The Z-Wave Alliance was established in early 2005 by a group of leading home control product manufacturers, each dissatisfied with the technological fragmentation that was strangling the promise of the then-nascent home controls industry. Their goal was to move that industry from an uncertain, unspecified future to a practical and widespread reality.
Back then, as these market leading core members saw it, the three biggest obstacles to widespread adoption of home control were:
• Competing, incompatible, proprietary technologies
• Unfocused, non-converging standardization attempts
• Undue cost for makers, sellers and consumers
After years of waiting for technologists to create a true standard to which they could build their products, founding members Intermatic, Leviton, Wayne Dalton, Danfoss, and Universal Electronics met with Z-Wave technology creator Zensys to discuss issues and questions that were common to all of their needs.
Immediately upon beginning product development with the Zensys chip technology, these founding members recognized that they had found the reliable performance and the solution for the broad market potential that they had envisioned. The home control manufacturers approached Zensys and all parties jointly decided to form the Z-Wave Alliance.
Since that 2005 inception, the Z-Wave Alliance has been the authoritative presence in the wireless home controls marketplace, and interoperable Z-Wave technology has become by far the market leader. Products from our members have won innumerable awards spanning virtually every sphere, and Z-Wave itself has been honored everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Reader’s Digest.
Thanks to the efforts of the founding Z-Wave Alliance companies, and the more than 700 companies that have joined them since, the promise of practical and widespread home controls is now a present market reality. And thanks to Z-Wave technology, the future is no longer uncertain. It is interoperable.