Chamberlain Group's IoT Solution for Secure Home Access Control

Chamberlain Group, Inc., with its LiftMaster and Chamberlain brands, is one of the top connected products companies, linking the smartphone with the home and garage. The company also taps into the corporate market, all based on a foundation of safety, security, reliability, and peace of mind. The company's consumer business is traditionally driven by house-building and remodeling activities. Chamberlain led the market in developing an innovative solution that allows consumers to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company's MyQ smartphone app has been so popular that monthly growth in user numbers quickly hit 15 percent.

Chamberlain Group, Inc., a leading connected products company, recognized a gap in the market where consumers wanted to use their smartphones to control and monitor their garage doors from anywhere in the world. The company developed an innovative solution, the MyQ smartphone app, which quickly gained popularity with a monthly growth rate in user numbers hitting 15 percent. However, the existing system architecture was not robust enough to withstand the pressure of this growth rate for long, and the risk of impact on performance and availability was constantly rising. The company needed to ensure that the app was highly reliable and responsive for consumers, especially when it controls something as important as the security of peoples’ homes. The challenge was to make the existing architecture more robust and scalable, so that it could support future peaks of up to one million concurrent consumer actions.

To maintain its leadership position in the market and meet the challenge of rapid growth in user numbers, Chamberlain selected IBM® MessageSight technology to enable its IoT solution to maintain performance and availability. Chamberlain’s MyQ system links its garage door openers directly to each homeowner’s home Wi-Fi network over an encrypted connection. IBM MessageSight appliances installed in Chamberlain’s own data centers handle the real-time communication between each consumer’s mobile app and the device installed in their garage. MessageSight helps Chamberlain validate requests against consumer data, thereby ensuring that only authorized users can communicate with their own garage door openers. The company is now working with automotive partners to integrate its mobile app and door openers with the Homelink technology that is now available in many automobiles. It has also integrated its MyQ app with Nest to allow consumers to quickly and easily set their Nest Learning Thermostats to “Home” and “Away” modes from within the MyQ app.

• With IBM MessageSight at the heart of its IoT solution, Chamberlain can support growing user numbers for its MyQ smartphone app without running into performance or availability issues. The MyQ app gives consumers an intuitive, convenient, and secure way to manage entry and exit through their garage doors, and provides peace of mind that their home is secure against intrusion. The data gathered by IBM MessageSight will help Chamberlain to steer the future strategy for both its mobile app and its physical products. The company is still working out how to leverage the data, but there are many possibilities. Ultimately, the data captured from smart devices in the IoT will help Chamberlain build better products and enhance the consumer experience.

• 10x increase in the number of concurrent users supported
• Higher availability drives increased consumer satisfaction
• The solution can currently support up to one million concurrent users—ten times the number previously possible