First, some background -
I work in technical support for a Chinese manufacturer making (among other things) home monitoring devices. I’m our resident open source enthusiast in the North American market, not that any of my bosses know or care. My background is not in comp sci or networking, so the only applicable knowledge I have is from my meager experience with my own home lab.
We have a product (I’ll refer to it here as the Brain) that communicates wirelessly with our other devices, takes the data from them, sends the data encrypted to our servers, and is available to our customers through our web portal or phone app.
We got a support ticket recently from a customer (and software developer) asking technical questions about the communication protocol from the Brain to our servers. This customer was trying to work on Home Assistant integration for our product stack, but was hitting some roadblock that I can’t even pretend to understand. To my understanding, the integration would allow a Home Assistant server to locally gather the same information sent to our servers.
After escalating the issue to our HQ team and some back and forth there, eventually the answer was that the data transfer is encrypted and we aren’t going to share any details about it. We don’t officially support this type of integration and have no plans to. Our tech contact at HQ offered to sell API access to this customer, but obviously that isn’t what he was hoping to hear.
The customer replied that this answer didn’t surprise him, but that he would be happy to develop the Home Assistant integration if we made the necessary information available to him.
So, here’s my questions - How can I advocate from within my company to open up this aspect of our platform for open source devs to integrate our products into Home Assistant and other open source IOT platforms? Has anyone successfully made a case for this kind of thing within their own companies? What talking points can I use that my higher ups will actually listen to and understand?
I’m considering reaching out to the customer privately to seek a better understanding of what he needs from our platform. Does that seem ill-advised to anyone here?
TLDR - My employer manufactures IOT devices and locks down the platform with proprietary networking protocols. A customer and developer is seeking to write an integration for our products to work locally with Home Assistant. My higher ups said that isn’t possible and I want to convince them to make the changes necessary for it to work.
What are the suits specifically objecting to? Ie. what are the reasons they don’t want to do this? If you don’t know the exact objections and can’t find out due to whatever reason, then you’ll probably have to take an educated guess.
When you know what they’re objecting to, you can then start thinking about whether the problems or obstacles they see are even valid in the first place or if they can be solved or worked around, and form an argument from there.
Asking a little bit more information from the client might be a good idea; you can build an actual business case out of it if their case is generalizable enough, and even if not it might still be useful. If you can get a developer in the loop on this it might be helpful, since they’ll know better what questions to ask etc. if you’re not clear on what the client wants to do and why it didn’t work, and a developer could also help you with doing a quick guesstimate of what would need to be done. Don’t want to go too far into planning at this point though, just enough to be able to make some sort of business case out of it.
Also, suits like money; you’ll want build an argument where you can ultimately conclude “so if we do this, it’ll make us $ X over K years based on these estimates, and it’ll only cost us $ Y and we can outsource the development to this person here”
I don’t know really if the suits even do object to it. The response from my counterpart at HQ was essentially “modbus TCP through wifi isn’t supported. The application layer protocol is protobuf. We can’t provide you with a decoding file. Buy API access instead.”
Our competitors do have Home Assistant integrations already (community maintained as well, obviously) so there may be room for me to make the case that we’re losing customers to them over this.
Edit: protobuf means nothing to me, but the customer indicated that he already knew that.
Seems like a bit of a case of shortsighted leadership.
Considering that your competitors already provide HA integration, that could be a good angle for you as you mentioned. I assume the issue is that they want to squeeze more money out of people by shunting them to the in-house API instead of supporting HA – plus I assume that by telling people to use the API they get more data out of clients, since things have to hit the company’s servers instead of everything happening on the client’s network.
How much does that API access cost? Would bridging that API to Home Assistant work, ie. writing a HA integration that talks to the API instead of directly to your doodad?