Demonstrating the cross-vendor smart home experience

By Philip Ling   |   February 24, 2026   |   Provided By Avnet

Powered by AWS, /IOTCONNECT™ provides the single pane of glass to enable seamless smart home cloud platform integration

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Enable zero-touch onboarding of smart devices using AWS provisioning
• Multi-protocol device control
• Unified dashboards across third-party clouds
• Provide a customized and branded end-user experience

Smart home technology continues to evolve, but interconnectivity remains a known challenge. Diversity at the device level ripples upstream, all the way to the cloud platforms that control them. Bringing disparate ecosystems for lights, cameras, actuators, and sensors together has become an imperative.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides the building blocks to do that, allowing providers to develop solutions that remove these barriers to consolidation. Avnet has partnered with AWS to help extend that technology all the way to the edge and simplify interoperative connectivity between multiple smart home device manufacturers.

Avnet’s /IOTCONNECT™ integrates with AWS solutions and complements two key elements: AWS IoT Greengrass, and AWS IoT Device Client. The table below outlines these technologies and how they cooperate.

Each technology listed above provides specific functionality:

• AWS IoT Greengrass Core Software is an edge runtime for Linux-based devices. It provides a local MQTT broker, component framework for AWS Lambda containers and local functionality (such as machine learning inferencing) and synchronizes with AWS IoT Core.
• AWS IoT Device Client is a ready-to-go Linux application that connects with AWS IoT Core using secure tunneling. It can provide basic metering and fleet provisioning.
• Avnet /IOTCONNECT is a solution accelerator platform built on AWS services, including AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, and AWS Lambda. It adds dashboards and essential features including a rules engine, over-the-air (OTA) updating, lifecycle management, and analytics. By packaging common AWS IoT patterns into a repeatable, multi-tenant solution, OEMs can deploy without rebuilding dashboards, OTA flows, and lifecycle logic for every product line.

C2C (cloud-to-cloud) connects cloud platforms

More recently, AWS released Managed Integrations for AWS IoT Device Management, a software framework that simplifies controlling different smart home devices from multiple manufacturers. The objective was to extend the smart home environment to multiple providers without putting the burden of integration on the homeowner.

Managed Integrations can be used to automate device setup workflows and support interoperability across devices, regardless of the vendor or their connectivity protocol.

The cloud-to-cloud connector is a vital piece of the solution. It gives manufacturers a structure for accessing device controls through APIs (application programming interface). This establishes a connection between Managed Integrations and the vendors’ cloud, which can be passed along to /IOTCONNECT to create a single pane of glass for the end user.

At CES 2026, Avnet demonstrated how this works in practice, using its Smart Home Demonstration Case. The demonstration uses Managed Integrations, edge intelligence, and wireless connectivity. The control plane is /IOTCONNECT with AWS IoT Core as the messaging backbone, showing how multiple devices with their own on ramps converge into a single user experience.

The architecture of the demonstrator comprises:

• Managed Integrations for AWS IoT Device Management for cameras and smart lightbulbs
• AWS IoT Core deployed on edge hardware
• AWS IoT Greengrass
• AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN sensors

The Avnet /IOTCONNECT Smart Home Demonstration Case

Devices in the Smart Home Demonstration Case include:

Conclusion

The smart home experience should be seamless, allowing agentic-like control over connected devices. Reacting intelligently to changing and variable conditions should be the default mode of operation. That scenario is now closer thanks to AWS Managed Integration and /IOTCONNECT. Bringing the key pieces of technology together, as demonstrated by Avnet, provides a platform for greater integration and market adoption. /IOTCONNECT consumes Managed Integrations APIs and presents them in a unified dashboard, without needing to directly integrate each vendor cloud. If your company is considering integrating C2C connectors for smart home solutions, Avnet can help.

About Author

Philip Ling, Technical Content Manager, Corporate Marketing

Philip Ling is a Technical Content Manager with Avnet. He holds a post-graduate diploma in Advanced ...

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• Avnet /IOTCONNECT home page
• What is managed integrations for AWS IoT Device Management?