Comcast and Alarm.com are reportedly in talks to buy Icontrol, a provider of back-end software behind many home security offerings.
Medium reports that Icontrol would sell its Piper security products and other assets to Alarm.com. Meanwhile, another section of the business will go to Comcast.
Here is an excerpt from Medium’s report:
A sale makes sense. Icontrol was formed in 2004 to provide security and home automation services for companies like ADT and Comcast, and raised more than $90 million to do it. It won big customers at first, but it felt like the rush of [do-it-yourself] connected gadgets that started hitting the market in 2013 and 2014 caught it off guard. To adapt it announced a new product called Touchstone that consumers could self-install.
Then it doubled down by purchasing Blacksumac, the maker of the Piper an all-in-one security device, in 2014. But with Piper and Touchstone, Icontrol was competing against its service provider customers. That was confusing at best and irritating to them at worst. More importantly, as other companies turned to the smart home, they chose other providers or built their own platforms. ADT has thrown some of its business to a rival company, and when Comcast started working with individual IoT device companies, it chose to integrate those into its Xfinity Home service itself without using Icontrol.
This will certainly be an interesting story to follow in the future.
