Ikea, continuing a years-long trend of offering innovative smart home products integrated with its furniture offerings, has announced a new smart home hub. The Dirigera – which means “conducting” in Swedish – is a small puck-device that, unlike its predecessor, the Tradfri, offers Matter compatibility. Matter, the newest widely supported communications standard for cross-vendor interoperability, offers investment protection. Even though the Matter standard is not fully released, Ikea’s early market support seeks to eliminate customer concerns about what smart home platform to choose.

The new Dirigera hub and Ikea smart home app are expected to launch this October, likely coinciding with the arrival of Matter. The company emphasized the user-friendly nature of its device and the robust personalization options. Ikea also revealed that it is developing its own cloud network to support remote access to smart home devices some time in 2023.

“Ikea’s offering is textbook consumer marketing,” remarked Stuart Sikes, Interpret SVP. “Ikea’s buyers are generally entry-level, first-time homebuyers and the company is offering them a technology platform that not only encourages them to consider Ikea’s music player lamp, the Vappeby or its Symfonisk bookcase music player, but also offers compatibility with smart home products from a large number of smart home device makers.”

Interpret’s Smart Home Matrix research divides smart home product owners into four segments. The segment called “Converts,” those who own three or fewer smart home devices and are more frequently first-time buyers, make up 75% of all owners. Ikea is well-aligned to appeal to the Convert segment and ease the first-time homeowner or renter into a smart home ecosystem which works with other Ikea connected home products, and will support expansion into a much larger, multi-vendor home system. Ikea joins a host of brands, including Samsung, Wyse, GE, and Amazon, to name a few, that are making smart home products a staple of new households.