UDMI

Smart buildings and estates increasingly run on hundreds or thousands of connected devices — sensors, controllers, meters, cameras, and actuators — sourced from many different vendors. The Universal Device Management Interface (UDMI) is an open, vendor-neutral specification, originally developed with Google, for how these devices report data and are managed in a standardized, secure way. It is not a replacement for field-level protocols like BACnet, Modbus, or KNX; it sits above them, giving owners a consistent way to onboard, monitor, secure, and operate a mixed-vendor device fleet at scale.

UDMI is a high-level specification (defined schema and set of behaviors), as well as a tool-set (contains testing capabilities, cloud-side support, edge compute etc…) for how IoT devices in a building communicate their telemetry and state to, and receive instructions from, a managing cloud platform. Rather than defining a new wire protocol, UDMI standardizes the structure of the messages exchanged (typically over MQTT), so that a controller, a sensor, and a gateway from three different manufacturers can all be managed the same way.

The name reflects its scope and intent:

• Universal — it is designed to apply across all subsystems in a building (HVAC, lighting, energy, access control, fire/life safety) rather than being a single-vertical solution.

• Device — it operates at the level of an individual managed device in physical space, not just a data feed.

• Management — its primary focus is device management — provisioning, monitoring, securing, updating — rather than real-time command and control, which remains the job of field protocols.

• Interface — it defines a message and data interface, not a proprietary client library, so any vendor can implement it independently.

UDMI typically works alongside existing building protocols rather than displacing them: a gateway translates BACnet, Modbus, or other legacy traffic into UDMI-formatted messages for the cloud, while field-level control continues to run on the protocol the equipment already speaks.

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Our mission is 4 fold:

• Reduce dependence on any single vendor or integrator

• Give portfolio-wide visibility instead of building-by-building silos

• Bake in security and lifecycle management that legacy protocols were never designed for

• Lower the long-term cost of operating a growing, heterogeneous device estate.

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How to get Involved

Anyone interested in shaping the future of the UDMI open standard  can join the UDMI-discuss group and be automatically invited to the monthly discussion. All background and roles are welcome.

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UDMI Committee Members

• Trevor Pering, Google - Moderator

• Francesco Anselmo, Google

• John Brough, Delta Controls

• Timothy Regovich, Carrier

• Duncan Greene, Onesight solutions

• Sabine Lam, Acuity

• ​Bryan Williams, Acuity

• Lorenzo Nobili, Siemens

• Nico Lomas, WSP

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