Here I have suggested to HAI OPII folks to purchase the device for a simple means of getting emails from the HAI OPII board. It is a nice feature to have making the OPII board a bit more "solid state".
Over the years have utilized Homeseer (even in a crippled OPII plugin state) to provide status; but it did mean using software and some means of redundancy to the "box".
Now though personally playing with simple communications / status running on PC's and taking it to the little device powered by the board methodology of simple status.
Impressed with that whole miniaturization thing of using a very simple micro router with multiple means of network connectivity (wireless 802.11N, 3G/4G and an IN/Out Nic) and serial connectivity in a tiny powered by the OPII board microrouter. Mostly here I have little space in the HAI OPII can to do much of anything these days. I do also have a subpanel in use though.
Just really a personal challenge these days to see if it can done; that and I am trying to break it. (a couple of days ago installed some metric measuring tools on it for graphing - really don't need it but curious about it).
I do the tickle email/text thing with the alarm service provider while concurrently doing my own thing and compare transaction speeds.
Yup; software (CQC) will let you go beyond the basics of the simple OPII combo security automation panel and or integrate some other means of hardware for security.
That said most / many folks want to keep it simple and basic these days. (many only care about remote control with the cell phones using cloud based applications -
easy button automation)
IE: basic lighting scheduling and events on the panel work fine for me while
here wanting a bit more than a timer/simple rules of my irrigation I took it to software (and made it sort of solid state running a piece of software on a tiny arm based CPU "computer" that fits inside of my old Rainbird box. I did leave another irrigation setup utilizing the Rainbird system even though I do have an OPII board there; it works other than the sand clogging up the sprinkler heads or solenoids or lightning blowing the fuse on the Rainbird system.