KNX's New Board Just Told You Exactly Why It's the Safer Bet

Every smart home platform makes the same quiet promise when it launches: trust us, we won't break what you already paid for. Give it a few years and most of them do. A firmware update bricks a hub with no backup path. An API you rely on goes behind a paywall. A company gets bought out, or just quietly stops shipping updates, and the automation you spent real money installing turns into a museum piece.

So when I read through what KNX Association's newly elected board actually said about where the standard is heading next, what struck me wasn't a big announcement. It was how boring the promise was, in the best possible way.

A board with skin in the game

Earlier this year, KNX Association held its General Assembly and elected a new Executive Board, expanded from 14 members to 17. This isn't a marketing team. It's the people running product strategy at ABB, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Hager, Gira, Theben, MDT, Weinzierl Engineering, Elsner, Eelectron and Insta, the manufacturers who actually build the 8,000-plus certified devices that KNX installations run on. KNX Association asked each of them what they'd push the board to focus on. Seventeen separate answers, and the same word kept showing up: simplicity.

Not "innovation." Not "AI-powered everything," even though several of them mentioned AI as a tool. Simplicity.

Charles Brunel, representing Schneider Electric on the board, put it more bluntly than most. He called KNX "the Linux of building automation," an open, robust, future-proof foundation, and argued that as raw materials and component costs get less predictable, total cost of ownership becomes the thing that actually decides who wins in this market. His case for KNX wasn't a feature list. It was "energy sobriety, long lifecycle, backward compatibility, and resilience."

Bastian Elsner made the same point from a different angle: KNX needs to get easier to use "whilst preserving its greatest strengths: robustness, stability, and backward compatibility." Thomas Weinzierl, whose company has been building KNX hardware for 25 years, was just as direct, framing "defending our open standard and international community against proprietary solutions" as a core goal for the board, not a nice-to-have.

Read all seventeen answers back to back and the pattern is hard to miss. Every one of these people runs a business that depends on KNX not breaking. None of them pitched a revolution. They pitched the same unglamorous discipline that's kept the standard alive since 1990: make it easier to use without making it fragile.

What that actually looks like in the software

Promises from a board are cheap until the tooling backs them up. ETS6.4, which shipped earlier this year, is a decent test of whether it does.

The feature that stood out to me wasn't the new multi-linking shortcut or the automatic project backups, useful as those are. It's something KNX Association calls Compatibility Mode. By default, ETS now starts in native 64-bit mode, full performance, full access to system memory. But the moment you open a project built with older plug-ins, ETS6.4 automatically restarts itself in 32-bit compatibility mode so that project still works exactly as it should. Close the project, and ETS drops back to native mode on the next launch. No manual toggle, no warning that a five-year-old project is unsupported. It just handles it.

That's a small, unglamorous engineering decision, and it's exactly what Elsner and Brunel were describing. Somebody on that development team decided that an existing client's older project working properly mattered more than defaulting everyone into the faster new mode and letting the old projects fend for themselves.

It also lines up with a claim KNX Association made in a separate year-end trends piece, that KNX installations wired before 2000 are still fully operable today. "Certified once, compatible forever," as they put it there. I can't personally verify every installation from three decades ago, but that same philosophy is exactly what I saw in the ETS6.4 release notes, a piece of new tooling built specifically so it doesn't strand old projects. It's a real engineering constraint the standard's own manufacturers are still building around, not a marketing line.

Why this matters more than a feature list

I've written before about what happens when the company behind a smart home platform makes a decision that isn't yours to veto. A remote firmware push has bricked hubs with no way to recover the configuration. A free developer API has gone behind a subscription paywall with a few months' notice. None of those companies were lying when they launched. They just eventually answered to a roadmap and a shareholder base that stopped prioritising the five-year-old install sitting in someone's ceiling.

KNX doesn't have that problem in the same way, and it's not because KNX Association is more virtuous than any single vendor. It's because the standard is owned collectively by a consortium of competing manufacturers who each need their new devices to keep talking to installations from a decade ago, or the whole open ecosystem stops being worth belonging to, for all of them at once. That's a structural incentive, not a promise. Reading the new board's own words just makes that incentive visible instead of implied.

For a project here in Joburg, that stability question isn't academic. Each install I spec gets documented and addressed in ETS, with a project file that belongs to the client, not to me and not to a single manufacturer's app account. If I'm not available, another certified KNX partner can open that file and keep the system running. Try doing that with a proprietary hub tied to one company's cloud login.

KNX isn't immune to a bad decision, and there's no guarantee every manufacturer on that board follows through on what they said this year. But the incentive structure points the right way, and for once, the people actually running the standard said so themselves instead of leaving it to a marketing brief.

If you're speccing a build and want to talk through what an open standard actually protects you from over a ten-year horizon, get in touch. Just a conversation about what the project needs.

wayne@knxlogic.co.za | 082 564 3982 | www.knxlogic.co.za