US smart home giant Nest launches in Australia today, minus its flagship product and ignoring local retail heavyweights in favour of a unique online partner.

An internet of things pioneer, Nest found success in the US with its smart thermostat which learns homeowner's habits to optimise their heating and reduce energy bills. The company was acquired by Google in 2014, fuelling international expansion plans, but Nest will not sell its smart thermostat locally due to the low number of Australian homes with compatible central heating.

Instead Nest is focusing in Australia on its Nest Protect smart smoke / carbon monoxide alarm, as well as home security cameras, with plans to sell devices exclusively through online insurance and utilities broker iSelect. 

While Nest has partnerships with insurers like Liberty Mutual in the US, an exclusive deal with a service like iSelect is a first. iSelect brokers around 20 per cent of Australia's home insurance purchases, 12 per cent of energy contracts and 5 per cent of broadband deals.

"Thousands" of Australians have already imported Nest products from the overseas, concedes Maxime Veron, Nest's director of product marketing. Imported Nest thermostats will continue to work, while supporting devices sold locally by iSelect, and Nest has not ruled out selling the thermostat in Australia further down the track.

The Nest Protect smart alarm sells for $189, while the NestCam Indoor and Outdoor security cameras each sell for $319, offering 1080p resolution and infrared night vision. Meanwhile the Nest Aware cloud-based camera monitoring service, which offers smart alerts and lets users scroll back through 10 days of security footage, sells for $14 per month for the first camera and $7 for each subsequent camera (the first month is free). There is no subscription for the Nest Protect smoke alarm.

iSelect sells Nest's smart alarm and cameras outright, or else bundled with other services such as broadband plans and electricity deals. iSelect is working on deals where insurance companies may offer lower premiums to customers with Nest security cameras installed in their home.

The decision to sign an exclusive deal with iSelect comes as a blow to Australian brick and mortar retailers already threatened by the arrival of US online retail giant Amazon later this year. 

The 'Works with Nest' program ensures that Nest devices are interoperable with a wide range of smart home appliances from vendors such as Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue and LifX. Amazon's Alexa smart benchtop speaker is the most popular smart home device with US Nest customers, closely followed by the Google Home speaker. Both speakers can be used to control Nest devices and other smart home gear, with Veron insisting that Nest is not in a power struggle with these giants for control of the smart home.

"We're focused on addressing individual pain points within the smart home," Veron says.

"Until we are able to cater to everyone's needs we can't be the centre of the home. I don't know if there will be a centre of the smart home, I think it's going to be more of a distributed model."

While Nest aims to be device and platform agnostic, working with Apple iOS and Android mobile devices as well as the Apple TV and Apple Watch, Veron says Nest gear is unlikely to work with Apple's upcoming HomePod speaker due to the restrictions of Apple's HomeKit smart home ecosystem.

"We've developed 'Works with Nest' as a way for devices to openly talk to each other through the cloud, but Apple took a very different approach," he says. "The way Apple has developed HomeKit so far hasn't been compatible with our view of what a connected product should be about."

"Now Apple is trying to open up its ecosystem so I'm looking forward to a time where their approach and our approach will be compatible, because we really want to offer the best experience for Apple-centric customers."