Reading this 'article' puportedly instructing one on how to avoid being locked in to a proprietary access control platform, one would get the impression that Mercury is the ultimate in openness:
A few industry veterans recognized the increasing value in being open and set a course to fulfill the value offering of open architecture within the access control industry. Mercury Security, as well as a couple of others, set out on a business mission of providing a truly open field-controlling hardware panel set. The others have since fallen out of favor....
Open architecture in access control is more than a concept. It is a set of operational constraints that restrict to the minimum any core element of the entire system that cannot be sourced from others.
Using the Mercury Security solution, the customer moves beyond this trap of proprietary hardware into a modern system with modern functionality, features, and most importantly, a Introducing the dynamic future of enhancements, network compatibility and options.
But isn't this just hypocritical BS, since you can't actually replace Mercury Hardware with anything but Mercury (or Mercury approved hardware with Mercury firmware). Moreover the fact that they are open to third party access control software is not surprising, it's essential, since they lack the software themselves. They have to open it up or write their own.
Is this just open spin or are they really different?
Background: Mercury Open Access Hardware Examined, Beware of Fake Access Control Panels?