Kramer Electronics is making headlines with one of the biggest and perhaps most provocative product announcements at InfoComm 2016— Kramer Control.
Kramer Control is an entirely new cloud-based solution that offers drag-and-drop configuration, works on any interface, on any operating system and is designed to cut customers’ automation costs significantly.
The real clincher is this: instead of requiring programmers, the system will merely require “configurers,” people with less programming expertise who will be able to configure the system fairly easily. The demographic Kramer expects to appeal to the most? Millennials.
“Millennials don’t want to learn a programming language,” says Clint Hoffman, VP of marketing for Kramer. “Programming doesn’t exist anywhere else anymore. Millennials will embrace this new style and they’ll take control to places it has never been before. I think we’re opening up the control market to so many places. Programmers will be our configurers of the future.”
CI editor Tom LeBlanc spoke to Itai Bengal of iRule, who worked with Kramer on the development of Kramer Control, at InfoComm.
More from Kramer’s CI BEST Award for Kramer Control:
Kramer Control uses distributed smart devices or “brains” in the system. Kramer Control is configured according to your real world layout; you specify a very simple hierarchy of your installation, from the room, to the building, to the campus. This allows the brains in the system to recognize each other. Incorporate automatic capture and display of any possible data analytics for easy ROI measurement, and you have an incredibly powerful, yet extremely affordable modern control system built for today and tomorrow.
Kramer Control will open up more than just the highest-end rooms and installations for control. Since it is incredibly scalable and also incredibly economical, yet full featured, it will make sophisticated control available in so many more applications.
This opens up new opportunities for integrators. The dashboard component will also present integrators with potential new reoccurring revenue streams. Finally, with the use of sensors and maximizing the growing Internet of things (IoT) trend, Kramer Control can also give integrators the opportunity to create unique automated solutions that enhance the productivity of customers.
