Business and Technical Impacts of Open and Proprietary Architectures on Infotronic Systems

Infotronic systems will have a strong link to and influence from IT industry in the future. When talking about the impacts of open or proprietary architectures, this significant characteristic has to be taken into account. Proprietary systems today don't satisfy the demands of this fast growing world. Using an open architecture, a clear layered and modular design leads to a controllable complexity and the 1^st tier suppliers could share their development effort with others. But new players are entering this market: the companies of the consumer industry. These companies use different business models – like licensing IP's, bundling of software packages from different sub suppliers instead of getting paid by produced hardware parts. Moving towards these new business models will help the “old” suppliers industry to keep their revenue stream “up to date” and to participate in increasing numbers of features sold to the customers.