Hive opens the Smart Energy Summit in Austin, Texas

Global Director of Strategy for Centrica Connected Home, Sudeep Maitra, will deliver a keynote address titled: “Leading the transition – customer-first strategies to succeed in the IoT.”

Sudeep will share the story of how Centrica grew from a simple idea to help people manage their thermostats through their phones with Hive Active Heating, to a multi-product, multi-service, multi-market smart home leader. He's setting out to encourage attendees to do likewise: look at a problem their customers face, solve it through smart home technology and services, and build from there.

The keynote will end with advice to attendees looking at how to maximise smart home technology and services to benefit customers, saying:

"If we can do it, so can you. Until now, the reality of the smart home hasn’t lived up to the hype. Customers have been confused by the sheer number of different products out there - we’ve ended up with a collection of gadgets, not a family of products that work together to solve real problems and add real value.

We think there’s a smarter way to do this, the Hive way of doing this.

For the utilities in the audience: you’ve got customer relationships, you’ve got people on the ground, you’ve got a right to help customers in their homes because you already do. Build from on that. Focus on solving problems linked to your heartland business, and once you have success there, build out.

Centrica’s history is in lighting gas lights in the UK. Now you can tell Amazon Alexa to crank up the heating with our product – that’s not just transition, that’s transformation."

Find out more at https://www.parksassociates.com/events/smart-energy-summit/agenda