CES 2024: Avi Rosenthal extends olive branch for smart home standards 'rival'
You’d be forgiven for thinking, given that Matter is run by an organisation that has traditionally been its biggest smart home connectivity rival, that the Z-Wave Alliance may be looking at Matter’s stumbling start and feeling rather smug about not being directly involved.
But that’s not the case, according to Avi Rosenthal, Managing Partner of Bluesalve Partners, who currently sits as Chairman of the Z-Wave Alliance’s board.
Instead, Rosenthal sympathises with the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s early teething issues with Matter, and is quick to point out that expectations of an initiative backed by pretty much a who’s who of Big Tech, were always going to be improbable.
“Let’s face it, in the normal everyday tech world, those groups don’t get along.” Rosenthal explained, during a meeting with The Ambient over in Las Vegas at CES 2024.
“There’s competition between Android and Apple every day. There’s competition between Amazon and Google every day.
“For them to come out and say, we’re all going to sit around the same campfire and we’re going to do something together… that in itself was news. That whole concept was news. It made people sit up and take note.”
Learn more
- Guide: Z-Wave all you need to know
- Explainer: What is Matter for the smart home
It was this early hype that paved the way for Matter to become a mainstream tech topic that has been covered extensively but also criticized widely, especially in the past 12 months or so since the first iteration of Matter went live at the tail-end of 2022.
But Rosenthal isn’t keen to jump in on the pile-on, instead choosing to defend the high expectations in a market that isn’t always the easiest to operate in.
“Those of us in the industry who have been involved in creating new standards know how hard it is,” he told us. “We’ve been where they are.
“What they’ve figured out is what we in the industry have always known: this is not easy.”
Rosenthal is hopeful that Matter will succeed though, as he believes that the new standard creates opportunities for both Z-Wave and the smart home industry as a whole.
“Do I see Matter as competition? Absolutely I do,” he explained. “Do I also see Matter as an opportunity? Absolutely I do.”
And Rosenthal is keen to extend an olive branch to the CSA in order, he believes, for everyone to harvest the fruits of those opportunities.
“We’re willing to help; we’re willing to be part of the conversation.” he said. “We don’t see it as an us and them scenario, we see it as an opportunity for everybody to work together.”
The Z-Wave Chairman of the board went as far as stating that he hopes 2024 would be the year we see a Matter to Z-Wave bridge, and he even laid out the process of what would need to happen to make that dream a reality.
“They have a set of rules and Z-Wave has a set of rules and between them there are connection points. What hasn’t happened yet is that we haven’t defined those connection points – but that is an easy conversation,” Rosenthal said.
“Once that conversation happens, we just need a couple of manufacturers to step up and say ‘great… I’m going to take a Thread border router and I’m going to take a Z-Wave hub and marry the two together and allow information to pass back and forth, following the rules that we set.’
“The establishment of those rules are very easy to do; it’s just a conversation. And that’s the thing we’re hoping to do sooner rather than later.”
Of course, you can get your Matter devices singing and dancing with Z-Wave ones using the likes of a SmartThings hub or the new Homey Pro, but Rosenthal is talking about native integrations where Matter and Z-Wave work in harmony.
And it’s this native compatibility, along with compatibility for other existing standards, that Rosenthal believes that Matter needs to embrace.
“There are a number of very large organisations that are going to be building hubs with multiple radios in them,” he explained. “And Z-Wave will be in those hubs.
“The establishment of hundreds of companies and millions of devices in an ecosystem is not something to be ignored. If you want to connect with others, and connect with the establishment, then you have to take Z-Wave seriously, and Zigbee seriously, because we all have established ecosystems in dozens of industries.”
Z-Wave riding a wave
Aside from Matter, Rosenthal was obviously also keen to talk about the state of the Z-Wave ecosystem at CES 2024, where there were more than 30 Alliance members exhibiting at the Vegas expo.
The industry titan was keen to point out that, following the first certified Z-Wave Long Range device – the Ecolink 700 Series Garage Door Controller – that went live in mid-2022, there are now more than 50 Z-Wave LR devices, as well as north of 300 Z-Wave devices with the new 800 series chip on board.
In total, there are now more than 4,300 certified Z-Wave devices, with a staggering 100 million+ devices in the wild.
