The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA), the organization supporting home and building automation, is partnering with others and bringing in new leadership.

Through its Intelligent and Integrated Building Council and new research program, the organization late last year completed its 2011 North American intelligent building roadmap. The roadmap investigated a number of things.

The roadmap research project outlined long-term opportunities in the intelligent building industry. It provided an understanding of the collective influence of emerging trends within the intelligent building industry, such as energy efficiency, renewable technology, IT convergence and the integration of buildings with the smart grid.

The roadmap also investigated the current and future direction of the intelligent building market and the opportunities it represents for participants within the value chain.

In another move, LIGHTFAIR International (LFI) partnered with CABA, first as an exclusive partner in last month’s CABA Intelligent and Integrated Building Council meeting and then at the upcoming LFI 2011 in May with two premier pavilions staged on the trade show floor of interest to CABA members: The Building Integration Pavilion and the Daylighting Pavilion.

Additional, CABA has entered into a supporter member agreement with the OSGi Alliance. The OSGi Service Platform provides functionality to Java that makes Java the premier environment for software integration and thus for development. OSGi Alliance members develop and facilitate the deployment of OSGi specifications, which serve as the platform for universal middleware in server and embedded environments. Deployment of the open standard greatly increases the value of a wide range of computers and devices that use the Java platform. OSGi technology is a component integration platform with a service-oriented architecture and lifecycle capabilities that enable dynamic delivery of services. OSGi technology is shipping in millions of units worldwide, and is deployed by Fortune 100 companies in home, automotive, mobile and enterprise markets.

Stan Moyer, president, OSGi Alliance, points out, “Diverse development environments including home gateway and Internet cloud have embraced OSGi as the proven modularity standard for Java.”

On the leadership side, Dr. Satyen Mukherjee of Royal Philips Electronics was appointed CABA chairman of the board. He is chief scientist and senior director at Philips Research North America. Dr. Jack Jachner of Alcatel-Lucent is now a member of the CABA board of directors. He brought more than 20 years of telecommunications research and development experience to his current position in strategic solutions development at Alcatel-Lucent. In his current role, Dr. Jachner is responsible for the company's enterprise solution technology directions and partnerships.

 Another new member of the board is Elizabeth Jacobs of Siemens Industry Inc. Jacobs is director of marketing for the Building Technologies Division of Siemens Industry, Inc. She is responsible for market strategy for the division's control products and systems, and fire life safety business units. And James Gilmore, director of Internet performance within the network technology department at Bell Canada, has also been appointed to the CABA board. Gilmore is responsible for the development of solutions that help enhance and optimize the end-to-end performance of broadband and Internet services within the home and Bell's network.