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In his current role, Mark Walters leverages hisover 20 years experience with electronic product solutions, high-end sound reinforcement, vehicular sensing/controls, premise wiring solutions,automated building controls,RF mesh networks, home automation and security. The Z-Wave Alliance isa consortium of over 300manufacturers and service providers worldwidewith more than 1000 certified productsthe alliance isdedicated to interoperable wireless home control products based on the Z-Wave open standard. I first talked with Mark at the internationalCESwhich ledto this podcastinterview portions of which are extracted here.

Q: Can you talk about some of your top career successes and lessons learned that you feel will be useful to the audience? A: .My background is actually in sciences, biology and chemistry and somewhere along the line I ended up in technology, and have served in a number of different roles through a number of different companies including operations, manufacturing, engineering management, general business management and now I find myself running a global consortium. I think whats worked best for me throughout my career is being very curious, asking a lot of questions and being fortunate enough to find technologies and companies that have been exciting to me..

Q: Can you describe your journey leading to your current role? A: .I started out in sciences and got interested in electronics way back in the early 80s when the Ethernet was just starting to happen. It was always very exciting to me how we could communicate across great distances with people in many different countries and so Ive always kept some element of technology and communication in my career path.I think the key for me in my career path and getting to Z-Wave Alliance and the chairmanship has been keeping that broader scope, higher level perspective and understanding how to apply that technology to the business and how to solve problems about making peoples lives better using the technology rather than focusing specifically on the technology itself.

Q: Many people in the audience may not be familiar with the Z-Wave Alliance and the challenges that led up to the formation and you being the Chairman and President. Can you comment? Also what is the value of the work from the Z-Wave Alliance? A: .I ran into this group of engineers from Denmark in a company called Zensys and as we got to know each other a little bit we realized they had a great technology. At that time there were 3 or 4 companies in the world that were looking at the technology as well. We all got together and said this is a great technology, we should use it in our products, but we need to do it in a way that we could take advantage of each others fortes. In this way, when somebody wants to do a home control solution all they have to do is buy Z-Wave and it would all work together.This sounded very simple at the time; there were 5 companies involved so we thought lets collaborate. Very quickly that began to snowball as other companies started to contact us saying that they wanted to get in on it and add their products to this particular standard of technology. We realized that we had to create some structure around that concept and we formed the Z-Wave Alliance. As the Z-Wave Alliance formed I was chosen to be the interim Chairman.Here I am some 9 years later still the interim Chairman of 6 months.

Q: What do you wish to accomplish in the next three years?A: .Three years its going to be about continuing to grow, bringing more companies into the Alliance and taking a look at how we use our technology and evolve our technology.This whole thing I was talking about aging independently thats going to become much more necessary as people begin to age. We talk a lot about the Internet of Things, and all of the things out there somehow magically talking to each other into this big thing we call cloud and that is making our lives better. I believe very strongly that we will use technology in our homes through the internet into a much bigger collective; what we are now calling cyber-physical systems to do things like reduce traffic and reduce energy consumption.

Q: What surprises you as President? A: .It continually surprises me how business wants to be sometimes (conservative would be a good word), and how afraid some people are to dream, imagine or let go of the why we cant in favour of the how about we do. This is something I get caught up in so Im guilty of this myself, but Im often surprised by very, very bright people who spend all of their energy figuring out just what can go wrong and just why they shouldnt do something and spend very little energy thinking about what happens if this goes right.There are certainly visionaries everywhere, but they seem to be fewer and farther between.

Q: What do you see as the top upcoming disruptive innovations? A: .I think two things are going to be pretty disruptive, the hydrocarbon economy and the aging population.

Q: I was just thinking about what you are trying to do with Z-Wave Alliance. Im thinking as a consumer I see kind of a spectrum confusion theres my bluetooth device, cellular phone, wireless mouse, cordless phone, router with its own WiFi, etc. how do you address all of that where maybe theres interference? A: .You go to an IEEE meeting and you figure out how we design this stuff so that it doesnt interfere with each other. We are seeing situations where some of the more popular brands are causing some interference and the technology solution is open up more bands.From the consumers standpoint, if we as technologists and technology developers do our jobs right and continue to do our jobs right, as far as the consumers are concerned they dont need to be concerned about what the underlying technology is technology done right is transparent and magic.

Q: In my interviews with many senior executives of very large companies I ask the question where they see as growth areas (in technical areas) internationally. They talk about Africa, India, China, perhaps South America and even now greater growth in the United States. Do you define these as the same top ICT growth regions internationally? A: .Absolutely.Worldwide you cant put the technology genie back in the bottle, you cant put the commerce genie back in the bottle, but barring political unrest which unfortunately we have far too much of in the world today, barring disruptions like that we are going to see amazing growth worldwide in all of these economies..

Q: What are your views on this rapid growth in free content? A: .Whats interesting is that we have a whole new set of content out there that is deliberately free the creator actually puts it out there in the public domain and says here take it for free, I dont expect any compensation back from this. I think its going to be paramount that we recognize the difference between something thats being given free by the creator and something that is being stolen and made available freely through technology.My dad used to always tell me that theres no such thing as a free lunch and I dont think there is such thing as free content. If were getting that content for free then we are circumventing some system that is important and sooner or later if everybody takes everything for free and there is no remuneration happening then the whole system will collapse and the content will cease to exist.

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