Adhere to innovation and sink into the scene Ruijie takes action to keep up with the education informatization 2.0

The three-day 74th China Educational Equipment Exhibition has now come to a successful conclusion. At this exhibition, we saw many new products, new technologies and new concepts of information development for educational equipment. As a national brand with 18 years of deep cultivation in the education industry, Ruijie Networks not only participated in this educational equipment event, but also held a "Smart Education Informatization Construction Seminar" during the exhibition to exchange new technologies and new products for educational informatization with people inside and outside the industry and experience the best practices of smart education.

In fact, in order to keep up with the trend of "innovation first" and "ecological transformation" in the era of education informatization 2.0, Ruijie Networks launched a series of innovative smart education scenario solutions in 2018, covering four major areas: cloud desktop, metropolitan area network, smart campus, and smart classroom. In addition, after the seminar, we were fortunate to invite Zhao Yahui, general manager of Ruijie's general education industry, and Xiao Guangwei, marketing director of Ruijie's cloud desktop product division, to have a more in-depth exchange and discussion on topics such as the general education market and cloud desktop.

Zhao Yahui (left), general manager of Ruijie's general education industry, and Xiao Guangwei (right), marketing director of Ruijie's cloud desktop product division

When it comes to educational informatization, we can't help but ask, what kind of school informatization construction can be called a "smart campus"? Or what characteristics should it have? In this regard, Zhao Yahui, general manager of Ruijie's general education industry, said: "For us, the most important thing is to integrate information technology with education and teaching to promote teaching business. For example, using technologies such as cloud, AI, VR, and AR to better connect with traditional teaching business, I think this is the best feature. As for what characteristics it has, I think it is that through these new products and new solutions, our customers can better teach and learn, and improve their information literacy and information capabilities."

"For this reason, the biggest difference between us and other competitors is that before developing each product, Ruijie first locks in a scenario, and then analyzes the user behavior and pain points in the scenario. This is also the 'Ruijie-style innovation' that Ruijie has mentioned a lot in the past two years. Therefore, in many cases, we wait until the scenario and pain points are locked before evaluating what kind of technology we want to use to implement the product solution." Xiao Guangwei, Marketing Director of Ruijie Cloud Desktop Product Division, said in an interview.

"Ruijie's cloud desktop products were also developed in this way. The advantage of doing so is that we have a greater core advantage from the beginning. In addition, we have done more exploration in scenarios for the 'Cloud Classroom+' and Cloud Office 3.0 released this year. In the future, we will continue to start from the scenario, get closer to the customer's scenario, and develop more high-quality solutions."

Speaking of in-depth scenarios, I believe many people are like me, curious about what the discovery process will be like and how long the cycle will be. Xiao Guangwei, Marketing Director of Ruijie Cloud Desktop Product Division, answered this question: "We have a large team called Product Planning. The colleagues in charge of planning will work on a quarterly basis. Each quarter must have a project. The end of a project does not mean that the project will no longer be followed up. Instead, it will either enter the product development prototype design stage or be postponed and continue to study the project when the time is right. There is also a possibility that the project will be sent back for re-study."

"Not only that, our planners are responsible for their own areas, such as general education office, medical office, etc. Their goal is to constantly learn from customers about their usage experience and existing problems. Of course, they will also understand some of the feelings and problems of users using other manufacturers' products. Therefore, by continuously working in this way, there will be a steady stream of topics. Afterwards, we will select some of these topics as the direction for our product improvement based on Ruijie's control of existing technologies and formulation of market strategies."

Obviously, the "closed-door" approach is not feasible. Even if a product with high-end features is built, it will be far from the actual needs of users and even unusable because it fails to meet user needs at the beginning of the design. For example, in order to completely solve the problem of users' difficulty in choosing between VDI and IDV, Ruijie has integrated VDI and IDV in the Cloud Office 3.0 Fusion Edition released this time, so that the advantages and disadvantages of the two can complement each other. According to the personalized needs of office, teaching and other scenarios for cloud desktop reliability and data drift, different cloud desktop technology supports are provided for different scenarios, realizing a truly on-demand and flexible cloud desktop solution.

Then the question is, as we all know, VDI is mainly based on centralized computing, while IDV is mainly based on distributed computing. In the face of different scenarios and usage requirements, how can we flexibly deploy the two? How can we achieve a good adaptation (or balance) between them? In response to this question, Mr. Xiao explained to us like this: "IDV's loss to the server is mainly in the memory, while VDI's loss to the server includes multiple core components such as CPU threads, memory, and hard disks. In order to integrate the two, in addition to a lot of adaptation and development in software, the resources of the two parts must also be allocated well for the back-end server. At present, we have two allocation methods. One is to isolate the hardware through software so that their resources do not interfere with each other; the other is that we will choose to add configuration to the server according to different scenario designs. Or we can reasonably allocate the ratio of IDV terminals to VDI terminals based on the specificity of the industry. After doing this, users do not need to make adjustments in 80% of cases. When adjustments are required in specific scenarios, we can help users expand capacity through software."

In addition, we also learned that Ruijie has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Intel. In the future, the two parties will launch comprehensive cooperation, bid farewell to the simple purchasing relationship in the past, and become a higher-level partnership to jointly promote the implementation of IDV. The two parties will set up a joint innovation laboratory around multiple cloud desktop technologies to further strengthen solution capabilities and continuously improve product performance and user experience.

"In fact, during our actual interactions with customers, we found that users often compare Ruijie's virtualized cloud desktop with the hardware configuration of their PCs to see if it is cost-effective. For this reason, Ruijie and Intel are also considering how to use software virtualization to enable users to obtain a better user experience. This is a major direction in the joint experiments with Intel, from which more topics will be derived, such as some protocol technologies and certain performance breakthroughs. After this cooperation with Intel, we will also obtain more and better resources," added Mr. Xiao.

Indeed, as the process of educational informatization continues to deepen, teachers' ideas are changing, and manufacturers' thinking is also changing. Therefore, we can see interactive teaching in various forms like today in the classroom, which is inseparable from the continuous efforts of manufacturers like Ruijie Networks, who have perfectly combined information technology with education. At the same time, we have also seen Ruijie's persistence and keeping pace with the times in the past 18 years, using innovative ideas to deeply cultivate every scene of education and teaching, providing users with diversified educational resources and personalized learning support, optimizing educational decision-making for schools, and improving educational management capabilities. In the future, we hope that Ruijie Networks can continue to launch more innovative solutions that are "down-to-earth and close to users."