Director of Energy Products at Nest Labs Ben Bixby speaks at the National Clean Energy Summit 7.0 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on September 4, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo : Getty Images/ Ethan Miller)
Google parent company Alphabet is moving some of its developers from the Nest subsidiary over to Google to work on smart home projects.
As Fortune reported, Google ramps up its efforts in the smart home field and prepares to launch its artificial intelligence (AI) Amazon Echo competitor, a speaker called Google Home. The product was announced in May during at the I/O developer conference without any strategic partnerships with third-party products.
Nest, with its "Works with Nest" platform, has these partnerships already in place, with companies such as Belkin, smart lock maker August and Philips. This makes sense as to why Google would enlist its colleagues at Nest to help with with Google Home's development.
The team of engineers responsible for the Nest Labs platform will move to Google and will be working with Android chief Hiroshi Lockheimer to assist bolster Google's ambitions in the smart home related projects.
This is just the latest in a number of organizational changes at Nest. The firm, founded in 2010, was a celebrated smart home appliance maker when Google acquired it for $3.1 billion in 2014. Yet after Google's big reshuffle as Alphabet in August of last year, Nest became a different entity separate from Google. That created a lot of pressure on Nest to turn a profit and produce new devices, something it wrestled with under co-founder Tony Fadell, who stepped down in June.
Following Fadell's departure, Matt Rogers, a co-founder was assigned the role of chief product officer, The Verge has learned. Prior to July, Rogers was the vice president of engineering.
Alphabet subsidiary Nest Labs is better known as a producer of Internet-connected thermostats and smoke detectors. Undergoing a restructuring, now Nest's entire platform team will be considered Google employees on Google payroll, in order to create a unified Internet of things platform and work on Google Home.
The new team is the same team that works on Brillo and Weave, Google's Internet of Things and smart home platform and protocol technologies will be working on third-party integrations and reporting to Lockheimer.
Watch a video on Nest thoughtful home here:
