Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 15TH - 21ST FEBRUARY 2019 | 7 Interview T here's a reason British Gas has been one of the industry's great survivors – its willingness to rein- vent itself. In the 1960s, for instance, it embraced the home energy revolution that was central heating – the home was re-imagined and British Gas helped install it all. And just seven years ago, in 2012 when things looked very different even from today's market, its parent com- pany Centrica conceived Connected Home, the divi- sion behind its Hive business. Now in a million homes, it began by giving consumers fingertip control of their heating and hot water remotely through a phone app, later also supporting a growing family of smart home devices – from light switches to security cameras. It had become obvious to Centrica, reveals Connected Home's managing director Claire Miles, who took up her role in January 2018, that home technology had been about to become "a very big deal". And its instincts were right. The division is now a star child of Centrica's stable, and the number one connected home player in the UK. A strong growth strategy has seen it establish a pres- ence in six territories. As well as the UK and Ireland, it is active in Canada and France, with recent development focused heavily on the US and Italy. And the company's November trading update reveals that, since the start of 2018, 280,000 new Connected Home customers have been added, with 767,000 devices sold and gross revenue up 50 per cent for the ten months to the end of October, compared with the same period the previous year. Miles is therefore a very busy woman, but we are finally catching up at Connected Home's offices in Aldw- ych. Appropriately, there's that achingly cool buzz, stere- otypical of tech businesses, permeating the place, along with the customary aroma of coffee beans. It's a million miles away from the British Gas showrooms of old, or even other parts of today's group. An enthusiastic Miles explains the thinking behind the concept. "The home was becoming the last thing to connect. You could take your car in for a service and someone could plug it into a computer, your office was connected. And we started to see all these devices emerg- ing that we thought represented a major opportunity for us to provide more progressive, intelligent digital ser- vices to customers in the future, to modernise what we'd been doing for years through home care – where we had been going into homes, fixing things, helping people's homes run more smoothly." Up until then the brand's market-leading home ser- vices model had centred on boilers, central heating systems, electrics, plumbing and drains, and kitchen appliances – with various levels of home care cover available and a field force of engineers managing any issues. But it seemed like time to expand the offering, and to head off rivals from outside the industry launch- ing into the smart home market. "We could see the trends, we could see we had a right to play in that space. You could imagine the future in 2012, of everyone suddenly getting all these gadgets in their home and all these possibilities. We thought, who would be the organisation that you would want to put them in and help you use them to modernise your home? It was that concept that helped us come up with Con- nected Home." But, she says, they also realised this was a high-tech area – not a core skill at British Gas. Nor did the company want to farm its ideas and decades of market insight out to a third party, so the division's Hive business was born. Incidentally, it had been that very insight, through British Gas engineers, that led to the creation of the first product built within Hive – its smart thermostat. They'd discovered that most customers had no idea how to use the ugly, old ones o›en stuck on walls in dark corners,

• Cover