Technology touches just about every part of modern life, and we're on the precipice of immense and accelerating changes.
In our view, our clients should be empowered to enjoy and benefit from various consumer and business technologies, and vendors' products shouldn't erode their independence, freedom, or decision-making abilities.
Here's an overview of why working with VMS is different:
# 1
We focus on digital self-determination, by building with a privacy-first approach, by building with open standards-based systems, and, wherever possible, by building with open source hardware, too.
In practical terms, this means that when tasked with building systems for our clients, we design and install very flexible, robust, slick, and tightly-integrated systems.
This approach translates directly into key benefits:
- Long-term evolution, upgrades, maintenance, replacements, recycling of systems (etc.) become very easy for our clients;
- Our systems are more flexible and responsive to our clients' evolving, growing, and unforeseeable technology needs, (when compared with traditional vendors,)
- Future system evolutions are less costly to install and maintain thereon.
For IP networking, this means that we work within the OSI Model, and we deploy 802.11-standard equipment. We strive to deploy minimal vendor-proprietary layers of software-defined network features, which aren't beholden to onerous license agreements or subscriptions.
Any structured media (i.e. wiring) we install is standards-based and mildly over-specified, and entirely flexible to connect on the end of each wire run, to sustain long term data transmission and bandwidth upgrades, (i.e. a clear upgrade path from 1Gbps to 100Gbps, over roughly 10 years or more.)
We carry this posture (of privacy-first and open standards) into audio-visual, automation, lighting, and control systems too.
We deploy Home Assistant as our clients' primary home control and automation software, with various community- and vendor-written open-source plug-ins.
We build with a variety of open-source hardware devices for edge-compute and control, (such as Arduino, ESP32/ESP8266, STM32, ARM-based SBCs such as Raspberry Pi, etc.)
This approach frees our clients from onerous click-wrapped end-user license agreements, minimizing if not eliminating long-term subscriptions, which are typically required by legacy home automation companies.
# 2
We focus on client privacy, client data privacy, data sovereignty, and offline-ready independence.
In other words, we make sure that our clients' systems "just work" without an internet connection, and absolutely zero packets of information about their automations or usage are transmitted to any (unintended) third parties, without their expressed permission, awareness and understanding.
In our view, no company should be "farming" data from our clients' private living spaces, especially not for their commercial or monetary benefit.
Our independence and engineering-first approach means that we're not on the side of "big tech" companies, who otherwise go about opportunistically collecting usage statistics on as many of their users as possible, and we certainly don't promote devices that are always "listening in" (i.e. via always-on voice assistants,) for ways to target advertising and marketing at our clients.
Our opinionated approach means that we often guide clients away from privacy-eroding products and offerings, and towards better-engineered, transparent, accountable, and socially equitable technologies.
In our view, your home should be a sanctuary, where you're in full control to turn off the noise of advertising and spam.
For our small business clients, this also means that your customer's behaviour and data (i.e. connecting to your retail location's Wi-Fi network) isn't being sent off to any third-party entities, (i.e. for further analytics and marketing exploitation, or demanding that you pay for this info.) When we've built networks, AV systems, and automations for our small business clients, we've put them in the "driver's seat" of decision-making.
# 3
We're a one-stop shop.
We cover a wide array of technical capabilities, and we stand by what we build. (One of our policies is to always have a no-charge, no-hassle, 30-day support window on anything we deploy or configure.)
We closely support our clients with system onboarding, training, documentation, and long-term maintenance of their tech investments. We also have a premium subscription Knowledge-Base and monthly "tech check-up" offering, to help further support our clients along the way.