NEC Platforms Joins Connectivity Standards Alliance, Targets Matter Smart Home

NEC subsidiary NEC Platforms has confirmed its membership of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), the organization of tech companies that established Matter and oversee its specification and implementation. It has also announced that it has become a member of the LIVING TECH Association, a Japanese body with a similar aim to the CSA, and with many of the same members.

But NEC Platforms isn’t known in the smart home arena, so what is going on here? Why is NEC Platforms getting involved with the Matter smart home?

What Is NEC Platforms?

You may have heard of NEC, a giant of Japanese electronics and producer of PCs, consoles and more recently, servers, telecommunications, and defense systems. It owns various subsidiaries to produce this hardware, and one such company is NEC Platforms.

Providing ICT (Information and Communication Technology) solutions across retail, industry, education, health, transport, and other fields, NEC Platforms has various interests. It is involved in office telephony, networking and embedded solutions, telematics, and automotive control unites.

It appears that NEC Platforms works alongside other NEC subsidiaries to deliver these solutions, with technology intended for one industry repurposed to use elsewhere.

Why Does NEC Platforms Need CSA Membership?

The smart home is one of the growing segments of the consumer technology industry, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more companies are targeting this market.

NEC Platforms needs CSA membership in order to get Matter certification for any hardware it produces. Without Matter certification, a Matter-compatible product cannot be released (for example, the Nanoleaf Essentials Holiday String Lights could not be released as a Matter device without certification). Any NEC hardware included in Matter-certified devices might be impacted by this, too.

According to NEC Platform’s announcement: “NEC Platforms has decided to join the Alliance because of the high affinity of its services with Matter, an international standard for understanding and controlling the status of smart home appliances and IoT devices.”

The sheer range of solutions that NEC Platforms is involved with illustrates how important its involvement with Matter (and the LIVING TECH Association) could be. In fact, with this in mind, it is a surprise NEC Platforms wasn’t already a member of the CSA.

How Might NEC Platforms Improve the Smart Home?

As an experienced player in the ICT solutions industry, NEC Platforms can potentially contribute to the development of smart home technologies. In fact, the announcement highlights that it “is involved in the business of home gateways for telecommunications carriers and routers for general households, which play a central role in smart home networks that support efficient living through the use of IoT and AI technologies.”

If we consider the importance of IoT technology to the success of the Matter-based smart home, then NEC Platforms could play a significant role. But we shouldn’t overlook that last phrase: AI technologies.

While Matter itself isn’t AI-based, the systems that use it – Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and other voice assistants – rely on AI to work effectively. As expectations rise for AI and smart home technologies (and the smart home is one of the few areas where AI can have a tangible presence in the home), NEC Platforms already has proven knowledge in providing server and network infrastructure – key elements of any successful LLM-based software provision.