Control4 Corporation announced the appointment of consumer-experience, product, and platform leader Charlie Kindel as Senior Vice President of Products & Services.

Charlie was most recently at Amazon where he created and led the Alexa and Echo Smart Home efforts. The organization he built and ran at Amazon proved that voice is a highly natural user interface for interacting with the home and the recent accelerated growth in smart home visibility is directly attributable to the broad reach and success of Alexa Smart Home.

Prior to Amazon, Charlie built a suite of connected home products through his 21-year tenure at Microsoft, including Windows home networking, Windows Media Center, Windows Home Server, and Windows Phone.

?We enthusiastically welcome Charlie Kindel to the Control4 team to lead our global product and services organization,? said Martin Plaehn, chairman and chief executive officer. ?Charlie?s successful track record building the world?s most loved consumer and developer products fits perfectly with the Control4 vision. His broad experience across the domains of consumer media, home networking and computing, mobile and voice, as well as the creation of their underlying scalable platforms and ecosystems are all directly applicable disciplines for creating and delivering next-generation connected home experiences.?

?The idea of the smart, connected home is decades old and has been poised to take off many times,? said Charlie. ?It?s gratifying to see individual and industry persistence paying off as connected home solutions are finally hitting mainstream households. However, many products and systems are still too complex and don?t work well across an entire home. By being customer-obsessed, Control4 has become the leader in whole-home connected solutions that are highly-refined, reliable, and simple to use. I?m excited I now get to focus on leading the smart home revolution from this different perspective.?

Charlie Kindel has 30 years of experience building some of the world?s most innovative and successful consumer and developer products, platform technologies, and partner ecosystems. This includes 21-years at Microsoft and five at Amazon. Most recently, Charlie created, led, and grew Amazon?s Alexa Smart Home division.

At Microsoft, Charlie served as General Manager of the Windows Phone Developer Experience where he drove the creation of the application and game ecosystem for Windows Phone 7. During his tenure at Microsoft, Charlie helped create Premier Support, Internet Explorer, COM/ActiveX, Windows NT, Windows home networking, Windows Media Center, Windows Home Server, and Windows Phone 7. Charlie earned his Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering from the University of Arizona in 1990.

Charlie will succeed Eric Anderson, who announced his retirement plans earlier this year after serving as the company?s product and services executive since 2012.

Control4 is a leading global provider of automation and networking systems for homes and businesses, offering personalized control of lighting, music, video, comfort, security, communications, and more into a unified smart home system that enhances the daily lives of its consumers.