Chinese Media Outlet Jinse.com Reports on Ruff's Technological "Great Leap"

SHANGHAI, April 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Chinese media outlet Jinse.com recently profiled up-and-coming tech innovator Ruff. The article has been translated into English below.

If there is any technology that is set to change people's life, work, and entertainment habits, it is the Internet of Things (IoT).

Years earlier, if someone talked about IoT, there may have been a significant portion of people who would not understand it. Nowadays, however, IoT has connected all equipment, from bracelets and home appliances to robots, automobiles, and plants. According to a Forbes report, the number of networked devices will reach 11 billion by 2018 - not including computers or mobile phones. Obviously, the topic of IoT will continue to be a hot one for a long time yet.

Ruff, founded in 2014, arrived with excellent timing to capitalize on this new trend. This was down to sharp senses and keen insight towards the industry, honed by years of experience. Ruff's founding team had anticipated the market at a very early stage, and promptly started R&D to secure the first-mover advantage.

Several Ruff's co-founders brought with them halos of outstanding achievements. Ruff CEO Roy Li is a serial entrepreneur, and former technical director of Nokia North America, being responsible for the 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 is a former business architect at Alipay, former platform architect of Shanda, and former chief architect of Wandoujia, and was granted a special contribution award by Borland, becoming the only Borland product expert in China to win such an award. These glowing accolades meant that Ruff drew considerable 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. Though it first aimed to solve the problem of technical risk in the industry, the team quickly found that what really hinders IoT is a gap between software and hardware. Therefore, they shifted the focus towards an operating system, committing themselves to solving the problem of IoT application development and the difficult access thereto.

One year later, Ruff's OS IoT operating system that makes IoT applications easier was formally released, consisting of three parts, namely SDK software tools development kit, software package sharing, and IoT development suite. In addition, the IoT operating system 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 the Ruff OS IoT operating system to practice and improve, then 2017 was to be a crucial year for "commercial output". The IoT OS had realized its "Great Leap" in industrial sectors, and so then shifted its focus to helping traditional plants realize digital transformation.

Most traditional plants resemble a "black box", where no one knows the production status of each piece of equipment and each product, resulting in production plans not being able to be finished on time, in addition to low yield, high labor costs, and grave losses in production incurred by the unexpected halting of equipment. However, these pains can be overcome if traditional plants smoothly transform to digital modes.

To assist in such transformation, Ruff released Ruff Plant Insight, an IoT application for the industrial sector. As an app, it has integrated underlying equipment data acquisition and access, data cloud, and terminal scene visualization display, which can be flexibly configured to support multiple business scenarios, including equipment manufacturers, terminal factories, equipment leasing parties, and service providers. Additionally, the app provides such functions as remote management equipment and real-time access to data and health status of devices, making business implementation more concrete.

Ruff CEO Roy Li once said, "a company running 24 hours a day could 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 within two weeks of Ruff Plant Insight having been deployed. 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 Ruff's official data, by the end of last December, Ruff Plant Insight had been launched in a wide variety of industries, including wood-based panel factories, auto parts factories, textile factories, electronic factories and so on. It has become a productivity tool for dozens of manufacturers in the industrial era of IoT.

Making Developments 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-defined hardware) and maintainability (OOTB). The device has abundant hardware interfaces which can fit 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 to master any programming languages.

But Ruff's involvement in the hardware field is not entirely due to ambition. The IoT can not be simply understood as connecting hardware to the Internet in a communication mode and installing broadband. In addition, the quality of each sensor and the ability of the hardware ultimately have to interact with the application.

Referring to the solutions of most IoT projects in which the hardware and software are separated, if a problem is encountered, the software team and hardware team should each be notified, and they should then work together to solve the problem on both sides. The efficiency of this 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 only needs to achieve compatibility with Ruff in order to utilize driver packages for every application, improving the efficiency and feasibility greatly. In addition, Ruff's business range, from software to hardware, reflects that the technical strength of the company is fully reinforced in many aspects, and has a high scalability that cannot be underestimated .

Ruff Chain testing the fusion capabilities of IoT and blockchain 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 higher consistency and security requirements of IoT data. 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 and sizeable Ruff ecology.

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, Ruff Chain uses DPoS as a consensus algorithm and will use Ruff coin as its 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 as 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 inception, IoT has been fragmented, that is, there is no standard. For example, bike sharing, intelligent electrical apparatus, smart home, etc., are all connected to their own 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 being achieved. In addition, the instructions of programming languages are sometimes unreadable, and it is all too easy to write bugs.

Therefore, without long-term industry experience and accumulation, it may be very difficult to solve the above problems, and one has to be able to learn and apply such lessons immediately. However, at that time, one may already have been surpassed by rival competitors. Fortunately, opportunities are always there for those who are prepared. That is Ruff.

As mentioned above, Ruff has developed the Ruff OS operating system since 2016, so it is able to solve IoT's problems of fragmentation and a lack of standards. 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.

Additionally, since its establishment, Ruff has achieved 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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This article first appeared in Chinese on Jinse.com - the original article can be found at: https://www.jinse.com/blockchain/178071.html

SOURCE Ruff Chain