IBNS (Identity Based Networking Services) - serious industry direction or Cisco pushing Cisco?

tl;dr - is IBNS Cisco SEs pushing Cisco proprietary designs or is this an actual, solid long-term industry direction? Can IBNS configurations be used with something other than ISE? General Googling isn't helping me with the answer (or I haven't had enough coffee yet.)

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I've just run across a customer that has recently replaced their NPS installation with ISE. On the switch side, the Cisco nodes they've recently deployed have been configured using IBNS 2.0 for 802.1x.

I'm generally vendor-agnostic, try to use open standards and keep my configurations easy enough for newbies to understand if they have to do emergency changes at 3 a.m. and are sleep-deprived.

The customer's parent org and project management often pushes open standards for interoperability purposes.

I've just started reading the marketing slicks, configuration guides and other docs but I need a sense of the bigger picture.

Is IBNS a real, functioning, good-for-use-in-the-real-world configuration process that I should be looking at moving my other customers to?

Is there a advantage to using IBNS-based configurations over Cisco's more standard 802.1x configurations?

Is there an increase in the O&M burden with IBNS?

Can Cisco's IBNS 2.0 configurations be used with something other than ISE?

Am I just completely over-thinking this and am just intimidated with all the classes and maps required to make it work versus a couple of global and port level commands?

Thanks!