Review of Ruff’s Path of Technical “Great Leap”
If there is any technology that will change people’s life, work, and entertainment habits, that will be the Internet of Things (IoT).
Years earlier, if someone talked about IoT, there might be a portion of people who would not understand it. Nowadays, however, IoT has connected all equipment, no matter bracelets, home appliances, or robots, automobiles, and plants. According to a Forbes report, the number of networked devices will reach 11 billion by 2018, and that is exclusive of computers and mobile phones. Obviously, the topic of IoT will continue its heat for a long time.
Ruff, founded in 2014, came correctly with the good trend. Based on years’ sharp sense towards the industry, the then Ruff’s founding team had anticipated the market at the very early stage, and promptly started R&D to secure the first-mover advantage.
Several Ruff’s co-founders have their halos of outstanding achievements. Ruff CEO Roy Li is a serial entrepreneur, and former technical director of Nokia North America, being responsible for OVI open platform and Symbian operating system; CMO Jing Tianwei once served as investment director of LeBox Capital and participated in such projects as angel investments in EHANG and uSens Ince; chief architect Zhou Aimin was former business architect of Alipay, former platform architect of Shanda, and chief architect of Wandoujia, being granted special contribution award by Borland, and becoming the only Borland product expert in China that won such award. This also constitutes that Ruff will draw much attention since its establishment.
The path from concept to implementation of IoT operating system
At the very beginning, Ruff’s original intention was to provide software developers with an “Android” platform dedicated for IoT. First, it aimed to solve the problem of technical risk in the industry, and then they found that what really hinders IoT is a gap between software and hardware. Therefore, they shifted the focus towards operating system, being committed to solving the problem of IoT applications development and difficult access thereto.
One year later, Ruff OS IoT operating system that makes IoT applications easier was formally released, including three parts, namely SDK software tools development kit, software package sharing, and IoT development suite. In addition, the IoT operating system had also realized the first step to commercial implementation that year. For example, there was an energy enterprise turning to Ruff for IoT technical support, and the latter took advantage of its independently developed IoT gateway and underlying IoT operating system to provide the customer with a package of solutions for remote monitoring, operation, and maintenance of PV power stations.
If 2016 was a “learning year” for Ruff OS IoT operating system to continue practice and improvement, then 2017 will be a crucial year for “commercial output”. The IoT OS has realized “Great Leap” in industrial sectors, and shifted its focus on helping traditional plants realize digital transformation.
Most traditional plants resemble a “black box”, and no one knows the production status of each equipment and each product, resulting in that the production plan cannot be finished on time, and low yield, and high labor costs, as well as grave losses in production incurred by unexpected halt of equipment. However, these pains will be overcome if traditional plants smoothly transform to digital modes.
During such transformation, Ruff has released Ruff Plant Insight, an IoT application for the industrial sector. As an APP, it has integrated underlying equipment data acquisition and access, data clouding and terminal scene visualization display, which can be flexibly configured to support multiple business scenarios, including equipment manufacturers, terminal factories, equipment leasing parties, service providers, etc., and provides such functions as remote management equipment, and real-time access to data and health status of devices, etc., making business implementation more concrete.
Ruff CEO Roy Li once said, “a company turning on 24 hours a day would produce five billion dollars a year, while an unexpected halt may cause a loss of tens of millions of dollars or even greater. Ruff helped a customer successfully intercept a halt as it was deployed in less than two weeks. But the annual fee we charged to the customer was very low, even less than 1% of the value we brought to it. ”
According to official data of Ruff, by the end of last December, Ruff Plant Insight had been launched in many industries, including wood-based panel factories, auto parts factories, textile factories, electronic factories and so on. It has become the productivity tool for dozens of manufacturers in the industrial era of IoT.
Making Development on both Software and Hardware
It is obvious that since the end of last year, Ruff’s ambitions have not been limited to software but extended to the hardware field. In the fourth quarter of 2017, Ruff launched the Intelligent Gateway to the IoT, with the three key advantages of compatibility (plug and play), scalability (software defines hardware) and maintainability (OOTB). The device has abundant hardware interfaces which can fit for the connections of a variety of devices. At the same time, as for the installation and configuration of the equipment, the operator can complete the configuration in only three steps, without the need of mastering any programming language.
But Ruff’s involvement in hardware field is not entirely due to ambition. The IoT can not be simply understood as connecting the hardware to the Internet in a communication mode and installing a broadband. In addition, the quality of each sensor and the ability of the hardware have to interact with the application ultimately .
Referring to the solutions of the most IoT projects that the hardware and software are separated, if a problem are met, the software team and hardware team should be found separately, and then work together to solve the problem on both sides. The efficiency of the solution is very low. And the feasibility is very low too. The implementation of software and hardware integration can make the fragmented hardware compatible and provide a unified interface to APP developers. Developers can only edit the existing API interface of the platform according to customer requirements and necessary business scenarios.
In the case of hardware, the developer can make compatibility with Ruff once to achieve calling Ruff driver package for every application, and improve the efficiency and the feasibility greatly. In addition, Ruff’s business range from software to hardware reflects that the technical strength of the company are fully reinforced in many aspects, and has the high scalability that cannot be underestimated .
Ruff Chain testing the fusion capabilities of IOT and the block chain technology
If you have heard about Ruff, you may know that, in addition to the above-mentioned software and hardware products, Raff has its own chain — Ruff Chain. From a theoretical point of view, the Ruff OS IOT operating system has been able to be compatible with most devices in the market. Then, is it still difficult to pass data on to the Ruff Chain? The answer is yes.
Although IOT has achieved the interconnection of things, it is composed of closed systems. For example, there is no interaction between the WAN and the LAN, and it is difficult to link the industrial system that is privatized and the IDC-based IT network, which is inconsistent with the requirements of IOT data on higher consistency and security. What Ruff Chain needs to solve is the problem of credible interoperability and paid interoperability between IOT devices of different systems, and to build an open big Ruff ecology.
PIC 3
Specifically, Ruff Chain is an architecture that combines IOT and the block chain. It contains a distributed operating system and an open main chain, so that it extends the peer-to-peer network in the virtual world and the consensus mechanism to offline, realizing the information flow driving the atomic flow and building up a new IOT ecology.
In this ecology, it uses DPoS as a consensus algorithm and will use the Ruff coin as the token for incentive, consumption and transaction in the Ruff public block chain ecosystem. Consumers will consume a certain amount of tokens in the course of property right or data transactions, and producers who provide the corresponding node resources and participate in verification, billing, etc. will receive Ruff coins for encouragement.
In fact, in addition to requiring the Ruff team members to have a large number of rich block chain technologies, the implementation of the Ruff public block chain further tests their capabilities to access IOT.
Since its birth, IOT has been fragmented, that is, there is no standard. For example, shared bicycles, intelligent electrical apparatus, smart home, etc., are all connected to a closed network. One way to solve this problem is to introduce operating systems that are compatible with a wide variety of hardware products and provide a unified programming interface.
At the same time, due to the fragmented nature of IOT, it is necessary to standardize the hardware, which is obviously more difficult. After all, the entire IOT industry has tried to solve this problem for more than two decades, without significant results achieved. In addition, the instructions of programming language are sometimes unreadable, and are easy to write bugs.
Therefore, without long-term industry experience and accumulation, it may be very difficult to solve the above problems, and we even have to learn and apply immediately. However, at that time, we may already be surpassed by our competitors. Fortunately, the opportunity is always reserved for people who are prepared. That is Ruff.
As we mentioned above, Ruff has developed the Ruff OS operating system since 2016, so it is able to solve the problem of fragmentation and standards of IOT. In addition, Ruff has access to numerous physical customers in several fields such as energy, agriculture and industry. Once such valuable data is put on the chain, it will further consolidate the first-mover status of Ruff.
At the same time, since it was established, Ruff has reached cooperation with many famous companies such as Microsoft China, Schneider, Baidu Cloud, and muRata, and has won several awards such as the Most Investment Value Award by the 2016 Microsoft Innovation Summit and the Best Innovation Award by 2017GE Predix Hackathon. What does that mean? This undoubtedly affirms the real technical force of Ruff, enhances the brand appeal of Ruff, and more importantly, contributes to the access capability of Ruff Chain to IOT. At this point, we believe that the construction of the Ruff public block chain ecology is just around the corner.
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