications of partners that base their smart home offers on the QIVICON platform, customers can remotely control their devices at home, as well as receive notifications when, for example, windows are left open or the smoke alarm detects smoke emission. With QIVICON, Deutsche Telekom has developed a platform that covers areas such as energy efficiency, security and convenience in the home for people of every age group.
Moreover, a constantly growing number of additional partner companies are using the QIVICON platform to offer their Smart Home products. First starter kits from QIVICON partners have been available in Germany since the 4th quarter 2013.
Deutsche Telekom constantly reviews technologies, access and consider new devices, such as wearables/wearable devices.
"Deutsche Telekom is focussed on retaining limitless scope for gaining additional technologies, new partners and applications. All possible through USB ports on the QIVICON Home Base, the control unit in the smart home, which enables the use of dongles to tap into new wireless networks," reports Olivia Price-Walker, Senior Consultant at Frost & Sullivan.
"Through partnerships with robust brands such as EnBW, eQ-3, Miele and Samsung, Deutsche Telekom's QIVICON platform is accessible through different wireless protocols and seamlessly operable via partner applications," she adds.
The functionality of the QIVICON platform is multiple and can be easily installed by the customers themselves. Deutsche Telekom designed QIVICON to engage multiple partners with their applications such as energy conservation, heating, air conditioning, climate control, domestic appliances, consumer electronics, shadowing, health and assisted living, as well as security and monitoring.
Apart from offering safe and comfortable living, QIVICON and the partner solutions allow users to optimize the electricity consumed by their electrical appliances. Frost & Sullivan's research finds QIVICON's features are in line with society's increasing awareness of smart living and a technology-savvy lifestyle.
"QIVICON enables partners to provide more options to users through product differentiation, which creates an open and flexible technical solution for users," notes Ms Price-Walker. "Strategic partnership opportunities provided by Deutsche Telekom helps partners reduce costs, and simultaneously educate society about the significance of QIVICON."
"We are very pleased about the Leadership Award. It shows that we have selected the right approach with the multi-vendor platform QIVICON – on the one hand by technology and on the other hand by the strategy. Any company, from multinational concern to start-up, can become a partner. We currently have over 30 partner companies, by the end of the year there will be about 50. So QIVICON is already the Smart Home platform with the world's largest number of partner companies. The result of this variety is a unique pick-and-mix Smart Home," says Holger Knoepke, Vice President Connected Home Deutsche Telekom.
"The QIVICON platform currently exists in Germany, but we receive many international enquiries. Many companies find the German Smart Home market highly promising and are interested in becoming a partner in order to open up the German market by having their products available on the platform. But we are also negotiating with interested parties to offer the QIVICON platform and partner products internationally. The main focus of internationalisation will be on Europe, but we also see promising prospects outside of the EU. As QIVICON depends on cooperation with partner companies, we are ready to hold talks with any interested party and we are delighted with every new partnership. To keep this process as simple as possible, we have developed a special partner programme. It includes the right business model for both large companies and small start-ups," Holger Knoepke continues.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated the understanding to leverage global Mega Trends and integrate the vision into processes to achieve strategic excellence.
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.
About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies with over 142 million mobile customers, 31 million fixed-network lines and over 17 million broadband lines (as of December 31, 2013). The Group provides fixed-network, mobile communications, Internet and IPTV products and services for consumers, and ICT solutions for business and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in around 50 countries and has approximately 229,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenue of 60.1 billion euros in the 2013 financial year - over half of it outside Germany.
About QIVICON
QIVICON is an alliance of leading German industrial companies, initiated by Deutsche Telekom AG with the aim of promoting the field of Smart Home technology and providing solutions for customers on a multi-manufacturer basis. Together with its partners EnBW, eQ-3, Miele and Samsung, Deutsche Telekom is developing a platform that covers areas such as energy efficiency, security and convenience in the home for people of every age group. QIVICON enables appliances and functions from different brands to be combined easily in the Smart Home. More: www.qivicon.com | https://shop.qivicon.com | www.youtube.com/qivicon
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants.
Our "Growth Partnership" supports clients by addressing these opportunities and incorporating two key elements driving visionary innovation: The Integrated Value Proposition and The Partnership Infrastructure.
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Contact:
Deutsche Telekom AG
Corporate Communications
Tel.: +49-228-181-4949
E-mail: medien@telekom.de
Further information for the media at www.telekom.com/medien and www.telekom.com/fotos
http://twitter.com/deutschetelekom
Kristina Menzefricke
Best Practices Group
Frost & Sullivan
Tel.: +44-(0)-207-9157862
E-mail: kristina.menzefricke@frost.com
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