Z-Wave Is Now The Key Enabler of The Smart Home Landscape

Smart home technology is finally today's hot topic, and the next big mega-trend for the consumer electronics industry. CE pros know that this trend didn't happen overnight.  Evolutions in both technology and consumer sophistication were needed to bring today's market opportunity to fruition.  One technology in particular has been a constant presence throughout these evolutions, and is powering today's smart home revolution: Z-Wave.

Z-Wave pioneered the smart home market and is now by far the world leader in smart home products and services, with over 14 million products sold worldwide.  No other technology offers anywhere near this kind of interoperable ecosystem, which is supported by over 250 leading brands, and offers the consumer more than 900 product choices.  This cross-brand interoperability gives both consumers and installers the confidence that products will work together, and that both installations and investments stay safe.
 
Z-Wave has achieved its leading position through its clear advantages from both a business and technology perspective.  Z-Wave is the only technology that's been developed from the ground up for smart home control, and is optimized for these applications.   Other technologies, some of which are only now trying to establish presence in the smart home market, have failed to take hold because they are the wrong solutions for home control environments. They are either proprietary at the device level, or have too short of an effective range, or too many different profiles, or don't support enough nodes, or interfere with existing home wireless products and systems. Z-Wave has none of these issues.

From a business perspective, Z-Wave has already made its case clear, and the market has spoken by making it the leading home control technology. For example, Z-Wave is the dominant technology for the US home security industry, with more than 80% of the market. Z-Wave is also the choice of leading "triple-play" providers, who are working hard to see that the "fourth play" is smart home technology. Z-Wave is also friendly to the independent integrator and even the retail DIY customer, thanks to its simple installation and effective mesh networking.

The biggest names in these industries have adopted Z-Wave, with more joining all the time. Leaders like ADT, AT&T, Honeywell, Ingersoll Rand, Linear, Verizon and too many others to name have adopted Z-Wave as their wireless technology of choice for smart home applications. Z-Wave is accessible to own, easy to install, and simple to operate. Because of its scalable nature, Z-Wave compatible smart devices can be added by the consumer (or the installer) at any time to an existing Z-Wave system.

While the other home control technologies are still figuring out what to do and how they can fit into the market, Z-Wave's mature technology has earned the confidence of integrators worldwide. While these newcomers play catch up or in some cases enter the market stillborn, Z-Wave is powering smart homes everywhere, today.  Many new and proprietary technologies say that they can do all the tasks needed for smart home control. But how many of them actually do?  The number is small and boasts are easy, but the proof is in the pudding.  Z-Wave is making smart homes popular now, not five or ten years from now.

Because all technologies evolve, Z-Wave is getting even better. Its recent evolutions include faster speeds, longer battery life, more memory and a host of other enhancements that once again, are optimized for home control.  All this while retaining backward compatibility with the existing product ecosystem.  No other technology can make this claim. Few of them even have enough products to think about backward compatibility.

In short, Z-Wave has earned its position as the smart home leader through optimized technology, a broadly-supported ecosystem and the trust of market leaders in virtually every channel of the automation market.  Z-Wave is indeed, the key enabler behind today's smart home revolution.