Good morning and welcome to IO207, the next generation of smart home solution powered by AWS IoT. Now a show of hands here. How many of you have a smart home at home? Just raise your hand. Alright. And how many of you wish you had a smarter, better, simpler home at home to set up your setup? Right. Exactly. Right.
So welcome. My name is Olivia Bernard. I'm an IT specialist with AWS. I am joined here today with Ann Chan Beg from Nestle, our guest speaker, and Ala Jud our product managers for our AWS IoT services. And if you are here to learn about the smart home, the promises that it delivers to consumers or OEMs or device makers developers. And if you want to know what the vision of what a model should really be and how we enable it with our services. You are in the right place.
So with this said, you know what is, what is a smart home? Well, a smart home is a collection of devices throughout your home that are supposed to work together, to create a better experience, to be, to provide convenience, comfort security. And as an example, let's say you come home from work and you drive in your driveway with your car, the front camera will recognize your car, read the license plates from your car and decide. Alright, you're the rightful owner of your home. So what the house is gonna do after that is the garage door is gonna open, the alarm is gonna disarm lights will turn on and temperature will set up to your preference within the home so that you get to get into your home later on in your day as you prepare your, your meal, the tv, or your smart speaker will tell you, hey, your favorite sport game is about to start. Let me put it on the main screen on the tv.
And as you go through your evening, maybe somebody, your guest will come to your home and ring your doorbell. And we say, hey, it's me, let me come in that pictures from your doorbell will show up on the tv, where you were watching your sporting events. You'll say, hey, that's the right person. Let him go in and you'll talk to your smart speaker and the door lock will open and your guest can come in as night falls, your smart cameras will turn to night vision, your front yard lights will turn on and that's the kind of experience we're looking for for the smart home where just by coming to your home, a whole chain of events will turn on and the house comes alive for you without any involvement with any in work. It's it's convenience, it's easy to use.
So to deliver on this promise of convenience, comfort, security, and savings, consumer, adopting small devices at an unprecedented rate. So right now, the average household has about 21 devices in their home, 21 devices in each home in America. As an average, that means that in 2022 we shipped over 870 million devices in a smart home. And this year we're on track to being over a billion devices. And when you project to what the next few years are coming to, there will be over 5.5 billion devices shared, whether it's smart light home security system, different appliances, cooktop refrigerators, all of devices will be shipped into your home. And that's a lot of devices that you need to provision, orchestrate, connect and then set up your routine.
So beyond the convenience to consumer, why our device manufacturer, people who are making the product that goes into your homes are looking to IoT. And that's because there is basically a lot of value for those guys as well for the device manufacturers. There's basically three buckets that you can orchestrate to figure out why they want to deploy in your home smart devices.
The first one is customer experience right in a world where more and more devices get commoditized. Really the experience of the consumer, whether the device comes alive for them, whether they do what they're supposed to do, and the deliver added value is really what helps device makers build their brand.
Beyond that, the second bucket is about better operational efficiency. And for example, let's say that you get a new device and it doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to work. It doesn't connect the way it's supposed to connect, you call customer support. Well, customer support could actually look at the configuration at your device and tell you this is what's not working, this is what's missing instead of having the consumer explain for maybe up to half an hour what the problem is and describing you have firsthand view. So you can actually get much better experience, much better response time and much more efficient in supporting the on boarding of your devices.
And then the third one is, is faster innovations. And at AWS, we like to talk about the fly whal, right, which is sort of feedback loop that allows you to do better product. Well, if you have a connected product, an IoT product and you know how the consumers you need, you know what features they're using, you know what features they're not using. Well, that allows you to focus your engineering resources on the stuff that the consumer really like as opposed to the stuff that they don't use. And that's a really, really good alternative to marketing studies and research group and focus group, you have first hand experience.
So you ship a product, you get to know how the user is using the product. You figure out what the features are, you get a better product and you ship that better product. And here goes that fly wheels of developing ever better customer product for your consumer. And this all leads to increased revenues, whether it's new product, as I described, new services, maybe new features that you can upload to your product that are already in the field or new business models.
So why do we know this? Well, it's be because for the nine, the past nine years, we've been at the forefront of the smart home for many, many customers, many many different markets, whether it's smart light appliances, coffee machine, vacuum cleaners, we have billions of those devices connected to our AWS IoT platform. And on any given day, we get over 270 million devices connected to one of our 21 different regional data centers. So we have a lot of customers. We have a lot of big name customers. Obviously, Nestle is one of our customers, but we have smart cameras. We've got smart TVs with Vizio, LG, smart vacuum cleaners, appliances, with Dysons, and all of those customers have chosen AWS because of the scale we enable for them.
So let me talk to you about a particular customer that has not gone through that journey. And why it was important for them to be working with us at the AWS. So C by GE is a $2.8 billion company that is a leader in a range of care product, whether it's air purifiers, water purifiers, sleep cares or consumer worldwide product. And they have over 9 million customers and they've been in that business since 2015. And the reason they started sending IoT product to the consumers is because they wanted to have access to the telemetry. They wanted to do remote diagnosis, they wanted to do preventive maintenance. And as I described earlier, they just wanted to know what do you guys like about our products so that we can make better product in the future.
So when they started in 2015, what they did is they said, hey, we have one product and we got a few customers in, you know, in 100 of 1000. And so we're gonna make our own applications. And so they outsourced the application to a third party that designed the application for us that gave us the data.
However, as C by GE became really successful with their product and the demand increased and they had more and more customers as they develop more product, different type of product and as they expanded into different regions, different geographical areas, they started to see problems with the third party platform. They had outsourced to in terms of scalability, reliability and quality of service, turn down times break devices. And therefore they decided that they were at the point where the scale and the breadth of their product required for them to own their own platform.
However, they did not want to do the heavy and different lifting and differentiate lifting that comes with making sure the devices just connect. And so they outsourced this to us at AWS IoT and by doing so, they saved money in terms of cost of managing all those devices and getting the data to the platform. And they have time and development cost in releasing new products. So they really were able to focus on what they do best, which is a consumer experience product that just work and the just work part of it is is what we do.
So we wanna make sure that you focus on what your customers see of you. The customer, the consumers will only see when it doesn't work, but when it does work, it just works. So how do you make a smart home product? What does it take? Well, there's basically three buckets that you have. Again, the first one is the devices. And so what you want to do is you want to figure out how do you build devices that operate at the edge that operates in your home that work the way they're supposed to work. And I made the specifications that you set for your product.
Then once you got that product and it's deployed in your home. The next question is how do you access that product? How do you control, manage, secure the data generated that product? And how do you ferry all that product back to your uh back end services? And the third bucket is the backend application. That's where you host all your data. That's where you have your analytics. That's where you have your compute pro product uh processes. And this is where you make sense of all this IoT data that's coming and that's how you take actions, whether it's, you know, preventive methods or notifications or just adding new features.
So what makes IoT extremely complicated when you look at this graph is you're dealing with three different sets of engineers, right? An embedded engineer that's gonna make the product, it's not gonna be able to develop your backend cloud applications. And that backend developer is not gonna be able to do embedded development on the device. And by the way, neither of those are communication network or security engineers. So that makes it extremely hard to build a team that has all the skills do end to end consumer product for the smart home.
Fortunately, we've been in a business for a long time. So we actually offer fully managed solutions to address those different buckets. So if you look at the devices, we happen to be the custodian of one of the most popular RTOS real time operating system um operating system in in the world and that's FreeRTOS. And what we did is not only we embedded FreeRTOS and we mandated FreeRTOS, but we added a set of libraries that makes it easy to connect all of the devices to the cloud. And that's our Cloud Development Kit. It's a set of libraries now that will require integration of those libraries and, and compiling this uh this uh software into your product.
If you don't want to do that, we also have AWS IoT Express Link, which is a little communication module that can be based either on WiFi or cellular that has all of those libraries compiled and orchestrated on your device. All you need to do is find that devices that you want to connect at the communication module and your product just became an IoT product ready to connect to the cloud.
In addition, if you have a home gateway or any kind of IoT gateways, we also have AWS IoT Greengrass and that's an edge runtime that works on an MPU on, on a gateway that allows you to move workload from the cloud closer to your home so that you don't carry as much data long haul between the cloud and where you need to make your decisions. That's better for latency, that's better for data rates.
On the connectivity front, we have three services that are extremely popular device management, device defender and IoT Core device management allows you to orchestrate and control your fleet of devices, segregate them, organize them. However you want to do it, take action, do firmware update. IoT Core allows you to ingest all of the data that come in that are generated by your devices. And device defender finds out what kind of security postures you have in your overall network from the device to the communication to the cloud. And it makes sure that there are no security vulnerabilities that you're exposed to.
Then once you've got that, then you can go to the cloud and you guys all know the cloud, there's a lot of capabilities in the cloud, whether it's storage datas, analytics, uh SageMaker for machine learning and AI application. Once you bring that data to the cloud, then you have a lot of resources available to make use of that data and take decisions.
However, as I said, constructing a smart home solution is hard, it's complicated and beyond the technology aspect of it, there is the reliability aspect of it. When you build an application for 10,000 units, going to 100,000 units is a step and then going to a million units is another step. Once you get to tens of millions of units deployed in the field, it's a very, very complicated problem to address. If you want to have quality of service. If you want to have resilience, if you want to be able to deliver constant quality of service to your consumers.
Same thing goes for um the diversity of your portfolio. If you're just managing a few lights, that's a fairly simple model to do. It's a very simple data model where you have light is on and off, light is bright or less bright and maybe the colors. But once you start adding to this security cameras or robots, it becomes very complicated. You have hundreds of parameters that now you need to ingest and maybe your platform was not designed for that to start with reliability availability.
All of this leads to maintaining and growing your customer trust. Once you lose your trust, your brand is affected
Once your brain is affected, your sales and revenues will be affected as well. So maintaining top notch performance for your smart devices is extremely important. Just like I asked at the beginning, you know, how many of you guys wish your home was smarter? It's a complicated product. So how do you stitch all of our services together to make a complete solution?
Well, this is sort of an architecture slide of how we do that. And as I said, it starts with the devices where you can have either freer tas and integrate your libraries on your own or you have expresslink as a module. And those devices have two paths to the cloud. They can either go directly to the cloud or they can go through an iot gateway and that's where aws ot green grass comes in play and ingest all the data does all the management of the devices and then connects you to the cloud.
And so once you have access to the cloud, then a t core will allow you to set up your data injections, it will set up, allow you to set up different type of rules, different type of management. It will manage some of the events that you want to care about. Whether it's, you know, the light diet or the appliances, uh motor is about to break down. Those are the kind of data that you can set up. And then after that, you have access to all of those services in the back end, eventually leading to applications, right?
So user interface, whether it's on a dashboard, on a smartphone or a tablet is really how the consumer relates to the product. Uh all of this is obviously very invisible to them, but this is very important and the device is working is very important at the bottom here.
Um I talked, I didn't talk too much about kinesis. But if you have smart cameras, we also have video injection services which is a little different than just telemetry data. So we have services dedicated to this and alo will will go dive a little deeper into that discussion.
So this is how you put a smart home solution together. This is how it takes the different services, stitch them and create value for both the o ems and the consumer now, it's not very simple to do. So it takes a lot of work, but just so that you understand what journey customers go through. Let me introduce you to anne and anne's going to walk you through how her and her team leveraged aws ot services and implemented them into their solutions. And thank you.
So you guys just saw like the most impressive iot situation ever, right? With aws. It's kind of synonymous, right? So i'm gonna take you through the opposite of that. So this is a space that's super new to us. We're very green and we're figuring it out, right? It's, it can be very overwhelming.
Um so for nestle, what aws is to iot we are to consumer goods, right? We sell over a billion products per day. We have 100 and 50 years of experience in the space. This is something we're really super comfortable with. We can definitely sell consumer goods. We have no issues there. But when we're looking at iot, you can see the stark differentiation and what we feel like we're really good at and what we're still getting really familiar with.
So you can see here, we, we do have one consistent iot platform leveraging aws iot core and that is currently powering this new space that we're entering into only 26 available commercial devices that we're supporting right now and we're really learning along the way. So we'll walk through a little bit of that.
Um you can see that, that accelerator that nestle's built with aws iot core supports several of our businesses. Um you guys might be most familiar with nespresso, but today we're gonna focus on pet care. So pet care purina, that's where, that's where my bread and butter is. Um so we're gonna focus on that example.
I would imagine that most of you are kind of working in a space we're trying to accomplish an ecosystem. Would i be right that most of you are somewhat involved in initiative around ecosystem? Uh we are no different there. So as we start to think about what our consumer journey looks like through the lifetime of pet ownership, we have several products that contribute to that life, lifetime of pet ownership.
Um right now, kind of starting at the right side, petfinder. Petfinder is a pet acquisition product. Uh it's an aggregator of all shelter pets across the country where you can go, you can look for pets that are up for adoption, you can filter through your preferences, but it really serves as our kind of lead generation into the ecosystem. So we have huge volumes there.
Um and then what we're a we're attempting to do now now is kind of continue that relationship to purina.com, which is where a core business is, right? Food treats and litter. Um and really that consumer goods focus product and then purina perks is a loyalty program. So once we have that relationship with you in that feeding journey. Once we're supporting you in that way, how do we keep you in the ecosystem? The loyalty program helps us drive that retention.
And now we're looking at pet tivity. So pet tivity is our iot brand. Um right now we have a smart litter box and market and that is what we're using to kind of facilitate kind of an ongoing relationship building effort with our consumers. We have kind of these moments of transaction throughout pet ownership, mostly at the beginning of pet ownership. But how do we start to facilitate that longer term relationship? And pet tivity is really our big bet there.
So we're looking at this kind of transitional moment, right? How do we really support this idea of ecosystem redefine our consumer relationship from those moments of transaction to journeys of experience and make sure that we're building that lifetime of loyalty that we're there when you need us throughout the whole lifetime of that pet.
Um and how do we build pet tivity to be the most trusted and recognized smart pet brand in the world by the end of 2025? Definitely an ambitious goal, especially since i just told you how new we are to this and how we're still figuring that out.
So what do, what did we do? Right. So over the last 18 months, what does that really look like? And how might you really get started in something that is so overwhelming and so big and so complex.
So we, we have three steps that we've broken it down to first proof of concept, second commercialization, third, expanding scale. So how do we look at these things uh in a way that we can kind of iteratively learn from our own work over time, we can lean on our partners at aws, on our agency. Partners lean on the people that have expertise in this space. I mean, who knows iot better than aws.
Um and really get to a space where we're feeling comfortable and we're feeling like we can achieve this really ambitious goal. So in the proof of concept phase, uh this was the fun one, right? This always is the fun one. So figuring it out, right? Is this feasible? Can we actually do this is their market fit? What is that opportunity size gonna look like? We know nothing about manufacturing hardware, how do we do that? So um we definitely operated in a start up mentality. We work in a consumer goods company. We're huge, we don't do well with start up mentality, but for the sake of making this work, it was necessary, it was necessary to kind of get that green light to operate really quickly and and really with agility and make pivots where we needed to, to try to drive this forward.
Um partnering with global teams to leverage aws and nestle developed accelerators. So again, i mentioned that nestle built this accelerator using aws iot core and that really was such a benefit to us because it took one of the biggest out of our way. I mean, you heard olivia kind of say those first two phases of of iot um devices and connectivity, we didn't have to do that because aws partnered with nestle and gave us that accelerator remove that barrier. Thank thank goodness.
Um define technical feasibility. So when you're looking at devices and platform api s and nestle iot accelerator, the business facing applications, the consumer facing applications, what does this really look like from an architecture standpoint? What do we need to do to make this work? Um that that was huge, right? Figuring that out in the iot space specifically is not like other spaces of cloud engineering that we're comfortable with and then address manufacturing firmware knowledge gaps.
So again, that was likely our biggest barrier because we, we did have that acceleration from work that had already been done with nestle aws. Um so what were our learnings? Our learnings cost matters. So especially when you're trying to prove out a business model having really high cost isn't the best way to sell. Then when we first generated the poc for our our smart litter box, our cloud cost per device was $7.
So when we're looking at a retail price and trying to make this attractive to consumers, having that high cost is a problem. We need to bring that down as much as possible. $7 per device was, was really not sustainable. Um architect, architecture needs to be more thoughtful and modular. So we built something that served the litter box, right? But only the litter box.
So when we're thinking about new data types or new devices or anything else that we wanna do in iot this was not what we built, we built for one singular use case. Um and then don't re invent the wheel, leverage aws, leverage iot services, we leverage parts of nestle that really could drive us forward. Like i said, this, we don't know the space. So why not lean on the partners that we have at our fingertips to really incorporate those learnings? Everyone else has already been down this path. We don't need to make the same mistakes as everyone else.
So phase two commercialization. So i mentioned earlier that $7 per device just for cloud um was not going to lend itself to us kind of really commercializing getting marketing buy in, getting media buy in uh leadership, buy in to kind of help drive this further and bigger. So first and foremost, looking at that as simple, it was as simple as looking at um aws billing council pulling that data into a visualized report and looking for patterns where we're releasing the highest cost just from doing that in partnership with our aws team.
We recognize the pattern over a couple of months. All of our cost is coming from how we have architected uh event ingestion. And we were able to knock that cost down from $7 to 250 per device. Just from that one change. It was that quick. It's just a matter of kind of having that vision of saying, ok, we need to monitor, monitor this over time. It was like a small learning, but it really was a big impact.
Um we needed to focus on a service based architecture based on data services that can serve any front end client. So when we're looking at what we were doing with iot, like i said, we were really super focused on getting that loader box in market, but we weren't thinking future forward.
Um and the way that we needed to start thinking about things is stop rebuilding things that we already have services for stop kind of building these really unique use cases that are only gonna serve a litter box. How do we look at services that already exist across our enterprise and start leveraging those things to make this a little bit more modular, a little bit more decoupled and really stop kind of recreating the wheel in that space.
So we designed something that would be much more service based less monolith um really using api mesh was, was how we were gonna get there. Uh but this was kind of the start of saying like this is how we could do it better and then leverage a consistent back in pattern for device data.
So the device data was kind of the new puzzle piece to us, right? We have other cloud infrastructure, we have other cloud architecture, we have really big products like petfinder that have a huge volume of traffic. But the device data was, what was the anomaly for us? We weren't used to dealing with that volume of data. We weren't used to ingesting that data and putting it where it needed to go to make it valuable and meaningful to an end user.
So we really had to figure that part out um and make sure we are fu future proofing along the way, right? So how do we make sure that we're using that iot core with that accelerator to set up a pattern that could be applicable to any data type and any device that we bring on to this portfolio uh in the future.
And then third phase expanded scale. That's, that's really where we are right now. So really starting to look at, ok, we had phase one, we had some learnings from that. We had phase two, which was really like, ok, we're gonna take these learnings from phase one. We're gonna put together a plan, take that to leadership, we're gonna get everyone's buy in and now we're doing it, we're in this expanded scale space.
So we're looking at things like like actually taking action on things, right? So consolidating databases from r ds to dynamo db, we're still looking at that cost per device, right? That was a big miss in phase one, not having kpis or measurement around cost per device which did impact that retail cost. So now that's one of our priority kpis cost per device, cloud cost should be low.
Dynamo db gives us that capability performance is the other one. How do we be as real time as possible if your cat has an elimination behavior and you don't get a notification right away, you're not gonna trust that product to give you accurate data. So dynamo db did both of those things for us, right? It decreased cost, increased performance and it's just going to allow us to scale in a way that's really graceful.
Um define modular device specific services that enable unique product features. So this is an interesting kind of concept as we move into the land of more devices right now, we have this litter box, but we're looking at adding three more devices to the portfolio next year. So if you a consumer have a litter box and a tracker for your pet, you would assume that those would be connected.
Um, I think Olivia was mentioning earlier, people have so many apps to manage and on boarding to manage and how do these things work together. And so we need to start thinking about not just the individual devices but overall household of devices and really kind of focusing on that smart home for pets.
So using API AppSync, we're able to not only service those individual services but combining those services to insight that might have multi, multi device households. So we're we're focused on kind of pulling that out, enabling those unique features, but also having features that are at the household level and then leverage enterprise services were available, avoid those single points of failure.
So we have, like I said earlier, we have these other enterprise services. Um most notably, I think is SSSSO solution uh using Cognito and we've custom build that solution, but it's at the enterprise level. So instead of rebuilding it for pet tity specific reusing that service, eliminating if that service goes down, all pet tity doesn't go down. Pet tity goes down, that service doesn't go down. So really starting to decouple and moize our architecture at the enterprise level, but looking at the bigger picture, not just looking at a singular use case over time.
And so the long term ambition, right, we want pet tivity to be the most trusted brand by 2025. But we also wanna serve this idea of ecosystem that is really ultimately the goal right is how do we get this really rich robust data from these iot devices, make the user experience really valuable, proactively inter interact with consumers at these times of vulnerability with their pets.
So you can see from that first slide where we just had four products mentioned to this slide where we start to truly be able to support an ecosystem. So we're going all the way from the point of acquisition to that transition of senior these can be really vulnerable moments for pets and their owners. So giving us um are having this opportunity for iot really understanding that data gives us the opportunity to really interact with users at at all points.
So this is an exciting thing. We're we're excited to get there, but um iot is really gonna be a game changer for us. So we're excited to kind of keep furthering this journey and i hope that you guys all do too.
Um Alec is gonna come tell us about how you can use AWS services to do some of these fun things. So take it away. Thank you, Ann. That was great as a pet lover myself. I must say this improving pet care around the world using the power of AWS. I, this is music to my ears.
Hi, my name is AJ I lead product management for IT services at AWS. Today. I'm here to talk about some of the recent innovations and product launches that our team at AWS I delivered that can be really helpful in your smart home journey.
So without further ado, let's get started, this slide would look familiar to you as my colleague, Olivia was sharing earlier that AW I provides you purpose built services to help with each stage of your smart home journey, whether you're building physical devices or trying to figure out the connectivity and control for devices or trying to build back in applications.
In 2023, we added new features and updates to almost every service listed on this page. But for in respect of time today, I'm going to focus on three services in particular that make the backbone of almost every smart home solution running on AWS cloud. These services are Amazon Kinesis Video Stream, AW I Core and AW I Device Management.
Raise your hand if you have used these services in the past. Nice. Quite a few of you for a quick introduction. Amazon K Video Stream is a managed a service that allows you to ingest process and store video data generated from your camera based ID devices with video stream. You can build real time computers and applications, for example, facial recognition or support batch processing and future playback of the ingested video.
And the next on my list is a code which many of you might have used. And we just heard about from Nestle how it helped them scale from like initial products to millions and millions of devices around the world. AW I code is an AW service that allows you to connect billions of IO devices to the AWS cloud and ingest trillions of messages from those connected devices.
AW I code provides you a secure bidirectional communication between your physical devices in the field and your back end applications running on the AWS cloud.
Next is a device management which allows you to manage and monitor your connected devices at scale with a device management. You can monitor the real time state of all your connected devices. You can be alerted whenever an unusual device behavior is detected and you can even sense over the updates to deploy a new firmware on those devices or to do bug fixes.
This year, we added two new major features to video stream to, to make it much easier for you to build video based application. First is we added web rtc support, web rtc or web real time communication is an open technology spec that allows real time video transmission between web and app applications, mobile applications, it provides the low latency that's really required for human to human audience video interaction.
Now, with web rtc support on k vs, you can easily build applications that require live video streaming between your camera based i devices and your application that control those devices and you can unlock multiple use cases. For example, you can allow parents to keep an eye on their kids room. You can enable homeowners to talk to the guests standing on the front door through the doorbell camera and the list just goes on
Along with web rtc support. We also launched KS Edge Agent, K edge agent provides you an efficient and cost effective way to connect to your ip cameras on premise with edge agent, you can stream and store the data locally on your on premise, data storages, you get full control on what data would be streamed to cloud. What part of processing you would like to do on premise and what processing you would like to do in the cloud. It essentially brings the CVS cloud intelligence to the edge.
You can remotely configure the upload frequency and time. Next on IO core, we added support for MQ 25 MQ. As many of you might already know message queuing tele transport is a very popular standard used for IO data transmission because of its lightweight implementation.
Ah MQ 25 is the latest iteration of the MQ standard and it gives many new features over the previous version of MQ, which was MT three, which makes the overall messaging system much more robust and reliable. It comes with dozens of new features, but some of the key ones are, for example, it provides message headers that allows you to process and route messages much faster in the cloud without even having to decode the message payload.
It provides you request response topics so that subscriber of a message can positively acknowledge the receipt of the message to the publisher. It comes with a feature called shared subscription that essentially allows you to load balance the trillions and billions of messages ingested from your physical devices. among your like a fleet of back and subscribers and applications. These features were not available in the previous version MP 23.
One thing to note here is AW I core supports both MQ 23 and MK 25. So you can easily have mixed fleet where let's say like your previous versions of I devices are using MQ 23 and you would like to leverage M 25 for your newer versions of devices. You can do all of that.
Now, next we added two new features to our society device management to give you much more control when you perform over the updates on your connected devices. First, we launched software catalog feature. Software package catalog is really useful when you have multiple product lines as Anne was just talking about and when you have multiple products and even multiple generations of the same product, then what ends up happening is you have multiple software packages that you need to manage that gets deployed on all those devices. You have multiple versions of those packages. You have so much of metadata that you need to manage. At that point, you would like to have the ability to view your fleet based on what software version is running on them. You may even like to say in software updates, you would like to target updates based on the software versions. For example, you would like to send updates to devices with older versions first, maybe to fix some like known vulnerabilities or add a feature backlog with software package catalog. You can do all of that
Along with SPC. We also launched what is called maintenance windows for over the year updates. Ah, how many of you have dealt a situation where, you know, like you turn on the tv to watch your favorite show and your tv suddenly starts updating its firmware as a tv manufacturer, i would like to avoid doing that with maintenance windows. You can time your ota updates in off peak cards or if you have products deployed globally, just like nestle has, then you can even time you can make sure that your ot timings are aligned with the local time zone to not cause any inconvenience to your end users.
What next new challenges keep popping up and innovation just goes on as we were sharing earlier that number of smart home devices are growing exponentially and with this growth, new challenges are coming up and aws is always looking for ways to innovate on behalf of our customers.
Let's look at some of those new challenges. By next year, 63% of the US household will have smart home devices and yet consumers struggle to during the initial setup of the devices that they purchase a smart device from one brand. OEM doesn't really work efficiently with device from another brand and another. OEM. There's a lack of interoperability within the smart home ecosystem.
Research shows that on an average a consumer spends 2.5 hours between customer support calls and reading product documentation just to get the device working when they purchase a new smart home device, as much as 22% of those consumers end up returning those products out of frustration. It's hard to believe. But even today, many connected, many devices that have the ability to connect to the cloud, never connect to the cloud. This includes the smart refrigerator in your house or your washing machine, your toaster. It's all because of the consumer frustration in setting up all those devices and connecting.
Uh Olivia mentioned earlier that an average US household on an average has 20 plus smart home devices, but they also end up maintaining 4 to 5 different applications to control those devices. Consumers are screaming for simplicity.
So what are you doing about it? First, the smart home industry led by Amazon Google Apple and the ZigBee Alliance has come together to solve the challenges for consumers by creating the Matter protocol. Today, Matter is backed by 700 plus companies around the world and within one year of Matter, 1.0 spec released, we have 200 plus Matter certified devices being sold in the market today.
What is Matter? Matter is a single IP based application protocol that aims to ensure that all the devices and smart home applications in your home speak the same language. Think of it as a abstraction layer between your physical I devices and the software applications that control those devices Matter certification is a seal of trust that there is inter operability within the smart home ecosystem and that you can use just one app to control all your devices in your home.
In parallel from AWS side, we are making two major updates to our services to solve these challenges for our consumers. First to eliminate the initial setup complexity and almost offer a zero touch setup experience to our customers. We are bringing in the learnings from Amazon's first party, Alexa and Echo devices where if you have used them, you remember that you one box, the device power it on and it just works. You don't even have to provide internet access to it. It automatically recognizes other devices in your house. We are trying to bring similar capability for all AWS customers.
Second to enable interoperability, we are creating a control layer for IT devices that would support almost every protocol that is currently used to control IO devices including the Matter protocol.
So what value consumers can expect out of it? Number one, they will have one app that unifies the experience across all smart home devices in their house. Irrespective of the brand make model manufacturer, smart home applications builder will have choice to choose the hardware they would like to support and they will be able to offer unified experiences automation routines that that requires devices to work in synchronous like Olivia was mentioning earlier when you step into your, you know, like your driveway, your camera recognizes you. It automatically tells the garage door to open, it automatically tells the lights to turn on. It automatically tells the thermostat to set the temperature for your needs. All of this requires the devices to talk to each other and it should not be restricted to device only from one brand and all of them are designed in a similar way.
So how can you bring your smart home ideas to reality at AWS? We believe that there is no one approach that works in all scenarios. It really depends upon your business situation. The amount of in house software development expertise that you have the amount of customization that you're looking for in your smart home solution and your desired time to market.
We have some customers who prefer to build solutions themselves on top of our building block AW services to get full customization and you know, like feature that they would like to have in their solutions. On the other hand, there are some customers who prefer to use purple purpose built AW services that specifically applies to their use case.
We also have buyer customers who prefer to buy a turn key solution and not deal with any building. They prefer to work with an AWS partner who have built services solutions and to end solutions on top of our services or they work with our AWS professional services to get a custom solution built for them the way.
So get started today, reach out to our solution, architects, brainstorm your ideas, connect with an a partner or reach out to our professional services to get hands on development support with that.
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