Savant stands out as smart home genius

Home is where the heart is, and today’s homeowners want to be surrounded by comfort, convenience, and efficiency. With whole home automation, these luxuries are easily possible. Smart homes unite automated controls for security, lighting, temperature, power and simplified wireless networking, but they need visibility and management to keep them up and running.

“Some homes and buildings resemble large enterprises with lights, cameras, phones, laptops, TV, and energy controls. They can be pretty sophisticated environments,” says Aaron Gutin, product category director at Savant Systems.

Savant didn’t want to merely provide a full suite of smart home solutions; the company wanted to ensure that consumers have the best possible smart home automation experience.  At the center of the home is the wireless network, which has long been delivering online games, movies, and Internet access.

Savant needed its home Wi-Fi network foundation to be easy to configure, and most importantly, reliable. Poor performance and downtime would prevent automated home controls from executing properly and frustrate the fast-growing customer base. Savant also needed easy-to-use troubleshooting tools that would allow its dealers to keep their customer networks running smoothly, foster brand loyalty, and drive additional sales.

With Juniper solutions, powered by Mist AI, Savant dealers are wireless heroes who keep automated controls performing flawlessly, movies streaming on date night, and games moving to the next level during sleepovers.   

Savant Smart Networking is the newest Savant service, and it has one goal: “We’re simplifying the dealers’ day,” says Gutin. “They can assure customers that they found the network problem and fix it so life can go back to the way it was.”

The Savant developers dug into the Juniper Mist APIs to create a dashboard customized for dealers. The code experts were impressed with how easy it was to use the APIs and create the new Savant Smart Networking service with Wi-Fi Assurance and Marvis Virtual Network Assistant.

“I’ve worked on about 100 integrations,” says Paul Langdon, director of cloud architecture at Savant. “This software and the APIs were the best I’ve seen. They had great example calls and thorough documentation, which meant I never spent more than a few minutes finding what I needed.”

In a short time, the developers created an app for dealers that gave them instant visibility into everything happening on their customers’ Wi-Fi networks. The dealers gained an enterprise-grade networking solution that helps them design, deploy, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks supporting smart-home components.

“The system is extremely stable and offers great insight about the network. It’s great to see the health of the system and any issues we need to troubleshoot,” said Matt Milstein, Owner of M2 Multimedia, a Savant dealer. “Setting up the APs is a breeze in the UI!”

Among the features M2 uses are zero-touch provisioning, including automated Savant device discovery; network optimization using advanced learning algorithms; and machine learning-based analysis of the user experience to correlate problems and automatically detect the root causes of issues.