Open, Closed and the Space Between
“Open” is one of those words the lighting controls industry uses with absolute confidence and surprisingly little consensus. It travels easily through presentations and product sheets, yet it tends to shift shape the moment you try to pin it down. The language often settles into familiar territory: standards, interoperability, compatibility, without ever fully arriving at the larger question: open for whom, exactly?
For Kristian Jenkins, CEO at Casambi, the issue is not whether the industry values openness, but how narrowly it has chosen to define it.
“Too often, openness is reduced to a protocol checkbox or a marketing label,” he says. “But real openness is an architectural decision, not just a feature.”
It is a telling distinction. The lighting controls industry has long treated openness as a matter of technical compliance: if different manufacturers can communicate through a shared protocol, the system earns the label. In another era, that may have been enough. Buildings were slower, technologies more isolated, expectations lower.
But the modern building no longer behaves like a fixed piece of infrastructure. It behaves more like a living digital environment: layered, interconnected, continuously updated. Lighting now exists alongside occupancy analytics, HVAC orchestration, cloud services, emergency systems, energy platforms, and increasingly sophisticated software ecosystems that evolve on timelines far removed from traditional construction cycles.
In that context, the old definitions begin to feel strangely incomplete.
Standardization still matters, of course. Few serious players would argue otherwise. Shared standards brought much-needed structure to a fragmented industry and established a common technical language across manufacturers and markets. Yet standards evolve slowly by design…Consensus takes time. Ratification takes longer. Meanwhile, buildings, and the technologies inside them, continue to accelerate.
“Customers don’t buy standards,” Jenkins says. “They buy flexibility, simplicity, and confidence that their building can adapt over time. The real test isn’t whether a protocol is open. It’s whether the system can evolve without forcing costly replacements. The systems that win are the ones that absorb change with minimal friction.”
What emerges is an uncomfortable reality: a system can be technically open while remaining operationally rigid.
Jenkins believes this is where the industry has started asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether a protocol is open, he argues, the more relevant question is whether the system itself can continue adapting over time.
“An open system should integrate across technologies, support multiple stakeholders, and evolve without forcing customers into rip-and-replace infrastructure,” he says. “Ultimately, openness is about long-term flexibility.”
That philosophy sits at the center of Casambi’s positioning, though not in the way the industry traditionally understands openness. The platform is proprietary at its core. Yet the ecosystem surrounding it is intentionally expansive, and open to participation: anyone who builds compatible technology is welcome to join. Hundreds of manufacturers already do, spanning thousands of interoperable products and integrations that stretch across both wired and wireless environments.
The distinction is subtle but important. Casambi is less interested in presenting itself as a universal standard than as a framework capable of accommodating many standards, many manufacturers, and many types of buildings simultaneously.
It reflects a broader shift taking place across technology industries far beyond lighting. Increasingly, the most influential systems are not closed products nor fully decentralized standards. They are platforms: curated enough to remain coherent, flexible enough to evolve.
Consumers already understand this intuitively. Few people choose a smartphone ecosystem because of the purity of its technical architecture. They choose it because it works seamlessly across devices, updates continuously, and adapts almost invisibly to changing habits over time.
Buildings, increasingly, demand the same behavior.
And perhaps that is why the old binary – open versus closed – feels less useful than it once did. The more pressing concern for architects, owners, and specifiers is not whether a system satisfies an ideological definition of openness, but whether it can absorb change gracefully over the lifespan of a building.
Because buildings do change. Tenants change. Technologies change. Expectations change. The systems that survive are rarely the ones that remain static. They are the ones that refuse to close. The ones that stay open from the beginning, with enough elasticity to accommodate whatever arrives next.
