Philips Lighting Launches New IoT Platform at Light + Building

Mar 26, 2018

Philips Lighting has introduced a new Internet of Things (IoT) platform, called Interact, that will enable professional customers to unlock the full potential of connected lighting for the IoT. The platform supports the company’s strategy to deliver new data-enabled services as value expands from lighting products and systems to services. The company also introduced connected lighting systems that can generate and upload data to its IoT platform to power a growing portfolio of data-enabled services.

Philips made the announcement at Light + Building 2018, the world’s leading trade fair for lighting and building services technology.

Philips Lighting has already installed 29 million connected light points worldwide and plans for every new LED product it produces to be connectable by 2020. This growing number of connected light points, sensors and devices, as well as systems, can collect large volumes of data for which Interact was designed to handle. The highly secure, scalable cloud-based Interact platform uses sophisticated and modern data management and data processing capabilities, including machine learning, to bring sense to all manner of data, creating data-enabled services for customers that will deliver benefits beyond illumination.

A typical example of such a service is occupancy data from different buildings, combined and analyzed to help managers to understand and predict how people use office space. Such insights can help deliver savings by optimizing the use of existing office space and support better designed, more efficient buildings.

In addition, data from authorized third parties can also be analyzed by Interact. For example, for a municipal authority, news articles and social media posts, reacting to a new lighting installation on a bridge, can be analyzed and data sent to a social impact app dashboard that summarizes the public sentiment.

“Now that light points are smart enough to collect data on their performance and the environment around them, we are tapping into that intelligence,” says Harsh Chitale, leader of Philips Lighting’s Professional Business. “By analyzing the data from our connected lights, devices and systems, our goal is to create additional value for our customers through data-enabled services that unlock new capabilities and experiences.”

Interact is also designed to foster innovation from third-party developers, development partners and customers. It includes a developer portal and a growing suite of licensed application program interfaces (APIs), so that various data-enabled services can be developed.

Interact connected lighting systems

Interact is also the name of the connected lighting systems that will not only support customers to improve their lighting experiences but can also generate and upload data to the Interact IoT platform. These connected lighting systems, offering a unified user experience, feature applications that address industry-specific verticals. Available now are

• Interact City for public space lighting, roads, streets, pedestrian areas, parks and plazas
• Interact Landmark for architectural lighting
• Interact Office for offices and commercial buildings
• Interact Retail for large retail and food stores
• Interact Sports for stadiums

Later this year, the company will launch Interact Industry, which will be geared to the specific lighting needs of factories, warehouses and logistics centres. Other segment-specific Interact lighting systems will be added to the Interact portfolio in the months ahead.

To learn how the Interact IoT platform and Interact lighting systems are already benefiting customers around the world, please visit www.Interact-lighting.com.