Let’s get back to our roots: How Bright Box solution has been developing since 2012? Part 2
By: Nadja Panchenko
Tags: Product Management, Cars, Automotive, Development, Connected Cars

In the previous post, you learned about how our flagship solution was developed. And as I promised to tell you about how we united the best features of DM and Remoto in a single product. Also in this part, you will find out what we develop now.

Vanilla

According to the sales model we had at that time, each new client got a separate instance, which means that each client’s data is completely isolated from other clients and that each client’s solution can be customized individually. Initially, we implied that we’d have a bunch of small clients using one single instance without customizations, and another bunch of bigger clients, using separate, individually customized instances. But the reality turned out to be different. Thus, we came to the idea of a single instance for most of our clients (served by the “core“ team) plus separate instances for those clients, who want more dramatical customizations (served by the united Project Management team).

With the chosen sales model, a fully configured separate instance was needed, which would be used for demo & sales purposes. Long story short, such an instance has been created in 2017 with the name Vanilla.

If I had to use a metaphor to describe Vanilla, I’d use this one: imagine a Lego set. Everyone who gets it can build anything he wants, being limited by the pieces given in the set. In this case, Vanilla would be the demo model built from this set, the one you could see & touch in stores. This is how we came with the idea of Vanilla, a reference instance that combined features of DM & Remoto.

The idea of the name Vanilla belongs to Vitaly Baum, Chief Product Officer at Bright Box, and leads its reference to the methodology of naming “pure“ versions of Android and Linux. What we usually called Vanilla within the company was the demo of the mobile application, which was also used for testing purposes.

I want to make it clear that Vanilla is not specifically a product, but a demo of our DM & Remoto products’ features. And the first version of Vanilla was called “Vanilla half“, or “Vanilla/2”, as initially not all features of DM & Remoto have been included in it.

Remoto Cloud Services

Remoto Cloud Services (RCS) is an evolutionary step that gathered all the best from DM & Remoto. In contrast with Vanilla, RCS has a new sales model: now we have a single instance for all clients and a subscription revenue model, which means that our clients pay us a recurring fee for access to our service. Transition to the new model has been forced by the new broker we started using for communicating with devices: Microsoft Azure IoT Hub. This model has shown itself to be more effective & cost-saving. So in 2019 the codename Vanilla has been replaced with RCS as well as the sales model has been changed. The guts (i.e. the technology) has stayed the same.

Remoto includes the following components/services:

Dealer Web Portal

Mobile application

Hardware + Firmware: our beloved devices which are installed in the cars: TCU & OBD.

Cloud magic.

This cloud-based platform is our main product at the moment and it is still referred to as the Connected Car Platform. Clients with Remoto keep being migrated to RCS, one by one. Because RCS keeps evolving according to the needs of our clients.

Thank you for reading to the end of a small excursion into the history of our products. As a dessert here are amazing explanations from our colleagues, used by them to explain what is RCS to their children:

Your car can tell you how it feels and you can ask it to make certain things.

If you left your cars (toys) at home, you could see what’s going on with them on your mobile phone.

It is a solution that you install in your car and the driver can see that everything works well within the car, how much fuel is left, where we have left the car for example. We can also book appointments with the dealership if we need to, or read the latest news from the company that made our car. The solution could also help if we have a problem with the car on the road, sending a signal for the rescue team to come and help us.

But seriously, though, RCS have the following advantages:

Full control on Bright Box side: from engineering and hardware production to publishing mobile applications.

Connectivity for the customers

Raising rate of the customer retention for the dealerships.

The Remoto Connected Car Solution is a unique combination of hardware, web portal, mobile application, and a car, and let’s see how far we will go in developing it.