Is BLE qualification required for proprietary service?

[Volodymyr]

Since related topic Is BLE changing licensing policy? was marked as resolved I moved my question to new one. My company is ready to get SIG membership for BLE usage and pay the fee. The only question is whether we need to pass qualification test if:

1. we are not going to use any Bluetooth logo or trademark on box, device
2. device will use the only proprietary BLE service
3. we don't even want to be compatible with any other profile or service
4. BLE is not the main service of our product
5. BLE will be used between our product and our application.

I would be really thankful for a piece of help. Thank you. PS. Tried to understand legal documents but unfortunately I am not lawyer.

[Volodymyr]

Thank you John for an effort. Unfortunately, I cannot use qualified module. We are going to use open-source Bluez with a chip without qualification. It is OK to pay the fee for our product, probably we already have got SIG membership.

BUT: We are using the only proprietary BLE service which won't be easy to qualify using PTS. To pass that qualification we need for sure to implement separate FW image which will support mandatory BLE options. It will take some time. The time, as usual, is the most expensive thing in our life. :-(

[John]

To be honest, I do not know if we used PTS at all. We hired a test house who then assigned a Bluetooth Qualification Engineer who dealt with all of the SIG rules and interactions. It wasn't a lot of money and so worth it to not have to figure all of this out ourselves.