iRule and sister company On Controls for the professional installation channel is a newish and growing home automation provider with inexpensive software to power some of the most demanding applications.
But iRule has been crossing over into commercial markets. For example, the company scored big with Magnolia stores last year and soon will be controlling the entire Best Buy campus in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
Now iRule has its greatest opportunity in the commercial space via a new partnership with Kramer Electronics, a leading provider of AV distribution systems for commercial venues.
For a few years, Kramer has offered a basic K-Touch AV control system for installations that required a modest amount of control but didn’t warrant a full-fledged system like Crestron or AMX. Now Kramer doesn’t just want to offer K-Touch as a convenience to integrators. The Israel-based company wants to own the commercial automation business.
As such, it teamed with iRule to create a system that controls commercial environments including lighting, HVAC, communications, AV and more.
Introduced at ISE 2015, the new K-Touch v3.0 (KT3) system includes a small networked control hub running a highly customized version of iRule, as well as a cloud-based service for integrating systems worldwide — as many Kramer users require. Previously, K-Touch comprised a mess of serial controllers. Now it’s basically a network hub and the cloud.
Aviv Ron, VP business and strategy for Kramer, notes that the major control systems manufacturers started encroaching on Kramer’s AV distribution business years ago, giving integrators the “incentive to buy everything from one vendor.”
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Ron says Kramer now is “leapfrogging the competition” with the new KT3, which it hopes will obviate the need for third-party controllers. He says he talked to “everyone” in the control business before selecting iRule because “we liked the flexibility and their enthusiasm about getting into commercial.”
iRule founder and CEO Itai Ben-Gal couldn’t be more excited.
“Commercial is a huge part of how we’ve been growing,” he says. “It makes sense to go forward with a strong partner.”
At ISE, Kramer reserved its big stage for two presentations. One of them was K-Touch. The new software touches virtually all of Kramer’s existing applications, but also creates new categories for the company in terms of command, control and collaboration.
In one demonstration, Kramer was showing its AV hardware in a boardroom application, where (fake) users around the globe were communicating with each other by way of K-Touch software.
Each user in a boardroom can “take over” a display by pressing a button on their computer or smart device. All the switching happens in the background over IP. Without a major investment in third-party control systems, users would otherwise have to swap out VGA or USB and maybe press a button or three.
