Its official Nick Liebertone's Convergent Technology has snared the rights to distribute the Control 4 range of products. It was this time last year that Liebertone lost the rights to the Creston range of products. The first of the Control 4 range to be distributed in Australia will be shown for the first time at next weeks CEDIA Expo in Surfers Paradise.
"This has been a long battle but I can now confirm that we are the official distributor of Control4 in Australia" Said Nick Liebertone the Managing Director of Convergent Technology. We will not be ready to distribute product until the last quarter of 2005. "We will not have all the product range but most of it" he added. The battle to snare the rights to the Control4 range in Australia has been fierce with Amber Technology being one of the losers. Kevin Chatfield of AV Technology claims that rejected the product after extensive discussions with Control4 at this years CES show in Las Vegas. He claims the product is not mature enough and has not been in the market long enough for it to be tested. On the other hand Nick Liebertone, the former distributor of Crestron and now managing director of Convergent Technologies, has persisted in chasing Control4. It was only a few weeks ago that he escorted a senior Control4 executive around various CEDIA members.
In recent weeks Control4 started shipping product into the US market and they believe that a key priority right now is getting their model right in their home market before they branch into international distribution arrangements. Control4 is popular because it is a leader in a new generation of wireless and wired IP-based products for home automation. What the company is doing is delivering a range of solutions that allow a reseller to sell a scaleable solution from entry level to high end.
Will West, chief executive officer of Control4, believes that the Control4 technology will allow CEDIA members and non members - including IT solution providers - to tap into the new construction home automation market, broadening it into a multi-million dollar industry in Australia. West, chief technology officer Eric Smith and vice president of marketing Mark Morgan co-founded Control4 in March 2003. West and Smith had by 1995 developed an early protocol for residential automation control, which they named PHAST. The system was sold to AMX in 1997.
Bound by a non-compete agreement, West and Smith then went on to found the broadband business service provider STSN in 1998. West, Smith and STSN veteran Morgan remain owners in STSN. Their experience there – managing broadband service via an IP-based network, with disparate devices entering and leaving the network (usually in a hotel or office building) – laid the groundwork for Control4."Whereas PHAST was proprietary and focused on rich people building homes this year, Control4 is very much based in IP, open-based standards," West says. "We couldn't figure out why people weren't incorporating more new technologies – technologies that were cheaper, better and faster – into the home automation environment."
