Vendor-neutral building automation
Nobody signs a contract intending to be locked in. It happens gradually.
A proprietary driver here because it was quicker. An undocumented point-naming convention there because the programme was tight. Graphics saved in a format only one contractor can open. A licence registered to the integrator rather than the building owner. Individually, each is a small compromise made for a good reason at the time. Together they mean that five years later, changing supplier costs more than living with the one you have.
The ownership question
Who holds the licences, source files, credentials and data that keep your building changeable?
If your Niagara or supervisory licences are registered to your integrator rather than to you, you do not own your building's control system in any meaningful sense. This is the single most common form of lock-in and the easiest to avoid - ask at tender stage, and require it in the contract.
Manufacturer-specific protocols mean any future integration has to go through that manufacturer, at their price and on their timeline. Sometimes there is a genuine technical reason. Frequently there is not, and an open BACnet or Modbus interface was available for the same money.
A point list nobody can interpret is a barrier to every future project - analytics, cloud integration, retro-commissioning, even routine maintenance. The knowledge lives in one engineer's head, and that engineer works for your contractor.
If you have the running graphics but not the source files, every change goes back to the original contractor. Over a ten-year building life that is a substantial and entirely avoidable revenue stream for someone else.
It is surprisingly common for a building owner to have no administrator account on their own system. Everything routine works fine until the day it does not.
Changes made over years without a change log mean nobody - including the incumbent - fully understands the system. That uncertainty is itself a switching cost, because any new contractor has to price the risk of what they cannot see.
None of this appears as a line item. It appears as a general sense that the building is expensive to run and difficult to change, which is exactly why it persists for years without being addressed.
We should be honest about the limits. Open does not mean every component is interchangeable. Controllers are manufacturer-specific. Some equipment genuinely only speaks its own protocol. Any integrator who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What open does mean is this: the interfaces between components are published and standard, the data is described in a schema anyone can read, and everything created on your project is handed to you in a form you can use without us. The lock-in that matters is not hardware. It is knowledge and access. Those we hand over completely.
This is contractual on every project we deliver.
Print this. Take it to your next tender interview. The answers will tell you more than the technical submission.
A contractor who answers all ten comfortably is one you can work with for a decade. A contractor who gets uncomfortable around questions six and ten is telling you something important.
Send us the specification, the point list, or just a description of what is not working. You will get a reply from an engineer within one working day.