Let’s take a quick walk down memory lane to a time the “majors” in our industry would prefer to forget.
Before the mid-1990s, building automation was an island of proprietary lockdowns. If you bought Vendor A’s system, you were married to Vendor A for life. Their protocols were a closed secret, their controllers didn’t play nice with anyone else, and their pricing reflected that total lock-in.
The major manufacturers did not want open protocols. They fought them. They argued that proprietary systems were more secure, more reliable, and that “openness” was a pipe dream.
Then came BACnet.
It didn’t happen because the giants had a sudden change of heart. It happened because an industry-wide movement—driven by frustrated engineers, owners, and visionary developers—demanded a standard framework.
Once BACnet took hold, the landscape fractured in the best way possible:
- The Rise of the Upstarts: Open standards allowed nimble, innovative new companies to enter the market. They didn’t have to build a whole proprietary ecosystem; they just had to build a better, cheaper, or smarter BACnet controller. They started winning bids and eating up market share.
- The Forced Evolution: The majors realized that if they didn’t adopt the open standard, they were going to be locked out of specs entirely. The movement forced their hand. They had to open up or become irrelevant.
Where We Stand Today: The Next Battleground
Fast forward to today, and we are standing at the exact same crossroads. Except this time, the battle isn’t about control protocols—it’s about data extraction and semantic meaning.
Many legacy vendors have accepted BACnet for device-to-device talking, but they are still trying to build walls around the data itself. They trap your building’s operational data in proprietary clouds, charge exorbitant API fees to access it, or deliver it in flat, meaningless spreadsheets that require army-sized engineering teams to decipher.
Once again, they are protecting their turf. And once again, the movement is going to force them to change.
The “People to Portfolios” Ultimatum
As the industry shifts toward scalable Portfolio Autonomy, we can no longer afford to manually map every single point in a building. We need open semantic standards like Project Haystack, Brick Schema, and RDF/TTL graphs that allow AI and autonomous tools to read building layouts instantly.
The message to the majors today is exactly what it was thirty years ago: Open up your data or lose market share.
Nimble, “do-ocratic” companies are already building open-first platforms that hand the data keys back to the owner. The specs are changing. Forward-thinking engineers are no longer just asking for BACnet; they are specifying completely open data access.
The giants can either build the bridges to modern, autonomous portfolios, or watch the next generation of upstarts walk right past them. History has already shown us how this story ends.
What are your thoughts on the current data lock-in? Are you writing semantic data standards into your specs yet?
