Standard vs Proprietary Technology

There’s a thought provoking article, by Lorenzo Amicucci, on the Nordic Semiconductor blog on End-User Factors Impacting Industrial IoT Connectivity. Nordic is the manufacturer of the System-on-a Chip (SoC) in most beacons and Lorenzo is one of their Business Development Managers. While the article talks about Industrial IoT Connectivity and by implication Bluetooth Mesh, the insights are applicable to any project that has to choose between standard or proprietary technology.

The main conclusion is that the best solution from a technical perspective is not always best for the customer. Instead, the best solution should depend on the longer-term business strategy. While a proprietary technology can have the advantage of differentiating your offering it can suffer from future limited supplier availability and possibly shorter lifetime of the technology. Large rollouts:

“…want the confidence that a huge capital spend won’t be wasted on a technology that will be left obsolete in a couple of years.”

More specfically, new and second sourced products from other vendors need to guarantee interoperability for the lifetime of your project.

Read about Generic Beacons