We play with cars in an adult: how we became suppliers of IT solutions for the largest automotive companies
Work at the interface of engineering technology and programming is the future. Already, a lot of startups integrate developers and techies in their teams to design, for example, robots and drones.
A little aside is the automotive industry, in which conservative moods mostly prevail. The only exception is probably Tesla Ilona Mask. Brands do not allow third-party developers to their technologies and develop them within companies, rightly fearing industrial espionage.
However, now there are startups that spend a lot of time and effort to develop devices that increase the capabilities of cars.
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This is a story about the Bright Box Company and the Connected Car Remoto platform. About the technologies we use and how the development process in our company differs from others.
Bright Box is a Russian startup specializing in the development of technology solutions for the auto business. In the market, we are known primarily for two products:
The company was founded by Ivan Mishanin and Alexander Dimchenko in 2012. Prior to that, they worked together at BrightConsult as director of business development and director of the portal solutions department, respectively, and when they sold it to German developer of ERP systems for car dealers Incadea, Ivan and Alexander decided to leave and create their own startup.
The former investor Innokenty Belotsky together with partners in the Cloud4Auto Ventures fund became the first investor of the new company. Unlike most startups, Bright Box primarily formed a unit for custom software development, which quickly became profitable and was able to cover all the costs of maintaining the company. Attracted investments were spent only on the development of the first product - Dealer Mobility.
Dealer Mobility helps with marketing, sales and after sales services. The application is installed on smart phones of car dealers' clients, reports all promotions and helps to send a request for service. The founders of the company in the past work have studied well one of the main problems of dealerships: when it comes to service, customers prefer to turn to cheaper unofficials. At the third MOT, almost no one comes to the official dealer. To keep a client, he needs to call, write and make special offers in time. Dealer Mobility solves this problem, moreover, its use by motorists is absolutely worthless, dealers pay for the installation.
In 2013, Bright Box successfully launched the first version of the application, quickly recruited customers and became the undisputed leader in this niche. At the same time, our team began developing a new project - Remoto. As planned, this solution allowed you to remotely control your car from anywhere in the world from a smartphone.
At that time, Bright Box had no expertise in the development of such devices from the hardware side, but there were contractors who developed the scheme for the necessary device, and two factories in Russia and China that agreed to assemble it. At the same time, KIA Motors Russia became interested in the project and agreed to become a pilot client.
The next six months were spent on developing a mobile application, the first batch of 1000 devices and firmware for it, so that by the end of 2013 the first batch of Remoto could get on the shelves to all KIA dealers in the Russian Federation.
To date, we have adapted our technologies for a variety of automotive brands, including outside of Russia. For example, the Nissan SmartCar in the Middle East is based on the Remoto platform. Dubai Police is working with Bright Box and Nissan Middle East to create a new technology service to ensure road safety.
Our developments are used to provide safety and control over the state of cars in Europe and Asia. We also actively cooperate with Telecom companies. For example, to ensure a high-quality level of Remoto communication in the CIS, we are working with VimpelCom.
Remoto is a very complex technological project. Before the start of development, Bright Box analysts conducted a survey of car owners. It turned out that first of all they need remote control of door locks, climate control and, of course, vehicle search with alerts for strikes or evacuation.
And if there were no problems with the latest requirements, as there have been technologies and mobile applications for quite some time that allow collecting information about the condition of the car, then it was much more complicated with the actual management of auto systems. Only few manufacturers equip their cars with smartphone management. For example, Volvo with Volvo on Call or BMW with ConnectedDrive. But the installation of the first system costs from 1000 euros (plus an expensive subscription), and the second does not work in Russia. Thus, Remoto had practically no competition in this niche.
Starting the development of Remoto, we had to quickly assemble a special team of engineers - Remoto Laboratory. As conceived by the developers, the designed system should at least be able to safely (through a secure communication channel) start the engine, open the doors and trunk, control the temperature and turn on the light.
To ensure these capabilities, it is not enough to simply connect to the standard diagnostic connector. It is necessary to know the protocols by which the modules of the cars communicate. Moreover, automakers often do not want to open the specifications of their protocols before startups.
Now most of the employees in the company are engineers. Bright Box develops the entire stack of technology equipment, firmware and server infrastructure of a mobile application.
Our community of developers is represented by teams of 5-6 people who own these stacks and are engaged in sets of specific tasks. These commands are cross-functional — each has specialists representing several stacks.
Remoto is developed as a large platform by all developers, and then a separate team is created for each client, which adapts this platform to the requirements of the automaker. For quality control, Bright Box has a field testers division.
Our first product, Dealer Mobility, was based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, so when developing Remoto, we had no doubts about the choice of technology stack. Initially, there were two main reasons to use the services of the corporation from Redmond:
1. Historical. Bright Box was easier and cheaper to rent the necessary services than to buy licenses. And, having accumulated a large amount of technical expertise and experience with Microsoft products, it makes no sense to change reliable technologies in the work on their own projects.
2. Support. Microsoft guarantees a high (24/7) level of reliability and availability of important services for the consumer almost anywhere in the world. In order to ensure the same level, it is necessary to invest huge amounts of money in infrastructure around the world, hire special engineers, and maintain equipment.
Clickable scheme
We use PaaS and Azure infrastructure components. Among PaaS components, Cloud services and various data storage technologies - blobs, SQL Database are worth highlighting. It also uses distributed caching (Azure Redis Cache) and components for storing unstructured data, i.e. telemetry data coming from the car.
If we consider the infrastructure components, our developers use Microsoft Azure virtualization technologies, on which the applications are located. They perform certain business operations: data is processed, reports are built.
Remoto uses a wide range of technologies in its development:
All data is streamed through Azure Event Hubs and further processed using Azure Stream Analytics, thereby performing hot data analysis.
At the same time, data from streams and other sources are collected in the Azure Data Lake repository, where they are further processed using Azure Data Lake Analytics.
Also part of the analysis is carried out on the Apache Spark cluster. Python / F # is mainly used to experiment with data. in conjunction with Jupiter Notebook for storing and running of which the service is used Azure Notebooks.
Each year, Bright Box collects data exabytes from its Remoto platform. The information obtained is not personalized, it becomes anonymous, and then it is processed to extract some patterns and patterns from it. The data is used by automakers for several tasks.
The first is tracking the quality of the cars sold. Remoto collects all information about defects, analyzes them, and transmits to automakers. This helps them to understand their causes and eliminate in the next versions of cars.
The second is the use of the data obtained to analyze the behavior of their customers and to form certain suggestions and recommendations for them on how to use and maintain the car. The system prompts at what time it is better to do maintenance, when it is better to go to the diagnosis to the dealer, if there are any problems with certain onboard systems of the vehicle.
The third task is to analyze the style and driving habits of the client. Such data are used for submission to insurance companies and are taken into account when calculating the cost of insurance. Also with them you can increase the level of customer care, thereby tying him to yourself for the longest possible period of time. Everything is done in order to keep the client loyal as long as possible.
One of our recent achievements is cooperation with the Dubai police. Bright Box and Nissan have created a new road safety service called Smart Response , the first of its kind in the Middle East. The system analyzes the movement, warns of accidents and traffic jams.
Behind the Bright Box is an impressive experience in software development and automotive engineering, which we cherish. We like what we do and the challenges we face. For example, we recently announced the development of an unmanned vehicle driving system that works using the student in the generated frames from computer games and real-life shooting frames from the neural network of computer vision.
Remoto Pilot is our new unmanned driving system that allows real-time vehicle detection and driving around obstacles, driving along a pre-planned trajectory, ensuring safe and reliable driving along the lane.
Bright Box is a work at the junction of engineering, programming, cloud technologies and big data. This is really an adult typewriter game. We are creating technologies that only large foreign brands could wipe at. There are no analogues in Russia. Our employees receive extensive international and interdisciplinary experience and work in areas that are already relevant in the near future. Join now!
We need:
Project manager
QA Specialist / Testing Engineer
Presale Consultant
Systems Analyst
A little aside is the automotive industry, in which conservative moods mostly prevail. The only exception is probably Tesla Ilona Mask. Brands do not allow third-party developers to their technologies and develop them within companies, rightly fearing industrial espionage.
However, now there are startups that spend a lot of time and effort to develop devices that increase the capabilities of cars.
')
This is a story about the Bright Box Company and the Connected Car Remoto platform. About the technologies we use and how the development process in our company differs from others.
Bright Box Story
Bright Box is a Russian startup specializing in the development of technology solutions for the auto business. In the market, we are known primarily for two products:
- Dealer Mobility is a platform for car dealers and their customers, which, using a mobile application and telematics, allows you to increase the customer's life cycle, increase the frequency of arrivals to the service and qualitatively improve interaction with customers
- Remoto - Connected Car platform for remote control of a car using a smartphone.
The company was founded by Ivan Mishanin and Alexander Dimchenko in 2012. Prior to that, they worked together at BrightConsult as director of business development and director of the portal solutions department, respectively, and when they sold it to German developer of ERP systems for car dealers Incadea, Ivan and Alexander decided to leave and create their own startup.
The former investor Innokenty Belotsky together with partners in the Cloud4Auto Ventures fund became the first investor of the new company. Unlike most startups, Bright Box primarily formed a unit for custom software development, which quickly became profitable and was able to cover all the costs of maintaining the company. Attracted investments were spent only on the development of the first product - Dealer Mobility.
Dealer Mobility helps with marketing, sales and after sales services. The application is installed on smart phones of car dealers' clients, reports all promotions and helps to send a request for service. The founders of the company in the past work have studied well one of the main problems of dealerships: when it comes to service, customers prefer to turn to cheaper unofficials. At the third MOT, almost no one comes to the official dealer. To keep a client, he needs to call, write and make special offers in time. Dealer Mobility solves this problem, moreover, its use by motorists is absolutely worthless, dealers pay for the installation.
In 2013, Bright Box successfully launched the first version of the application, quickly recruited customers and became the undisputed leader in this niche. At the same time, our team began developing a new project - Remoto. As planned, this solution allowed you to remotely control your car from anywhere in the world from a smartphone.
At that time, Bright Box had no expertise in the development of such devices from the hardware side, but there were contractors who developed the scheme for the necessary device, and two factories in Russia and China that agreed to assemble it. At the same time, KIA Motors Russia became interested in the project and agreed to become a pilot client.
The next six months were spent on developing a mobile application, the first batch of 1000 devices and firmware for it, so that by the end of 2013 the first batch of Remoto could get on the shelves to all KIA dealers in the Russian Federation.
To date, we have adapted our technologies for a variety of automotive brands, including outside of Russia. For example, the Nissan SmartCar in the Middle East is based on the Remoto platform. Dubai Police is working with Bright Box and Nissan Middle East to create a new technology service to ensure road safety.
Our developments are used to provide safety and control over the state of cars in Europe and Asia. We also actively cooperate with Telecom companies. For example, to ensure a high-quality level of Remoto communication in the CIS, we are working with VimpelCom.
Remoto
Remoto is a very complex technological project. Before the start of development, Bright Box analysts conducted a survey of car owners. It turned out that first of all they need remote control of door locks, climate control and, of course, vehicle search with alerts for strikes or evacuation.
And if there were no problems with the latest requirements, as there have been technologies and mobile applications for quite some time that allow collecting information about the condition of the car, then it was much more complicated with the actual management of auto systems. Only few manufacturers equip their cars with smartphone management. For example, Volvo with Volvo on Call or BMW with ConnectedDrive. But the installation of the first system costs from 1000 euros (plus an expensive subscription), and the second does not work in Russia. Thus, Remoto had practically no competition in this niche.
Starting the development of Remoto, we had to quickly assemble a special team of engineers - Remoto Laboratory. As conceived by the developers, the designed system should at least be able to safely (through a secure communication channel) start the engine, open the doors and trunk, control the temperature and turn on the light.
To ensure these capabilities, it is not enough to simply connect to the standard diagnostic connector. It is necessary to know the protocols by which the modules of the cars communicate. Moreover, automakers often do not want to open the specifications of their protocols before startups.
Now most of the employees in the company are engineers. Bright Box develops the entire stack of technology equipment, firmware and server infrastructure of a mobile application.
Our community of developers is represented by teams of 5-6 people who own these stacks and are engaged in sets of specific tasks. These commands are cross-functional — each has specialists representing several stacks.
Remoto is developed as a large platform by all developers, and then a separate team is created for each client, which adapts this platform to the requirements of the automaker. For quality control, Bright Box has a field testers division.
Technology stack - Microsoft
Our first product, Dealer Mobility, was based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, so when developing Remoto, we had no doubts about the choice of technology stack. Initially, there were two main reasons to use the services of the corporation from Redmond:
1. Historical. Bright Box was easier and cheaper to rent the necessary services than to buy licenses. And, having accumulated a large amount of technical expertise and experience with Microsoft products, it makes no sense to change reliable technologies in the work on their own projects.
2. Support. Microsoft guarantees a high (24/7) level of reliability and availability of important services for the consumer almost anywhere in the world. In order to ensure the same level, it is necessary to invest huge amounts of money in infrastructure around the world, hire special engineers, and maintain equipment.
Clickable scheme
We use PaaS and Azure infrastructure components. Among PaaS components, Cloud services and various data storage technologies - blobs, SQL Database are worth highlighting. It also uses distributed caching (Azure Redis Cache) and components for storing unstructured data, i.e. telemetry data coming from the car.
If we consider the infrastructure components, our developers use Microsoft Azure virtualization technologies, on which the applications are located. They perform certain business operations: data is processed, reports are built.
Remoto uses a wide range of technologies in its development:
- .NET platform - for developing server software and for data processing;
- For the analysis, processing and selection of structured data from arrays, such standard Big Data technologies as R, Python and Hadoop are used;
- For Embedded development - C ++ programming languages and low-level frameworks and operating systems: RTOS, on the basis of which the blocks operate;
- Technologies and protocols that are created for the Internet of things. MQTT as a protocol for exchanging data between the automotive and server-cloud infrastructure and data exchange between mobile applications and cloud infrastructure.
- Different systems are used to store data, depending on the tasks - both Microsoft solutions and various Open Source solutions. Data caching is basically Redis clusters; Microsoft SQL Server is used for business data and customer data. For work with geographic data - PostgreSQL with Postgis and pgRouting extensions. Azure Tables and Apache Cassandra are used to store large amounts of log data and time series for which there is no need to perform complex dynamic queries. In the same places where flexible data analytics is required and preferably more compact storage, ClickHouse column database is being implemented. To store large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data using HDFS compatible system Azure Data Lake.
All data is streamed through Azure Event Hubs and further processed using Azure Stream Analytics, thereby performing hot data analysis.
At the same time, data from streams and other sources are collected in the Azure Data Lake repository, where they are further processed using Azure Data Lake Analytics.
Also part of the analysis is carried out on the Apache Spark cluster. Python / F # is mainly used to experiment with data. in conjunction with Jupiter Notebook for storing and running of which the service is used Azure Notebooks.
What we do with big data
Each year, Bright Box collects data exabytes from its Remoto platform. The information obtained is not personalized, it becomes anonymous, and then it is processed to extract some patterns and patterns from it. The data is used by automakers for several tasks.
The first is tracking the quality of the cars sold. Remoto collects all information about defects, analyzes them, and transmits to automakers. This helps them to understand their causes and eliminate in the next versions of cars.
The second is the use of the data obtained to analyze the behavior of their customers and to form certain suggestions and recommendations for them on how to use and maintain the car. The system prompts at what time it is better to do maintenance, when it is better to go to the diagnosis to the dealer, if there are any problems with certain onboard systems of the vehicle.
The third task is to analyze the style and driving habits of the client. Such data are used for submission to insurance companies and are taken into account when calculating the cost of insurance. Also with them you can increase the level of customer care, thereby tying him to yourself for the longest possible period of time. Everything is done in order to keep the client loyal as long as possible.
One of our recent achievements is cooperation with the Dubai police. Bright Box and Nissan have created a new road safety service called Smart Response , the first of its kind in the Middle East. The system analyzes the movement, warns of accidents and traffic jams.
We play cars in an adult
Behind the Bright Box is an impressive experience in software development and automotive engineering, which we cherish. We like what we do and the challenges we face. For example, we recently announced the development of an unmanned vehicle driving system that works using the student in the generated frames from computer games and real-life shooting frames from the neural network of computer vision.
Remoto Pilot is our new unmanned driving system that allows real-time vehicle detection and driving around obstacles, driving along a pre-planned trajectory, ensuring safe and reliable driving along the lane.
Bright Box is a work at the junction of engineering, programming, cloud technologies and big data. This is really an adult typewriter game. We are creating technologies that only large foreign brands could wipe at. There are no analogues in Russia. Our employees receive extensive international and interdisciplinary experience and work in areas that are already relevant in the near future. Join now!
We need:
Project manager
QA Specialist / Testing Engineer
Presale Consultant
Systems Analyst
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/321324/
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