SmartThings for Enterprise Level?

Hey all,

How reliable is SmartThings in 2019? Currently considering it for a longitudinal health study as part of a university with around 60 homes. I’m mostly interested in using ST for this because of the nice consumer facing app as well as the flexibility in creating rules/integrations. While I have been working with SmartThings for a couple years now and like its flexibility, I am hesitant to use it for an “enterprise level” situation since I know it is mostly consumer facing. In other words, I am skeptical of its reliability and scalability (however as part of the study, there would be a “genius bar” type tech support.)

Any thoughts?

Definitely not ready for enterprise work.

See the following, and follow the links to both the official status page and the first bug reports in the community –created wiki.

Also note in particular that they can and do push out unscheduled hub updates that you can neither defer nor deny. This can take the hub off-line for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and quite often cause problems for a very small percentage of customers. This alone would typically disqualify it for enterprise use.

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BTW, You should also take a look at some of the discussion threads on accessibility. In particular, a couple of years ago there was one community member who is working with the VA on creating some accessible homes for people with TBI. He ended up deciding that smartthings was not a good match because of the reliability and moved on to create a different system for their project.

Go to the quick browse lists in the community – created wiki, look down at the bottom of the page for the “project report” section and then choose the list on accessibility.

There is also another list for landlords under “second homes,” but again most people trying to manage multiple homes have ended up using at least different software.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Quick_Browse_the_Community-Created_SmartApps_Forum_Section

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Yeah, no way on earth I would do this, and I have been with ST since the beginning.

ST is for good for an end user who’s willing to tolerate outages, misbehaving devices, failing devices, and potentially a lot of overhead depending upon the number and complexity of devices in the environment.

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I am very happy with how SmartThings works for me. However, I would never use it in a mission critical application, though.

  1. Too many outages
  2. Updates you can’t defer
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Exhibit A:

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I manage enterprise support, here’s how Smartthings falls short. Don’t think I’m here to bash as it was never designed to provide his level of service. Smartthings segment is home and maybe small business.
Typically Enterprise level involves 99.99 - 99.9999% availability which Smartthings can’t provide in numerous ways:

  • There is no redundancy, if your hub fails, a radio fails, a power supply fails, an interface fails you’re down.
  • There is no upgrade path, if you upgrade aka replace your hardware you start completely over. There is no migration, there is no restore. You are down until you reconfig your setup from scratch.
  • There are no backups… no explanation needed for this one.
  • If you have a hardware failure, you will not have a replacement in 4 or 24hrs unless you buy new hardware from Amazon and it’s available for same day delivery.
  • Auditing… 7 days max
  • Access control… 2 levels, all access or no access.
  • Scalilabilty… Vertical or horizontal are a nope.
  • Most importantly is the TOS. There is no guarantee smartthings will work in any environment and any data provided to Smartthings can be resold, so your IP may end up as Samsung’s IP.
  • Finally support, there are no guaranteed levels of support. There is not even an offering for one.

If you don’t need any of these things then Smarttings might be a good fit and you’re not even close to Enterprise level. Though if you are asking on a community forum weather or not Smarttings is enterprise ready you probably are not either.

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I’m currently managing just under ten locations with ST, which is a combination of houses, apartments, and offices (with between 5 and 50 employees, so, “small”). I definitely agree that ST should not be considered for anything enterprise. I get some automation and nifty feature, and I can manage mostly what I want, but I recognize that things can break/go offline/security is limited. I’m exploring upgrade paths like OpenHAB, which gives much more control over infrastructure but at the cost of a lot of time investment to figure out integrations and individual devices.

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lafff -

all good points.

Enterprise useage is where the money is for SH manufactures but as yet no manufacture has been brave enough to invest in that space to any extent

I do feel that the current ST is just beta for future developments which would include a much more powerful and capable hub with all local execution fall back

I would have to respectfully disagree. There are literally dozens of companies doing commercial building automation, and they have been for decades. That includes some of the names you know from Home automation like Phillips and Lutron and Leviton and Honeywell and Schneider and Savant and Control4 and Crestron, some names you know from other areas like IBM and GE and Carrier and Rockwell and Johnson Controls, and some you’ve probably never heard of. But there are a lot in this space. Just Google “commercial automation systems.” :sunglasses:

A few Leviton case studies from their commercial systems division, for example. In addition to the usual airports, universities, hotels, retail and restaurant chains, convention centers, libraries, office buildings, courthouses, prisons, hospitals, and sports facilities, they also have a couple of really cool ones like the lighting system for inside Mammouth Caves.

Not only was it intended to save money while keeping the tens of thousands of visitors safe, they had a lot of very specific requirements such as limiting light to specific wavelengths in certain areas to deter the growth of algae along the trails. Last time I looked, it was on page 4 of the sample case studies. :sunglasses:

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One of my favorite things about the mammoth caves project: they do use “follow me” lighting for the area that people are walking through so it is lit up much brighter than other areas.

But they found that in order to keep visitors from being claustrophobic, they have to have universal lighting along the entire ceiling of a cave Which is always on as long as anyone is in the area, as well as having the exit always fully lit. So this is a whole different kind of zone lighting.

Look at the picture again, and you can see the zones pretty clearly. The automation for this one is pretty slick. :wink: