When the ZigBee Alliance was founded in 2002 it had a direct mission: To bring companies together to develop reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products, based on an open global standard. Fast forward roughly eight years later and it’s safe to say that plan has worked out quite well.

Results from M2M magazine’s 2010 corporate adopter survey show that ZigBee is making a strong impact for companies in a range of different industries, including healthcare, energy, consumer, transportation, and security. One company developing products using the ZigBee standard, Ember, www.ember.com, Boston, Mass., has announced a major ZigBee milestone. The company is the first to ship more than 10 million ZigBee wireless chips. This achievement is reflected in the company’s revenues and sales bookings. Ember is predicting an annual revenue growth of almost 300% this year.

The company’s success has been driven by large-scale deployments of smart energy technologies by utilities, device manufacturers, and smart home products for applications in energy management and home security, monitoring and automation. Leading vendors of in-home displays for energy management, home awareness systems and smart meters are “Ember-enabled”.

Accoring to Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril, www.tendrilinc.com, Boulder, Colo., “Energy management technologies like ZigBee are providing new ways to acquire and communicate energy data to consumers accurately, reliably and in realtime. Ember’s ZigBee chips and networking protocol software play a critical role in allowing consumers to monitor and change their energy consumption in new ways.”

ZigBee chipset shipments are projected to reach 192 million units in 2014, up from just over 5 million units in 2008, according to research firm West Technology Research Solutions, www.wtrs.net, Mountain View, Calif.