New Zhaga Has Gone Live! - Offering a “Community Membership" to Serve New Groups

As preannounced in spring of this year, the Zhaga Consortium, following the most recent trends in the lighting industry had investigated how to best address new business opportunities in digital lighting and service models. This triggered the renovation process of the Zhaga scope, to comprehensively address new growth areas in IoT and service economy requiring interoperability and interfaces to smart components, such as sensors and connectivity modules.

Now the NEW Zhaga has gone live by means of a new Consortium Agreement, it is based on a new Vision and Mission and expressed by the new Slogan “Smart standards. Smarter lighting.”

“Benchmarking against the “current Zhaga”, there is a lot of continuity”, states Dee Denteneer, Secretary General of the Zhaga Consortium. “The NEW Zhaga remains true to its original mission to “specify interfaces of components in LED luminaires”. Also, it will keep the specifications as thin as possible to maintain design freedom and scope for differentiation also in the next emerging space of interfaces to smart components.”

In fact, the new vision extends the current scope with interfaces enabling the connectivity of luminaires to the IoT network, and the upgrade and service of LED luminaires depending on the design choices by the luminaire manufacturer. This new scope aims for true interoperability and now includes the interfaces to sensors and connectivity modules, but also the interface between module and driver. This positions Zhaga as a key enabler of crucial developments in the lighting industry.

The NEW Zhaga is also reaching out to a new group of companies comprising installers, specifiers, architects, and end users. The ability to upgrade or service luminaires and the availability of a wide supply of interoperable components will become appealing to these user categories, as well as the testing and certification program that warrants interoperability. To serve these new groups, the NEW Zhaga offers a “Community Membership". Community members receive membership benefits like the access to selected information on the members’ area of the website, the access to the Zhaga bookstore and the dedicated Community Membership logo. Community membership is free of charge.

Regular and Associate Members continue to receive specific benefits, such as early access to specifications. However, Zhaga has changed its publication strategy, and will no longer publish its specifications to non-member companies.