When we first received the news about Crestron XiO Cloud in early 2018, we were excited about the possibility of a more modern (and honestly, easier to configure and manage from a higher-education perspective) Crestron Fusion. Our Crestron representative made it clear that XiO Could isn’t a one to one Fusion replacement, and that Fusion wasn’t going away. But, XiO Cloud seemed like a better fit for our environment. Fast forward twelve months, and we’re now getting to see a live demo of the platform.
The Good: The interface is very clean and while it takes elements from Fusion, it’s a refreshingly modern graphical user interface, clearly designed for expansion. Within a few minutes, I was navigating the various hardware components installed within the system, checking status, etc. etc. With a Crestron Mercury, I checked the current status, pulled usage statistics, confirmed the firmware was up-to-date… all the things a centralized AV group would want.
The Less Good: XiO Cloud currently isn’t ready for our (emphasis on “our”) environment. While Crestron has a few devices fully integrated into the XiO Cloud environment, our organization doesn’t deploy those devices in volume. Some of our core devices (DMPS3-150-C, etc.) are partially compatible with XiO Cloud, allowing us to reboot the hardware, obtain basic status, etc., but it’s not up to where we are with Fusion.
The second item is, we currently don’t have a pricing structure for XiO Cloud. Crestron is working on that, but replacing Fusion with a potentially more expensive solution with fewer features (currently) is a hard sell.
Conclusion: The potential for XiO Cloud is significant… the thought of pre-provisioning hardware that automatically installs or configures the AV system is amazing. Also, the thought of obtaining deep metrics associated with a platform is compelling. I look forward to revisiting Crestron XiO Cloud in 12-18 months to see the progress they have made. With just a handful of updates, the platform could transition from “interesting” to “must have” in a short period of time.
