Your Matter Portfolio Isn’t Dead. It’s in the Wrong Building.

When Matter launched, it did what you’d expect when Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung all show up to the same standard: it started a hype cycle almost instantly. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that? Companies across the building industry called it a source of new opportunities and big names rushed to build their own Matter portfolios, certain this was the wave to ride.

In homes, Matter found its buyers. In offices, those portfolios mostly sat on the shelf.

Nobody Specifies Matter for an Office Tower

The building industry is not a fast industry. It takes time for the bold, trend-chasing projects to become the normal ones. The companies rushing to sell into that market expected Matter to move at software speed, in an industry that moves at concrete speed. But that timing mismatch wasn’t even the real problem.

The real problem showed up at trade fairs. At Light + Building 2024 we heard the same question at stand after stand: «What about Matter for the office?» And the answer, once enough installers had tried it, always converged on the same conclusion. You couldn’t build an office with Matter.

Two reasons came up again and again:

• Matter’s controllers are home hubs. They are built to manage one household, not a facilities team running hundreds of rooms with different tenants and access rights.
• Offices need room control to talk to the rest of the building: HVAC plant, access control, emergency lighting, the building management system. KNX, DALI and BACnet have done that for decades. Matter was never designed to.

None of this is a flaw. Matter is doing what it was designed to do, and missing that is exactly why so many Matter portfolios sat unsold. Matter was built to solve the mess in home automation, not to referee standard wars that have run inside commercial office buildings for decades. The companies that got this positioning wrong burned a launch cycle finding out the hard way.

Writing Matter Off Is the Same Mistake as Overselling It

Matter is still young. Not experimental anymore, but nowhere near finished either. If you’re building products or platforms on top of it, as we are, it currently sits somewhere between early and middle stage in its life.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance has settled into a fairly predictable rhythm: one or two feature releases a year, with smaller point releases in between for bug fixes, security hardening and incremental features.

The basics already exist: lights, switches, sockets, sensors, thermostats, locks, blinds. Each release adds a layer on top:

• 2024: EV chargers and home energy management (Matter 1.3 and 1.4)
• 2025: cameras (Matter 1.5)
• 2026: NFC commissioning, Joint Fabric shared administration and thermostat suggestions (Matter 1.6)

Judging its ceiling by what it can do today is a mistake in either direction: overselling it or writing it off.

Where Matter Wins: Rooms That Behave Like Homes

Matter remains residential, and that’s correct, because residential is what it was built for. But the reason it fails in offices also shows where it works: any commercial space shaped like a home. At Atios we see the clearest fit in hotels, and a smaller opening in shops and restaurants.

Hotels: Hundreds of Smart Homes Under One Roof

Hotels are the strongest commercial fit today, for a simple reason. A guest room is essentially a smart home on its own: a few dozen devices, one set of occupants at a time, reset between stays. Matter already covers most of what a room needs: lighting scenes, motorised curtains, smart thermostats, occupancy sensors, smart plugs, air quality sensors, window and door contacts.

That seems to contradict the office problem, since a hotel also has hundreds of rooms. The difference is that a hotel doesn’t need Matter to run the building. It needs Matter inside each room. Corridors, plant rooms, central HVAC, emergency lighting and the backbone that links hundreds of rooms stay on systems built for that job, such as KNX.

Picture a guest checking in. They tap their key card and the room responds. Curtains open. Lights fade into a «Welcome» scene. The temperature settles to 22 °C. The bathroom fan kicks in if humidity’s climbing. Matter can already handle the device interoperability behind all of that, while the hotel’s own management system supplies the business logic on top, and the key-card and TV systems stay where they are.

Two features in Matter 1.6 make this more practical. NFC commissioning lets a device be set up over NFC before it is fully powered, so a whole floor of switches and fittings can be provisioned in advance and join the network as soon as the power comes on. Joint Fabric lets several controllers administer the same Matter network, which suits a property where the operator and the integrator both need access. Both are in the specification now; support in shipping devices and platforms will follow.

Shops and Restaurants: No Thousand-Point Control Needed

Shops and restaurants are a smaller opening, for the same reason: most don’t need thousands of control points. Matter handles the lighting layer well: product highlighting, seasonal scenes, window displays, and scenes that shift from breakfast to dinner to cleaning. Add occupancy sensing in storerooms and restrooms, motorised shades for patios, and energy monitoring on smart plugs that catches a fridge or coffee machine left running overnight.

Stop Choosing Between KNX and Matter

Matter is not, today, a complete building automation protocol for hotels, shops or restaurants. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you the same overreach that left all those unsold Matter portfolios sitting on a shelf a few years ago. But it already provides a strong foundation for the parts of those buildings a guest, a shopper, or a diner actually experiences.

That gap, between what a guest experiences and the building’s backbone, is precisely where we’ve built Atios to sit. The Atios KNX Bridge connects an existing KNX installation to Matter. It is a Matter interface, a KNX IP interface and a KNX-DALI gateway in one device, so the lights, blinds and climate already running on KNX show up in Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa or SmartThings without replacing anything.

Where there is no KNX, Atios SmartCore brings the same result to a single space. One controller with relays, inputs and DALI-2 lighting control runs a guest room, a shop or a restaurant, and it speaks Matter out of the box.

We don’t ask anyone to choose KNX over Matter, or to wait for Matter to replace it. We bridge the two, so the guest experience speaks Matter and the building’s backbone keeps running on the standard that’s proven it can carry hundreds of rooms for more than thirty years.

Matter runs the room. KNX runs the building.
Each protocol does the job it was built for.