Fairhair and the ZigBee Seek IoT Interoperability

The Fairhair Alliance and the ZigBee Alliance have signed a liaison agreement to collaborate on driving higher levels of product interoperability and standards unification in smart commercial buildings. The two organizations will explore opportunities to combine their technical specifications and take advantage of the ZigBee Alliance's extensive testing, certification and branding resources and expertise to simplify the development and deployment of lighting and building automation systems based on a common, IP-based network infrastructure.

“The building automation product ecosystem has been fragmented by proprietary, standalone solutions, which the Fairhair Alliance addresses through unification around an IP infrastructure that encompasses major interoperable product ecosystems such as that created by the ZigBee Alliance,” said Klaus Waechter, Steering Group member from Siemens, with the Fairhair Alliance. “With this agreement, we deepen our relationship with the ZigBee Alliance by aligning the two organizations’ work on a key missing piece of the interoperability puzzle: IPv6-based technologies for building automation and lighting control systems, including middleware solutions for application services such as security, discovery and network management.”

“This is an important liaison agreement that reinforces the ZigBee Alliance’s commitment to unifying IoT standards so we can simplify development of interoperable products and improve the consumer’s ‘smart’ experience,” said Tobin Richardson, ZigBee Alliance President and CEO. “Unifying standards around a common IP stack is a key step in this journey, and doing the same thing at the application layer is equally important. This is a key focus area as we continue to create the world’s most complete set of definitions for IoT device interoperability.”

Fairhair is an Alliance of leading companies, from the Lighting, Building Automation and IT industry, that aims to facilitate the use of IPv6 for the ‘Internet of Things’ in buildings. The Fairhair Alliance envisions a future where building automation and lighting control systems utilize interoperable systems and link to application eco-systems, such as BACnet, KNX and ZigBee.