Opportunity Knocking

Even though I'm not at liberty to share all the details yet, I've been chatting with a New Jersey VAR who was recently part of an extraordinarily exciting project—his integration firm pulled together the pieces of a whole-home automation system that will be featured in an upcoming episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."

HEATHER CLANCY Can be reached via e-mail at hclancy@cmp.com.

What made this particular opportunity all the more compelling is not just the price tag for the donated technology—about $100,000—but that it includes some pretty specialized accessibility technology. The recipient family includes a blind father, a mother with cancer, a blind grandmother, two daughters going blind from the same genetic condition and a deaf son.

The solution provider in question, Silicon East, has had experience with this sort of project before. But its core specialty is actually small business. Which leads me to ask, what technologies are you bringing home?

Fact is, the business and personal lives of your customers—like your own—are blurring. Computing is not just a work phenomenon, it's a social construct. And that's just one reason why after more than two years of covering the home integration movement in a separate print and online forum, Digital Connect, we're bringing that news back into the CRN fold in the form of a monthly section spearheaded by Emerging Markets Editor Jeff O'Heir.

The interest in this movement is vivid, and integrators hailing from the traditional IT world, rather than professional AV installers, seem to be embracing the market quickly. Today, close to 70,000 CRN subscribers tell us they touch homes, home offices and very small offices. Quite simply, CRN has an obligation and an opportunity to step up to their information needs.

This issue contains the first monthly section starting on page 25, featuring an article about distributed audio systems that could piggyback off a digital media server.

The home integration movement will mean different things depending on your particular business model—whether you're a system builder who could mine the interest in Media Center PCs, a network expert who could find a niche in home surveillance systems or an MSP who could provide proactive monitoring of just about anything. For those of you who intend to test the water, welcome home.

What technology are you bringing home? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, encourages feedback at hclancy@cmp.com.