​Jiangbo Longsys Electronics' Cai Huabo: How to build a storage IoT system?

In the digital age, all personal information that can be stored is valuable. How to preserve personal and industry information for a long time in a safer and more worry-free state at a reasonable cost has become the focus of many storage terminal manufacturers.

On September 14, 2021, Longsys Electronics, together with its high-end consumer storage brand Lexar and industry storage brand FORESEE, appeared at the 2021 China Flash Market Summit (CFMS) and won the "Best Brand Expansion Award" in 2021. Longsys Electronics also released a new form of storage IoT product at the same time - Lexar Time Machine M2 (hereinafter referred to as M2).

Cai Huabo, Chairman of Longsys Electronics

After the meeting, Mr. Cai Huabo, Chairman of Longsys Electronics, accepted an exclusive interview with the reporter of Yifei.com. In addition to introducing the stories behind the scenes of M2 in detail, we focused on discussing two topics: 1. How to build a storage IoT system? 2. How to provide better services for storage data?

The following is some highlights of this interview:

 Be prepared for danger in times of peace. How does Longsys Electronics meet the urgent need for private cloud?

 Q: How did Longsys Electronics determine its business direction in transforming from a storage module OEM to a technology-based brand company?

A: From the perspective of our own development, we must have a certain sense of crisis. As a storage company, when we reach a certain scale, we must change our thinking and seek new breakthroughs.

We have already cooperated with many packaging factories, but we will not open a packaging factory ourselves. Every company has its own genes. Our genes are to focus on technology and brand, generate competitiveness and premium profits through brand, and then invest in research and development, and put forward higher quality requirements for the supply chain.

We have made a lot of innovations in traditional standard storage products, and it is difficult to differentiate them. So we strive to find breakthroughs in storage form, just like the new storage form product launched this time - Lexar Time Machine M2.

 Q: Why do you want to develop the M2 product? Is this product a private cloud like NAS?

Answer: Personal information storage is a rigid demand, which also means there are huge business opportunities. There are generally three solutions for personal information data storage: the first way is NAS, which has high deployment costs, high professional requirements, and is not portable; the second way is to improve the local storage of mobile phones, PCs and other computing devices, but the cost is high. Taking mobile phones as an example, it costs more than 1,000 yuan to increase from 128G to 256G, and the storage consumption is relatively fast, and it is easy to be fully loaded; the third way is a mobile hard drive, but cloud storage cannot be achieved. So I often mentioned to the R&D team that we must help users solve pain points and make the data in the mobile phone truly become the user's own data. So, we made a brand new storage hardware product that can solve local storage and network upload and download of data at the same time.

M2 is a new product form that takes into account both network disk and mobile hard disk modes. In addition to being used as a mobile hard disk, it can be used as a network disk by connecting to an Internet cable and a power supply. File upload, download, management, and sharing functions can be achieved through a mobile phone. Sharing files through M2's network disk will not be compressed and there is no size limit. In addition, M2 also provides a variety of plug-in functions, such as Thunder download, shared albums and other applications. For example, high-definition video content was difficult to spread before, but now I can send it to you directly through WeChat, and it will not take up space on your mobile phone.

 Q: Are there any similar products on the market now?

A: No, this is a brand new product. We found that the demand for interaction of stored content is increasing, so we mainly solved an interaction problem. When sending stored content (files) through general social software, we only pass a path to the stored content, so that it will be easier to use and more widely disseminated.

 To be different, for whom should we design products?

 Q: What is the difference between developing M2 and other previous products?

A: We tried to make NAS before, which took a lot of time and effort. Later, because photographers needed to share high-definition video files, we gave NAS to professional photographers. As a result, he just took out the hard drive and used it separately. NAS used to be used by corporate customers and required IT technicians to maintain it. It was difficult for ordinary users to use it. This incident taught us a lesson, and later we resolutely cancelled the development project of NAS products. We should design products from the user's perspective, rather than from the perspective of an engineer.

So we later switched to MTK's SOC as the processor for the M2, because we believe that this MTK SoC can better meet user needs and has very strong hardware multimedia encoding and decoding capabilities. After we talked with MTK, we conducted new research and development at the architectural level, and redeveloped a new product that not only had functional innovations but also had to be interesting. For example, I can share part of my storage space with others, and we can share storage content (files), thus forming the concept of a storage Internet of Things.

 Q: What is the Internet of Things in storage?

A: We believe that data is also a kind of thing. Computers, mobile phones, televisions, cars and other computing terminal devices used by individuals and families generate a large amount of data every day. These data may have been deleted in the past, but now we may have to save them and realize the function of connecting them.

For the Internet of Things, a large amount of industry data needs to be backed up and stored offline. For example, two years ago we designed a 64G~256GB data backup disk for smart car manufacturers, storing part of the monitoring and sensor data generated by smart cars every day on the data backup disk, and smart car users can save their own data. Today, the Internet of Vehicles has gradually become popular, and many cars can connect to 4G and 5G networks, so can we transfer this part of the data to our M2? What we have to do is to stand from the user's perspective, help them solve problems, and build a data steward platform. In the future, smart cars, medical care, finance, law and other industries will have an urgent need for data storage security. M2 can provide technical customization for various application industries to achieve data cloud storage and data security.

Q: Why use the Lexar brand to promote industry applications?

A: This needs to be considered in combination. For some consumer industry customers, they may feel that the Lexar brand adds value to their brand, while FORESEE is less well-known among ordinary consumers. In addition, although M2 can meet some industry applications, it is first and foremost aimed at independent individuals, just like DingTalk. If it competes directly with WeChat, it may not have as much influence as it does now. However, DingTalk uses solving corporate problems as a breakthrough, and its target market positioning is significantly different from WeChat. Enterprises are made up of people. Lexar will first solve industry problems based on different user needs, and then slowly develop from individual users to corporate users, so that we don’t have to compete directly with strong enterprise-level friendly companies at the beginning.

 A virtuous cycle: how to make Lexar more vital?

 Q: What are the operational differences between FORESEE and Lexar, two dual-brand operations?

Answer: The B2B and B2C markets are very different, and the business models are also different.

In the B2B market, we know where our customers are. FORESEE has been operating in the industry for many years and has a certain reputation. Customers want our technology, quality, delivery capabilities, services, including FAE support, etc. However, in the B2C market, it is very different. Not to mention the global market, even if we only face the Chinese market, users' demands for products vary greatly. Lexar has a certain brand effect in the world, and the brand itself has also experienced a change in user groups, from professional photography users to ordinary consumers.

How can we make the Lexar brand more vital in the future? Let Lexar inherit the old culture while giving it more new cultural connotations. We have several things to do: first, further enrich the product line; second, improve product quality; third, rebuild Lexar's user base.

To build a brand, we need continuous investment and international talents. The R&D center we built in Shanghai can reflect this point, and we built the R&D team from a high starting point. Many R&D investments may take 3 to 4 years to bear fruit, but we have enough confidence, determination and long-term patience to invest in R&D. We hope to make the product valuable first, which is value for money, rather than the concept of falsely marking high prices. With good profits, we will continue to invest in R&D and put forward higher quality requirements for the supply chain, and finally form a virtuous business cycle.

 Q: In addition to the differences in operation and management, what innovations has Lexar made in its business model?

Answer: I think all business opportunities can be innovated. As a commercial company, the purpose of making any product is to solve the problems of customers or consumers.

There are many innovations in business models in China now. The business logic is that hardware does not make money, but subsequent software services make money. You may buy a smart TV cheaply, but you have to endure various startup ads. If you don’t want to watch ads, you have to pay for membership. You can use the network disk to store things for free, but the download will be very slow. If you want to speed up, you have to buy a membership. For consumers, if you want to get all the services, you need to spend more money.