Lighting, IoT and Open Standards
Companies that are looking to adopt open standards for wireless control can start their push with lighting controls. After they are comfortable with lighting controls, they can adopt open standards in other areas such as plug loads, thermostats, CO2 sensors and more. So lighting control is a testing ground before you move on to advanced technologies.
So what is an open standard? A standard is considered open when it is developed in an open, transparent and collaborative process, is free to use and can be adopted in any business model.
Embedded developers will appreciate open standards because of their flexibility and ability to accommodate multiple devices and systems. The lessons learned from adopting open standard wireless lighting systems can help to integrate other applications into the open standards based wireless Enterprise IoT. If you are an embedded engineer, for a moment go back to the time when networking was still nascent when proprietary protocols were like fences that prevented networking innovation and hampered adoption rates. Ethernet came as a godsend and helped in the proliferation of related technologies.
Similar to how open standards pushed rapid innovations in computers, they (open standards) can do the same for building automation if you only you let them. Once this happens, there will be a lot of scope for embedded engineers to innovate. This is important because the smart lighting market is expected to touch $56 billion by 2020.
