Owlet® - Powered by OpenSynergy
From Lab to Market Success in Weeks:
How Blue SDK delivered tailored Bluetooth® connectivity to Owlet Dream Sight™
The Go-To-Market Challenge
Owlet, a leading brand in baby monitoring technology, approached OpenSynergy with the ambitious goal of shipping a sub-$100 baby monitor with features, value, and a user experience rivaling other products that retail at a much higher price. Additionally, Owlet wanted to deliver the final product in time for the pre-Christmas selling season, which meant that retailers needed to receive the product by late summer—only a few short months away from the time they engaged with OpenSynergy.
Stuck with BlueZ
Owlet’s product team realized early that to deliver their vision and meet their go-to-market strategy, it was mandatory that they had full control over the Bluetooth® stack in the new product. Therefore, they could not rely on the default Bluetooth stack included with their Bluetooth® controller.
Up to that point, Owlet had been working with BlueZ, the native open-source Bluetooth stack in Linux™, but soon realized that it would not meet their requirements for supporting the key features needed in the new product. The solution also had to ensure an outstanding user experience as well as the high level of quality that their brand is known for. Additionally, since the native Linux Bluetooth stack is not qualified with the Bluetooth SIG, Owlet would be forced to spend several weeks or even months qualifying the Bluetooth stack on their own with no support. While realizing a low bill-of-materials cost was critical to the product’s success, Owlet could not justify the time and effort that taking ownership over the native Linux Bluetooth stack would require and certainly could not justify spending valuable development resources on bug fixes and maintenance of a forked version of BlueZ. It was clear to the Owlet engineering team that they would not meet their shipping deadline if they continued to work with the native Linux stack, also potentially jeopardizing the quality of their product.
The Solution
Blue SDK
OpenSynergy presented to the Owlet team their industry-leading Bluetooth host stack, Blue SDK, which provided all the flexibility, control, and rich feature set that Owlet needed to realize their vision and meet their timeline. Blue SDK allowed them to avoid spending unnecessary resources on owning their own bug fixes, qualifying the Bluetooth stack, and struggling with Bluetooth-related issues without the support their team needed.
OpenSynergy supported Owlet in a quick turnaround by quoting the right solution for their product, beating several other alternatives on both cost and quality. OpenSynergy was quickly selected as Owlet’s Bluetooth host stack supplier and work began immediately to tackle the product’s aggressive timeline. By trusting OpenSynergy’s team of Bluetooth experts, Owlet gained not just a reliable Bluetooth software stack, but clear support and guidance in the integration of its product while managing its constrained hardware resources. The product required an alternative to using D-BUS, the native IPC in Linux for Bluetooth.
OpenSynergy was able to easily support this requirement, leveraging example code included with Blue SDK, and completing the integration without the use of an IPC. The collaboration between the teams was very efficient, with OpenSynergy taking care of the initial integration and having the Owlet team up and running within a few days. OpenSynergy then completed and delivered the full scope of the hardware integration within a two-week timeframe, enabling Owlet’s engineering team to take over at that point and focus on integrating their existing applications with Blue SDK. This phase required only minimal support that was provided by OpenSynergy with detailed and swift responses, even on the same business day.
As a result of the readiness and robustness of Blue SDK and the effective collaboration framework, Owlet successfully delivered the product to market as planned, joining the growing family of over 1 billion devices powered by Blue SDK. Owlet also reports an 83% decrease in customer service intakes for the Dream Sight camera from the previous model.
OpenSynergy is very proud to partner with Owlet and to have contributed to the successful launch of Dream Sight and looks forward to continuing to support them in their vision to drive further innovation and a better user experience in technology-assisted baby care.