It can be tempting to focus on the perceived cost savings or configurability of a proprietary solution, but this comes at the sacrifice of the true value of wireless controls: interoperability.

As we saw in the early days of the internet, "walled gardens" are typically the first to market. They offer a curated list of options and they prove that there is demand. But multi-vendor, open standards tend to provide more value and enable more innovation in the end.

By choosing technologies like Zigbee, you will always have the option of selling your device through other ecosystem partners or adding devices from other vendors to your own ecosystem. It's difficult to predict which ecosystems and use cases will be common just a few years from now, but you can't go wrong by choosing the most widely supported and open IoT standard!

Choosing a standards-based technology also means that a global group of experts are continuing to improve and innovate on the technology underlying your product. This includes improvements to interoperability, functionality, power efficiency, and security — all areas that may consume considerable resources if you were to develop on your own, and could potentially leave you more vulnerable to customer experience and security issues.

MMB has significant expertise working with industry leaders who were ahead of the market with their own proprietary solutions and now want to adopt standards like Zigbee. We can help you evaluate the best way to integrate Zigbee into your existing products and ecosystem, taking into consideration factors like whether you need to continue to support legacy devices and minimizing changes to codebases. In some cases we have been able to adapt RapidConnect to customers' existing protocols, enabling them to add Zigbee communications to their products without changes to their existing code.