How Industry Standards Drive Success in IoT Development

With the IoT landscape expanding at an unprecedented pace, enterprises must adapt quickly to maintain long‑term viability. “We want to make sure that our solutions are running and being supported for many years to come,” says Mathieu Creteau, Lead Software Architect at the Hager Group. Hager relies on proven industry standards to navigate this rapidly diversifying field. Creteau shares the benefits of standards and how the company implements them in practice.

Smoothing IoT Development

OSGi is a cornerstone of Hager’s standards‑driven strategy. The OSGi framework defines a modular architecture for Java applications, allowing developers to treat a system as a collection of interchangeable bundles rather than a monolithic codebase. This modularity offers numerous advantages for IoT projects:

• Component reuse across projects, reducing development time and costs.
• Parallel work streams, boosting team efficiency.
• Rapid feature addition, future‑proofing applications.
• Access to a large Java developer community, easing talent acquisition.

“OSGi allows us to reuse components that are already available. With the multiplicity of IoT devices, it’s more or less mandatory for us to use it,” Creteau explains. The framework’s modular structure enables Hager’s engineers to work on distinct parts of an application concurrently, driving productivity and allowing new features to be integrated swiftly.

In practice, Hager applied OSGi to the home‑energy‑management system built for Audi. The system orchestrates the electricity flow in a house, optimizing the charging of the Audi e‑tron and integrating solar panels, wallboxes, and other domestic loads. Leveraging an existing OSGi‑based gateway, Hager was able to port core components from its earlier Hager Energy platform, accelerating time to market and ensuring consistency across solutions.

Ensuring Interoperability

Interoperability is a key driver for Hager’s adoption of standards. “There are always new partnerships on the horizon. Therefore, it is crucial for us to have systems that are compatible with others,” says Creteau. Standards enable seamless integration with partners’ products, enhancing the end‑user experience.

One such standard is EEBUS, a specification backed by an alliance of over 70 companies in the smart‑home sector. EEBUS ensures that devices from diverse vendors communicate using a common language. In the Audi project, EEBUS guarantees that components from multiple manufacturers work together without custom interfaces, simplifying deployment and reducing support overhead.

Similarly, KNX underpins Hager’s home‑automation platform, domovea. KNX handles the networking of electrical installations, allowing Hager to integrate KNX devices, IP cameras, and IoT sensors on a single platform. With the release of domovea V2, the system now also leverages OSGi technology, combining the strengths of both standards for maximum flexibility.

Standards Are the Way to Go

From streamlining development to guaranteeing interoperability, standards provide the order and stability needed in a fragmented IoT ecosystem. “We want to support our products and solutions for as long as we possibly can. We don’t want to have to constantly start from scratch and see our previous work become obsolete,” Creteau states. By building on well‑established standards, Hager secures a solid foundation for future innovation.

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