The ZigBee Alliance sees EnOcean’s reaction as proof that the EnOcean Alliance’s standard is not really open. “It’s a proprietary user group masquerading as an alliance,” ZigBee Alliance Chairman Bob Heile told us this week. “What they’ve got is not a standard,” he added. “They’ve got a single-company proprietary solution and their alliance is their customer base. So you’ve got our open, publicly available solution with over 300 manufacturers involved vs. one company, one company, one company.”

[an error occurred while processing this directive] EnOcean President Jim O’Callaghan, however, disagrees. “There is a published specification and about 100 companies make products that communicate with other company’s products using that spec,” he said, adding that the EnOcean Alliance is an open, non-discriminatory organization. “One need not purchase product from EnOcean to be part of the EnOcean Alliance,” he said. “And in fact, many members offer software or services to either OEMs, installers or end users.”

The competition between the two is clear in company materials, too. An internal ZigBee Alliance document says: “To bridge the gap with EnOcean a marketing campaign should be considered, with the announcement of a batteryless, maintenance free solution compatible with the current ZigBee standard.”

Regardless of how the groups view each other, Heile said that nothing the ZigBee Alliance is working on flies in the face of EnOcean’s intellectual property. “We are not standardizing or developing harvested energy techniques,” he said. “There are plenty of suppliers for that, EnOcean being one of them. What we are doing is creating extensions to the existing ZigBee stack that would permit OEMs to use a greater selection of available energy-harvesting solutions.”