The Zigbee Alliance – which oversees Zigbee, the IoT-friendly wireless standard – has announced a development within the Connected Home over IP project (CHIP).

Zigbee Alliance targeting IoT within commercial buildings
Featuring the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple, the project has the aim of establishing a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products. Now, it is forming a team dedicated to the development and promotion of the standard for use in commercial markets.
Within the IoT landscape, the standard is targeting devices in categories such as lighting and electrical, HVAC controls, access control, safety and security, window coverings/shades, TVs and access points.
Specifically, it’s addressing the needs of the commercial buildings category, where the Alliance anticipates the install base of connected devices to grow from 1.7 billion in 2020 to nearly 3 billion by 2025. Think multi-tenant residential buildings, offices and hotels, supermarkets, warehouses and shopping malls.

It writes:
From multi-tenant residential buildings, offices and hotels, to supermarkets, warehouses and retail malls, many smart home use cases that the Project will address at launch also have wide applicability across the commercial landscape. The standard is well-suited to commercial applications as it is being built on market-proven solutions and best practices from major technologies to ensure secure, scalable architectures. Of particular importance, the Project is based on an IP networking foundation, which enables the reuse of flexible and familiar connectivity options.
The agenda for new team includes clarifying the commercial use cases that can be supported by the project’s initial specification; to define the new features required for additional commercial use cases; to facilitate collaboration among members to strengthen use and adoption of IP-based connectivity standards and to advocate and encourage others to join and contribute.
“The industry is constantly investing in new technologies to achieve interoperability and offer an augmented use case experience to customers and tenants within commercial buildings,” said Murat Eti, Vice President Strategy and Future Technologies, Legrand. “The Project will help drive the development and growth of a large, multi-vendor device catalogue that commercial solutions providers can tap into to drive value and efficiencies across both residential and commercial environments.”