Have You Been Enlighted?

The news of Enlighted shutting down the lighting controls business have been a real earthquake for the industry. Once the absolute champion and the leader in the lighting controls and IoT space has ceased to exist. Sadly, they have not been the first ones. There was Universal Douglas in 2023 and Touché in early 2025.

But the Enlighted case has really transformed the company name into a verb. In a very bad way: "to be enlighted" almost feels in line with "to be musked":

"to be musked" can mean to be treated poorly or "screwed over" by a company, often without apology. For example, buyers of Tesla vehicles might say they were "musked" if they experienced unresolved issues with their cars. This is a play on Elon Musk's surname and is used pejoratively.

So have you been enlighted?

We can help.

The common theme across all the above mentioned "gone out of business" events is - they all were proprietary / vendor - locked solutions. Companies come and go and there is nothing unusual about it. Perhaps the bit unusual part is, at least in the case of Universal Douglas and Enlighted, that there were considered mature businesses. With well developed products and well established sales and support channels.

At SILVAIR, the risk of us going out of business had been expressed by our customers and partners very often in the past. Also such (false) rumors were often spread by our competitors. Now it turns out we are alive and well (very well, I should say - watch our published financial reports), while the incumbents are gone.

What should customers be doing now then? How to avoid stepping into a trap of a building system that may cease to exist a few years from now?

There is just one, and the only one answer: pick a product / solution that is based on an open standard. 

And fundamentally there are two choices here: DALI for wired systems and Bluetooth NLC for wireless. There is also the third alternative which is the mix of the two above: DALI/D4i luminaires with a Bluetooth NLC system.

Bluetooth NLC in particular has a great track record. It has been installed in big banks, factories, at Fortune-100 companies, also powering the entire university campuses. Increasingly more national accounts across the globe select the standard. Clearly Bluetooth NLC has propelled itself into an enterprise-class system category, with essential product options like cloud APIs, BMS connectivity through the BACnet protocol, and IT integrations like SAML-based SSO. And recently has even brought standardized HVAC Integration.

Bluetooth NLC certainly can be considered a drop-in replacement for any Enlighted system.

What about SILVAIR then? Well, we are just the orchestration tools. I mean, probably the best set of tools you can have. But fundamentally any device that works in a SILVAIR system is not locked down and can be commissioned and configured without help of any SILVAIR software. The products are fully open and interoperable. That is the power of an open standard that translates into the safety of the investment.

It is like when constructing machinery, you (even without thinking about this) are using standard bolts and nuts with standardized dimensions and heads. So that you can use screwdrivers and wrenches from any tool provider. Absolutely natural. But imagine a world where every screw required a screwdriver from the same manufacturer. Sounds insane? That is what proprietary lighting control and building automation systems are.