Amazon to Join Zigbee Alliance Board of Directors

Appointment Supports Continued Work to Simplify and Standardize IoT for Customers Using Zigbee Wireless Technologies

DAVIS, California – January 24, 2019 – The Zigbee Alliance, an organization of hundreds of companies creating, maintaining, and delivering open, global standards for the Internet of Things (IoT), today announced that Amazon will join its Board of Directors. As IoT growth continues to accelerate, prominent companies in the tech industry are collaborating within the Zigbee Alliance to shape the direction of standards, ecosystems, and devices to offer users easy and enjoyable experiences they’ll want to build upon within their homes and personal spaces. The decision by Amazon to join the Zigbee Alliance at the Board level is a strong message that the industry is focused on simplifying and adding convenience to the growing range of IoT devices available to customers.

Smart Home Satisfaction

Moving beyond its infancy, the smart home is taking hold and consumers are embracing IoT products as they continue to become easier to use. Manufacturers and standards organizations are bridging differences and breaking down barriers for the good of the entire industry. With voice services like Amazon Alexa and products such as the Amazon Echo family — which serves as the ‘brain’ or hub of choice in smart homes across the world — consumers can intuitively connect lights, locks, sensors, and more to broaden the conveniences around them.

Hubs & Ecosystems Unite

Finding a common vision and mature, interoperable solutions within the Zigbee Alliance family of technologies, leading service providers and device manufacturers — such as Amazon, Comcast, Huawei, IKEA, Legrand, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Somfy, and Samsung SmartThings — have chosen to design and introduce devices based on the Zigbee Alliance’s wireless standards. In doing so, these companies offer consumers greater choice in building simpler, consistent, and reliable experiences. For instance, Amazon devices including the Echo Plus and new Echo Show feature a built-in smart home hub that easily connects to Zigbee-based light bulbs, door locks, sensors, and more. Now, customers can benefit from Frustration Free Setup and quickly connect new Zigbee products by simply saying “Alexa, discover my devices.”

“Pairing Amazon’s Alexa-based technology with the Zigbee Alliance’s prominent wireless standards makes a lot of sense for not only manufacturers looking to partake in the smart home, smart building, and connected city categories but more importantly for the consumers that must embrace and champion connected technology for it to grow by contributing value to our everyday lives,” said Mareca Hatler, Principal Analyst at ON World. “Our research projects Zigbee technology will ship in 85% of the 4.5 billion 802.15.4 units predicted to hit the market in 2023, and with Amazon as a Board contributor in the Alliance, it’s clear the market-movers are really pulling together and operating on a global level to steer everyone forward.”

For information about the Zigbee Alliance, its Board of Directors, general membership, and benefits of being Zigbee Certified, visit www.zigbee.org.

About the Zigbee Alliance

The Zigbee Alliance is the foundation and future of the Internet of Things. Established in 2002, our wide-ranging global membership collaborates to create and evolve universal open standards for the products transforming the way we live, work, and play. With our members’ deep and diverse expertise, robust certification programs, and a full suite of open IoT solutions, we are leading the movement toward a more intuitive, imaginative, and useful world. The Zigbee Alliance board of directors is comprised of executives from Amazon, Comcast, Huawei, The Kroger Co., Landis+Gyr, LEEDARSON, Legrand Group, MMB Networks, NXP Semiconductors, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, SmartThings, Somfy, Texas Instruments, and Wulian. www.zigbee.org

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