Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.

This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the environment.