Device Integration

The client's scanners and access panels were fully functional but spoke proprietary, vendor-locked protocols with no native path into the modern platform they intended to roll out organization-wide. A wholesale hardware replacement was neither budgeted nor operationally justified given the equipment's remaining useful life, but the fragmentation was already costing them: three separate reporting systems with no single source of truth.

We reverse-engineered and documented the legacy protocols where vendor documentation was incomplete, then built a middleware layer that speaks each legacy protocol natively on the device side and exposes a single, unified REST API on the platform side — handling protocol translation, message queuing, and error/retry logic in between. Rollout was staged device-group by device-group rather than as a single cutover, with each group validated in parallel-run against the legacy system before decommissioning the old reporting path. No firmware changes were made to existing hardware, and there was zero production downtime across the entire rollout.

The client retained every piece of working hardware, avoided the capital cost of a full hardware refresh, and now reports through a single unified platform instead of reconciling data across three disconnected systems. The integration layer was also built extensibly, so onboarding the next legacy device type is a configuration exercise rather than a fresh engineering project.