Over a decade ago, an executive from one of the top home automation brands asked to meet with me at CEDIA. Meetings like this were fairly common, as PanTech Design would handle a lot of out-of-the-box programming projects. But that wasn’t why the executive had called the meeting. No, he had the express purpose of telling me to “brush up my resume because they were going to put me out of a job.”

I looked him dead in the eye and said “you’re absolutely wrong. The only way to get rid of programming is through a lot of programming. But good luck trying!” 

Here was their plan: outsourcing all of the programming to China.

As you can probably guess, it didn’t go so well.

Two years later, I get another meeting request at CEDIA. That same executive wanted to hire PanTech Design to do their programming. We politely declined.

I don’t mention this story to wave the “I told you so” flag at that person, but rather because it perfectly illustrates the lack of awareness of the role that programming plays in home automation.

Our industry has been trying to make programming go away for a long time. Business owners hate it because it’s intangible, and it’s hard to sell and manage properly. But what many business owners don’t understand is that, when you’re talking about eliminating the need for programming, there are really only two paths you can take.

• Path #1: Use someone else’s programming.
• Path #2: Create your own programming.

In essence, the end result is that the only way to get rid of programming is by doing great programming.

Eliminating programming means making compromises, and there are very few companies in the world that understand this industry well enough to know where to put those compromises in their software. If you make the wrong compromises, you lose control of your software to a point. You’re now in a position where you’ve programmed yourself into a sandbox, and you have to stay within the confines of the software you’ve written.

Here’s the better approach: getting rid of the conditions and rules associated with programming without compromising your ability to customize systems.

So that brings us to now. We saw a problem, and we developed a software to solve it. It’s called ADAPT. It’s a software for Crestron residential systems – we won’t get too much into the features here, but if you’re interested in learning more, we’re happy to talk with you about it.

Just gives us a call at 817.898.0339 or fill out this quick form for more info.