MIOS Acquisition

I figured this deserved it’s own thread. So, what do you all think?

[broken link removed]

Broken link?

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/globe-newswire-ezlo-announces-acquisition-of-mios-to-accelerate-time-to-market-in-smart-home-sector.html

Thanks for fixing the link!

Happy to answer any questions you may have guys.

Who are you?
What’s your title?
What actual authority do you possess?
What’s the business model you expect to operate under?
What do you think you know about vera customers?
Did anyone in your organization think to read these forums as part of due diligence? Trick question. If you had, you would have known most of the issues and come here with an announcement and a plan.

Good, I can only see good things coming out of this. What are your plans?

[quote=“kigmatzomat, post:6, topic:199656”]Who are you?
https://www.forbes.com/profile/melih-abdulhayoglu/

What’s your title?
-Chairman of the Board

What actual authority do you possess?
-a lot! :slight_smile:

What’s the business model you expect to operate under?
-We want home automation to be accessible to everyone. We want to create the platform for home automation to run on. We have to reduce the cost of ownership of home automation, as well as create an ecosystem for everyone else to contribute to this ecosystem by developing their own versions of home automation products.

What do you think you know about vera customers?
-I was a Vera customer! Reason why I setup Ezlo is because Vera didn’t provide me what i needed. Both quality and capability. That was in 2013. They certainly have come a long way, but still some to go. By joining forces we hope to accelerate. But i am sure there is a lot i have to learn from you guys here…so please do tell me, what should I know about a vera customer? what should I do to help?

-Did anyone in your organization think to read these forums as part of due diligence? Trick question. If you had, you would have known most of the issues and come here with an announcement and a plan.
Like I said, I was a Vera customer and fully aware of the forum. Its unrealistic for us to put a plan at the acquisition time, not possible. We have to understand resources, work plan, recruit new resources etc before we can give you a plan that the company can stick to. Look, our belief and capabilities might certainly be different than Vera. For starters, I am here talking to you!We believe unless a company is fully involved with its users, it can’t understand nor can it solve its users’ problems. Me being here should be a good indicator and an example. You can see how we look after our users by checking my other companies https://forums.comodo.com/index.php where we have 168,000+ end users and https://c1forum.comodo.com/ 34,000+ IT Admins and MSPs. I take part on both forums and its very important that the whole company is engaged with our users. You are welcome to ask questions on those forums about me or how we I operate. One thing for sure is that every company will have a problem. Anyone telling you that they won’t have a problem would be lying to you. The difference is how you deal with the situation when you have a problem. This is what differentiates a good company from bad company. All I can say is, we always and always listen to our users, and will do our best to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and learn from those issues. Now to be able to do this, we have to create a whole new layer of team/capability/processes etc, so will take us a bit of time, but we will do it as fast as possible. Vera is made up of great people but not enough resources, and that resource problem is what we can solve![/quote]

6 Likes

Good, I can only see good things coming out of this. What are your plans?[/quote]

Thank you :slight_smile: Yup, thats the plan. We have done a huge amount of due diligence on Vera and one thing for sure is that they amazing people, amazing engineers and care for their users, but they simply didn’t have enough resources :(… We are solving that as well as bringing a lot of innovation on top of that. I answered a lot of kigmatzomat’s questions above, if you have any more happy to answer. We are here to serve you guys!

1 Like

[quote=“melih, post:8, topic:199656”]What do you think you know about vera customers?
-I was a Vera customer! Reason why I setup Ezlo is because Vera didn’t provide me what i needed. Both quality and capability. That was in 2013. They certainly have come a long way, but still some to go. By joining forces we hope to accelerate. But i am sure there is a lot i have to learn from you guys here…so please do tell me, what should I know about a vera customer? what should I do to help?

-Did anyone in your organization think to read these forums as part of due diligence? Trick question. If you had, you would have known most of the issues and come here with an announcement and a plan.
Like I said, I was a Vera customer and fully aware of the forum. Its unrealistic for us to put a plan at the acquisition time, not possible. We have to understand resources, work plan, recruit new resources etc before we can give you a plan that the company can stick to. Look, our belief and capabilities might certainly be different than Vera. For starters, I am here talking to you!We believe unless a company is fully involved with its users, it can’t understand nor can it solve its users’ problems. Me being here should be a good indicator and an example. You can see how we look after our users by checking my other companies https://forums.comodo.com/index.php where we have 168,000+ end users and https://c1forum.comodo.com/ 34,000+ IT Admins and MSPs. I take part on both forums and its very important that the whole company is engaged with our users. You are welcome to ask questions on those forums about me or how we I operate. One thing for sure is that every company will have a problem. Anyone telling you that they won’t have a problem would be lying to you. The difference is how you deal with the situation when you have a problem. This is what differentiates a good company from bad company. All I can say is, we always and always listen to our users, and will do our best to resolve the issues as quickly as possible and learn from those issues. Now to be able to do this, we have to create a whole new layer of team/capability/processes etc, so will take us a bit of time, but we will do it as fast as possible. Vera is made up of great people but not enough resources, and that resource problem is what we can solve![/quote]

Well, I am impressed. Your post above didn’t quite format correctly, but I understood and it gives me a lot of hope for the future of Vera.

As far as “so please do tell me, what should I know about a vera customer? what should I do to help?”: Well, that is a tall order and not sure any one user can really speak for the whole, but here goes - start by making Vera products stable.

The UI7 Vera products reload Luup far too often. If UI7 was rock-solidly stable, a lot of things change, and new opportunities would arise from that. In my opinion Vera currently doesn’t really have test scenarios that look like the Vera configurations that many forum users build (multiple plug-ins, PLEG automation, Lua functions), and hence they don’t really understand that their products are unstable.

1 Like
-I was a Vera customer! Reason why I setup Ezlo is because Vera didn't provide me what i needed. Both quality and capability. That was in 2013. They certainly have come a long way, but still some to go.

Ah. You should be aware that many people here think that vera peaked around 2014 and it’s been a rocky road since.

Back then it would have UI5. It was a solid, reliable but not flashy platform.

UI6 was a short lived sequel that was widely panned and, I think, only shipped on one product. Lots of people tried to downgrade from UI6 to UI5.

UI7 was released in a hurry to replace UI6. It is Web2.0 metaphors with a lot of white space and way too many page refreshes. Despite the slow UI, at first blush was an upgrade over UI5 as it supported the 500 zwave series features. (I bought a veraplus with ui7 for door locks and garage door controllers that required the new security). There was some issues with the wifi features but it didn’t seem bad at first. Ui7 (and maybe ui6) required using new cloud systems.

However the quest for new features has apparently come at the cost of stability. There is Alexa support but I think 3 firmware releases in the past 2 years have been officially retracted. Sometimes the issues the firmware created required users to disenroll and re-eneroll devices, which is both time consuming and erases all related scenes, requiring reprogramming. The onboard services for the new cloud features are directly contributing to the instability, even when nothing is using those services.

Right now, a lot of users would be happy if UI8 was UI5 with support for the current zwave feature set.

You will note many threads on people discussing options to escape vera, like HomeAssistant and HomeSeer. I have a couple hundred dollars of vera gear and many hours of scripting effort. I abandoned that sunk cost and spent another couple hundred dollars on a Homeseer controller.

I don’t know what vera’s corporate customers say, but their direct customers are pretty much kept by the price/performance ratio because of its local processing and fairly robust (3rd party app based) device support. If all was good, you would still need to keep an eye on Hubitat, which is in the same price/performance zone but is new so device support is still a little light.

But if the cloud-service components cause issues when offline (which they can over time) then it isn’t fully local, and Wink/Smartthings becomes competitors and they are cheaper and more widely available.

And if vera developers keep leaving, you lose the device support that makes you feature comparable to HomeSeer and more appealing than Hubitat (which is currently siphoning users away from SmartThings).

At which point vera will lose all but the most die hard direct customers and will become the cable box of home automation where the users refer to it as “that smarthome box my (insert service here) company gave me for free/$5 per mo. It’s ok but I wouldnt buy it if it wasn’t part of the bundle”.

1 Like

[quote=“kigmatzomat, post:11, topic:199656”]

-I was a Vera customer! Reason why I setup Ezlo is because Vera didn’t provide me what i needed. Both quality and capability. That was in 2013. They certainly have come a long way, but still some to go.

Ah. You should be aware that many people here think that vera peaked around 2014 and it’s been a rocky road since.

Back then it would have UI5. It was a solid, reliable but not flashy platform.

UI6 was a short lived sequel that was widely panned and, I think, only shipped on one product. Lots of people tried to downgrade from UI6 to UI5.

UI7 was released in a hurry to replace UI6. It is Web2.0 metaphors with a lot of white space and way too many page refreshes. Despite the slow UI, at first blush was an upgrade over UI5 as it supported the 500 zwave series features. (I bought a veraplus with ui7 for door locks and garage door controllers that required the new security). There was some issues with the wifi features but it didn’t seem bad at first. Ui7 (and maybe ui6) required using new cloud systems.

However the quest for new features has apparently come at the cost of stability. There is Alexa support but I think 3 firmware releases in the past 2 years have been officially retracted. Sometimes the issues the firmware created required users to disenroll and re-eneroll devices, which is both time consuming and erases all related scenes, requiring reprogramming. The onboard services for the new cloud features are directly contributing to the instability, even when nothing is using those services.

Right now, a lot of users would be happy if UI8 was UI5 with support for the current zwave feature set.

You will note many threads on people discussing options to escape vera, like HomeAssistant and HomeSeer. I have a couple hundred dollars of vera gear and many hours of scripting effort. I abandoned that sunk cost and spent another couple hundred dollars on a Homeseer controller.

I don’t know what vera’s corporate customers say, but their direct customers are pretty much kept by the price/performance ratio because of its local processing and fairly robust (3rd party app based) device support. If all was good, you would still need to keep an eye on Hubitat, which is in the same price/performance zone but is new so device support is still a little light.

But if the cloud-service components cause issues when offline (which they can over time) then it isn’t fully local, and Wink/Smartthings becomes competitors and they are cheaper and more widely available.

And if vera developers keep leaving, you lose the device support that makes you feature comparable to HomeSeer and more appealing than Hubitat (which is currently siphoning users away from SmartThings).

At which point vera will lose all but the most die hard direct customers and will become the cable box of home automation where the users refer to it as “that smarthome box my (insert service here) company gave me for free/$5 per mo. It’s ok but I wouldnt buy it if it wasn’t part of the bundle”.[/quote]

kigmatzomat ,

very insightful indeed.
1)Product must work
2)Product must be cost effective
3)Product must address all of user’s home automation needs
4)Product must be available to developers so that they can develop their own versions of home automation products.

Vera seems to be stuck at 1…to be honest, its an easy problem to fix (once you know how, and luckily thats we do! ) We will deliver all 4 but we are gong to start with 1…there has been much focus on stability or bug fixes in the development team due to resources…that is going to change! We will get the team to focus on stability and bug fixes asap. No point in adding features to a product that doesn’t work!

Keep the feedback coming, afterall we are building all these for you! It has to be to your satisfaction!

2 Likes

I’d like to echo what others have said. Vera is mission-critical to its users. All other features should be subordinate to stability. Period. I think you need to fix the broken release process, refactor the system so that the addition of new devices doesn’t necessarily require firmware updates, and only happens for devices the user actually has. And, make firmware updates for the executive possible without the OpenWrt distro in tow, because when that goes wrong, time/difficulty to repair goes orbital.

As for the UI, UI7 isn’t great, but it’s also something I believe Vera can never get right for everyone. I’d like to see Vera tighten up its UI in appearance, but also the code, which is a morass of per-device exceptions driven by schizophrenic rules for determining what device it’s presenting. Then, a few upgrades and tweaks to the JavaScript API and the Luup requests interface would take them the last mile in making a platform on which other UIs could be developed. Let the world make other UIs, and pick what it likes. If you really wanted to be a mensch about it, create a well-defined environment for this so that the Vera could actually serve those UIs itself, so users wouldn’t have to figure out how to use a Raspberry Pi, NUC, or some other local server. Keep your own UI simple, clean and fast. Let the rest of the world do the UI stunt work, so you can focus on core quality.

And I’ve already said elsewhere, creating some more support around the developer community would be very welcome.

2 Likes

[quote=“rigpapa, post:13, topic:199656”]I’d like to echo what others have said. Vera is mission-critical to its users. All other features should be subordinate to stability. Period. I think you need to fix the broken release process, refactor the system so that the addition of new devices doesn’t necessarily require firmware updates, and only happens for devices the user actually has. And, make firmware updates for the executive possible without the OpenWrt distro in tow, because when that goes wrong, time/difficulty to repair goes orbital.

As for the UI, UI7 isn’t great, but it’s also something I believe Vera can never get right for everyone. I’d like to see Vera tighten up its UI in appearance, but also the code, which is a morass of per-device exceptions driven by schizophrenic rules for determining what device it’s presenting. Then, a few upgrades and tweaks to the JavaScript API and the Luup requests interface would take them the last mile in making a platform on which other UIs could be developed. Let the world make other UIs, and pick what it likes. If you really wanted to be a mensch about it, create a well-defined environment for this so that the Vera could actually serve those UIs itself, so users wouldn’t have to figure out how to use a Raspberry Pi, NUC, or some other local server. Keep your own UI simple, clean and fast. Let the rest of the world do the UI stunt work, so you can focus on core quality.

And I’ve already said elsewhere, creating some more support around the developer community would be very welcome.[/quote]

Agreed 100%!

I was half way through writing what is effectively rigpapa’s post (except he said it better.) And, melih, rigpapa is one of the top contributors of solid, well-designed plug-ins that have gone a long way towards making Vera useful. Give him, amg0, akboor, and so many other terrific contributors a rock-solid platform and development environment and watch Vera soar!

1 Like

That is exactly what we want to provide, a platform! Between the cloud and backend of Vera/Mios , amazing controller capabilities of Ezlo and (some more capabilities that I can’t yet reveal as they are not launched) our developer ecosystem is going to be buzzing with Innovation! And I want to reduce the cost of home automation!!! I find it too expensive to expect someone to pay $100 for a controller!!.. $20 is a fair price for now (did that Smart Home - The Last You'll Ever Need - Ezlo Smart Home )…(i am working on bringing it to under $5…but will take me time)… This way our developers will have a huge ecosystem to provide their creations to.

I agree with what others said.

I had to put a mini pc just to offload some work from the controller to improve stability.

For me better device support is a must. I’m waiting since one year and a half for the right support for a zwave device you declared fully supported on your site - which is not.

Speed is a key too. I have scenes turning on lights that sometimes are fast, sometimes took 5 minutes to be completed, becoming unuseful and lowering the wife acceptance factor.

Overall, I hate to develop for the platform, because you have to search for things on the forums and documentation is horrible. I’m a professional developer and this is one of the worst documentation I ever found.

I see potential but time is running up. Good luck!

[quote=“therealdb, post:17, topic:199656”]I agree with what others said.

I had to put a mini pc just to offload some work from the controller to improve stability.

For me better device support is a must. I’m waiting since one year and a half for the right support for a zwave device you declared fully supported on your site - which is not.

Speed is a key too. I have scenes turning on lights that sometimes are fast, sometimes took 5 minutes to be completed, becoming unuseful and lowering the wife acceptance factor.

Overall, I hate to develop for the platform, because you have to search for things on the forums and documentation is horrible. I’m a professional developer and this is one of the worst documentation I ever found.

I see potential but time is running up. Good luck![/quote]

We are on it!
Can you please tell me here or PM me exactly which zwave support you refer to…Please do tell me everything you need…bugs, feature requests, wishes…all…

thank you!

Topic Stickied and moved to Official Announcements board. 8)
Welcome, Melih!

Why can’t I reply on the original MIOS acquisition topic on the official announcement section?

Started by nameless and replied by mr Melih?