The new Commander in Chief, Guy Lawrence has taken office at Rogers, he has conducted his one on one interviews with the management team and made his assessments of his front line. Two weeks ago we saw the first two casualties as Executive Vice-President John Boynton and Senior Vice-President Shelagh Stoneham were let go as Guy trimmed his management team. As part Guy Lawrence’s first 90 days on the job he also took time to decide the future of Rogers which includes what products ad services remain part of Canada’s largest telecom’s future. Let’s be honest, they have their hands in just about anything and everything that is connected to the Internet. Back in August 2011, Rogers launched its Smart Home Monitoring Service, based on the last few quarterly earning the service isn’t bringing as much revenue as they had expected.
Fast forward to today, and Rogers has stronger competition from companies such as Belkin, D-Link to name a few, but of course who can forget Google’s $3.2 billion dollar acquisition of Nest which makes smoke detectors and thermostats that can be controlled from your smartphone. Such a large acquisition has triggered a lot of questions about the future of the home automation industry. Since Google makes more than half of its revenues from advertising, another big question is whether Google will turn Nest into a big advertising platform and server advertisements to consumers. Nest isn’t Google’s most recent move to connect with consumers, you may recall Google Canada recently shifted its management as Chris O’Neil stepped down from his role of Managing Director to head up day to day operation for Google Glass as they look to make a big retail push.
Rogers will also have another competitor to worry about as rumours have started to surface that today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2014) they will make some announcements about their iHome, which is their Home Automation offering.
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