Open Standards = Success

There was a time when the major automation vendors locked out their competition with proprietary products that forced their customers to keep coming back to expand or upgrade their systems. Those days are rapidly disappearing. The equation is simple. Your success when you base your systems on open standards is the sum of:

Lower product development costs
Lower product support costs
Greater market share through compliance
    with customer requirements
Higher customer retention
Opportunities to leverage on your compatibility
    with other products

Jan 4, 2002, by Curt Wuollet from a Control.com Post

Sometimes OEMs think that compliance with open standards removes the distinction or uniqueness of your products. This is not the case, however, Cleaver product designers always distinguish their products with proprietary features and performance enhancements. They simply make sure that their competitive advantages work in concert with the open standards their products support. Your competitive advantages give customers reasons to select your products. Your compliance with open standards gives your competitor’s customers the ability to jump ship and use your products instead.

When you base your products on proprietary features, you find yourself constantly writing software and needing one more feature. Customers are constantly asking you to develop interfaces to other equipment they use or worse, they elect not to use your products because they don’t meet their interfacing requirements. Once you have adopted open standards, your costs decrease dramatically as your engineering burden diminishes. This is especially true when you embed LINUX in your products. Once you step up to an IPm™ core for your product, you have all the developers at SIXNET plus LINUX programmers around the world enhancing your product constantly. None of these developers are on your payroll or straining your budget in any way!

Every day, your customers ask you if you support Modbus, or if your systems support Ethernet TCP/IP networking. Customers expect that the products they buy from you will work with the other components in their systems. They tell you that they want the freedom to choose their suppliers but the fact is that if you deliver the products and services they need, most customers will stay loyal to you and be repeat customers. Supporting open standards in your products is the best way to insure the growth of your customer base.

The fact is that the “old school” suppliers – the ones that cling to their closed (proprietary) strategies – are losing market share and their profits are suffering. (You know who they are. You hear the stories of their troubles every day.) OEM suppliers who have adopted a philosophy of open standards in their product offerings are the companies who are thriving in today’s business environment. In spite of the difficult economic climate, SIXNET sales were up 40% in the first half of 2002. We attribute this tremendous success to our leadership position in developing industrial products based upon open standards. We wish to openly share this success with you.