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.
One suspects, for numerous reasons, that your employer will never allow any user, especially a North American, to stop data collection by the central servers.
However, you might refer the customer to your colleagues in the EU. They will have stronger data protections that could be used to force the issue. The Europeans might be able to share how it works with your North American customer.