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that drive understanding of the products. We bring various OEMs together to share their development experiences with people who are just starting out. It allows people to get a good understanding and also gets people acquainted with design tricks and stuff to help people along. The attitude in the market is, in part, understanding what other people have done and what decisions have been made so that they can make intelligent decisions. What do you see as the biggest challenges for large, mass adoption? It varies. Even though a wireless sensor network is very generic in architecture and character, we’re not out there building a grand internet of things from the bottom up. We think about home automation and about commercial building automation. What this
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means is that we not only design a standard networking capability, but an application that allows for interoperability. We’re seeing, for instance, home automation and smart energy have been growing the fastest because, in the case of energy management, we know we have shortages of electricity, we know we need to do residential demand response. Building the smart-grid is strategically important to a lot of nations. The challenges for smart energy is making people comfortable in the early market phase, that this technology is not just a flash in the pan, but it will be around for years to come, because that’s the lifetime of these designs. Do you have tools that help hardware developers integrating into the standards? Absolutely. We have seven of the world’s top ten companies
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in the Alliance and we have a number of fabless semiconductor companies—so it’s a very rich ecosystem. On the ZigBee website, there’s a “Products” page and all of the silicon providers all have training and development kits to help with designs and to see the network performance. There’s a lot of good stuff you can pick from and a lot of good companies that can help you do it. What is the future of the ZigBee Alliance? What are some of your goals? It’s pretty much what it has been in the past, except now we are in the mode of where the standards now are in very wide deployment around the world, particularly in the smart energy arena, which is not a static arena. The way the wireless sensor networks has been unfolding, eventually there will be enough