Essence Group has joined the Zigbee Alliance as a member in the project, Connected Home over IP initiative to contribute to the development and promotion of the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet.
Essence Group’s CEO, Dr. Haim Amir commented on the news: “Essence is excited to join in and contribute to the standard by bringing its vast 25 years of experience and knowhow in developing and manufacturing radio IoT devices for the security, connected home and healthcare markets, currently producing over 10 million such devices per year.
“As a global software and IoT provider with a history of developing disruptive technologies, Essence has always believed in the holistic vision of ‘better life made possible’ while building solutions at scale that emphasises security and privacy together with an intuitive user experience.”
The Connected Home over IP project was formed in December last year by the Zigbee Alliance, Amazon, Apple and Google to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers.
The initiative is built around a shares belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to us. By building on IP, the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. Intending to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from various member companies, the project is expecting it to accelerate the development of the protocol and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
Through its participation in the Connected Home over IP project, Essence will demonstrate new abilities across different segments over the next decade, strengthening and accelerating the global standard.
“Industry players are working alongside each other through the Alliance to shape the future of the IoT using open global standards,” said Chris LaPre, solutions architect, Zigbee Alliance. “Our members together drive meaningful connections throughout the smart home, and we welcome new additions like Essence Group to our roster of IoT visionaries.”