Building a smarter IoT ecosystem for a century-old brand
Helping customers today and tomorrow
For more than a century, Intermatic has built reliable, easy-to-install lighting control and energy management solutions for electrical, pool and spa, HVAC/R, retail, and OEM markets. From its Illinois headquarters, Intermatic reaches residential and commercial customers across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.
Since 2017, Vervint has partnered with Intermatic to modernize how customers control their home and commercial lighting and energy systems, architecting and evolving the company’s entire IoT ecosystem from its first connected timer through voice assistants, mobile apps, and the cloud platform tying it all together.
Make installation painless
Let contractors set up connected products like the Ascend Smart Timer without needing an internet connection or the homeowner present.
Reach customers on their terms
Support voice control, mobile apps, and cross-platform experiences so customers could manage their home the way they wanted to.
Build one ecosystem, not a patchwork
Architect the cloud platform, apps, and voice integrations to work as a single connected system that could scale with new products and regulations over time.
Time-saving connections
Vervint’s initial work with Intermatic expanded capabilities for the company’s Ascend Smart 7-Day Programmable Wi-Fi Timer, a connected product controlling lights and other electrical loads to improve energy efficiency, safety, and ambiance. Vervint created a peer-to-peer connection for the Ascend timer so contractors could complete installation and onboarding without an internet connection or the homeowner present, saving about 15 minutes per install and the hassle of finding a hotspot.
Vervint also designed and developed Intermatic’s voice user interfaces for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, researching and refining the experience with real consumer insight before launch, and used the cross-platform tool Xamarin to build native iOS and Android apps from a single codebase, extending Intermatic’s reach across a broader customer audience.
One ecosystem, built to last
To support current and future needs, Vervint architected all the foundational elements of Intermatic’s IoT ecosystem: the cloud platform, the Ascend Smart Timer mobile app, voice applications, and more, designing the underlying messaging structure and workflows so cloud, mobile app, product, and voice teams could build, test, and iterate together instead of correcting course after working in silos. Over time, Vervint became Intermatic’s trusted partner for new product launches.
When new 2019 California energy efficiency guidelines created an opportunity for a new compliance solution, Vervint designed a separate IoT cloud platform for the Bluetooth-driven Arista Advanced Lighting Control System, synchronizing local configuration with a cloud database that backs up and persists data, while keeping the installer experience simple: generate a map of what’s installed, push it to the cloud, done.
A roadmap built for what’s next
Since Intermatic debuted the Ascend timer in 2021, hundreds of IoT services have launched. To help Intermatic keep innovating, Vervint led architectural discovery to identify business growth goals and development requirements, recommending a sister cloud platform that could support new product lines and device generations while preserving the reliability customers already counted on. Innovations included modernized messaging protocols, enhanced AWS-based security, a shared device authorization model for multiple users on one device, faster and more granular firmware updates, and expanded command-and-control features built on AWS services like API Gateway, Lambda, and IoT Core.
With a unified, scalable IoT ecosystem now underpinning everything from smart timers to voice assistants, Intermatic is positioned to keep bringing more than a century of reliability into an increasingly connected future.
