Can 3rd party or non-Skyline developed protocol drivers be added to Skyline Maintenance & Support?
Skyline can only provide limited support for second-party or third-party driver development, like sharing some basic information by answering small questions for example.
if additional support would be necessary, or if the second-party or third-party driver need to be covered by Skyline Maintenance & Support, it would be required to order System Engineering hours to have the protocol reviewed and approved.
Also note that every second-party or third-party driver need to be registered in Skyline’s DMS Driver Database. This registration is free of charge, and will make sure that the protocol will be assigned a unique ID to ensure a seamless integration in their DataMiner System.
By default the party developing the driver is the party that owns the liability for the support on its product. As owner of the driver, the owning party as well is granted a perpetual rights-to-use license. In other words the developing (owning) party can sell driver licenses & support services to the market using his own business model.
Third-party or non-Skyline developed driver protocols are by default not part of the Skyline DataMiner Maintenance & Support package as the service we offer includes only the products Skyline is liable for. However case-by-case we can look into it.
Below some possible options:
- At first in the DataMiner system (driver list) you easily can see whether a driver is Skyline owned or belongs to a third-party – in case the ‘skyline bird’ is colored in gray the driver is non-Skyline owned.
- For those non-Skyline drivers, Skyline offers a service to have a validation check on those drivers. The latter means that a Skyline expert will have a look to the incoming/outgoing communication threads to ensure this is not creating any instability of the complete DataMiner platform. Note: the hours we spend on the service are payable. When the process is validated the full DataMiner platform becomes again under M&S. NOTE: Skyline is not liable for how the driver is working (e.g. if there are functions written in the driver that eat more than expected CPU resources then Skyline is not liable for this behavior.
- Case-by-case an agreement can be made where a driver developed by a third-party can be added to the Skyline library, where Skyline is not only validating the in/output mechanisms but reviewing the full functionality of the driver, again all the hours we spend on it are chargeable as a service. As a consequence the driver becomes fully supported as it was developed by Skyline. Note the latter is only possible case-by-case, after an agreement made between the commercial sales manager and the customer and after finishing the required technical validation steps.