Strix Fleet Management

A modern B2B Fleet Management solution

Following the accomplishments of Lo/Jack LATAM's partnership with Leapsight on Strix, the business made the decision to continue modernising by replacing its outdated Fleet Management solution with a new one based on Magenta, the IoT platform built and managed by Leapsight for Strix.

A modern architecture for a modern UX

By utilising the most recent distributed applications features provided by Magenta, Strix Fleet Management offers a significant improvement over its predecessor, including:

• The Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP) is used to connect all elements of its architecture, particularly to enable (soft) real-time bidirectional communication with the user interface.
• The use of micro frontends - adopting the microservice architecture style to frontend development.
• A more advanced Digital Twin solution based on Virtual Actors, an abstraction on top of the actor model wherein actors exist perpetually and are always addressable regardless of their physical location.

Bondy and WAMP

Magenta connects all components of its distributed architecture using Bondy, an open-source distributed application networking platform created by Leapsight that implements the open Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP).

Bondy offers service and event mesh capabilities thanks to its distributed, decentralised implementation of WAMP.

Strix Fleet Management web app uses WAMP to subscribe to real-time events produced by the vehicle (and other assets) digital twins. This allows users to receive state change events that the vehicles' digital twins publish each time they get a telemetry signal.

With no complex client or server-side logic required, WAMP's use of Web Sockets establishes a bidirectional communication channel that enables customers to track tens or hundreds of vehicles in real time.

The following videos show the end result.

Micro frontends

As new features will be constantly added Strix needed a way to make the development scalable. Also, not all customers subscribe to all features and it was desirable for the application to only load the code required for the enabled features.

Following the successful implementation of a microservice-style architecture for the backend, we decided to replicate the same in the front end.

The result is an application that is composed of micro applications, each one developed by a different team and encapsulating a set of features that are enabled/disabled based on the user's contracted service plan.

Digital Twins via virtual actors

Finally, we needed more complex capabilities in terms of digital twinning. As opposed to Strix consumer offering, Fleet Management includes support for CAN-bus telemetry, making the definition of the digital twin state and state transitions much more complex.

Building interactive services that are scalable and always on is hard. To support a large number of digital twins and user sessions, high throughput and low latency are essential.

A naive solution is to write the new digital twin state to the database on every telemetry signal received and read the new state from the database on every user request. This has limited scalability due to the latency and throughput limits of the database layer.

A caching layer is often added to reduce latency, but this comes with its own complexities, the main one being the loss of the underlying database consistency guarantees.

As Magenta is based on the actor model we decided to explore the idea of Virtual Actors popularized by Microsoft Orleans.

Using virtual actors, Magenta digital twins offer better scalability and lower latency.

We are eager to see what Strix and Magenta will bring next.

Strix

B2C Internet of Things Platform integrating Home Security, Connected Car, Location Sharing and Family Tracking

Technology innovation has always been the foundation behind Lo/Jack Latam's leadership in asset tracking and recovery, a company well known for its stolen vehicle recovery service operating in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay since 1998.

Lo/Jack Latam's vision is to provide tranquility and comfort to their clients through total visibility and control over their assets using innovative technological solutions.

That is why when Lo/Jack Latam decided to explore a new B2C business model they partnered with Leapsight, to explore the art of the possible.

The result of this collaboration is Strix, a new business model enabled by an Internet of Things (IoT) Platform (codenamed Magenta) designed, built and maintained by Leapsight.

A new business model

When Ramiro Martínez Casas joined the company as Commercial Director in 2017 he realised the need for a B2B2C go-to-market approach in their business model.

Up to now Lo/Jack Latam's main focus was its two main B2B customers: Fleet Owners/Managers in Transport and Logistics and Insurance Companies, both mainly interested in stolen vehicle recovery.

In the case of the solution for insurance companies the end user usually forgets the existence of the service until their vehicle is stolen.

Several of our clients did not really felt 'ours' as we didn't provide them any service directly.

The road ahead was Lo/ Jack needed to replace its technology with one that could open up new markets, new value propositions and foster a direct relationship with customers.

That is when Lo/Jack started replacing the legacy tracking device with GPS trackers in their Transport and Logistics B2B clients in order to start providing services well beyond stolen vehicle recovery, such as vehicle status visibility, real-time location tracking, real-time alarms based on user-defined rules such as speeding, harsh driving behaviour and geofencing.

Digital Transformation

The time came to test the final piece of the puzzle, offering the GPS-based solution to Insurance companies and up-sell services directly to consumers, the B2C side of their new business model.

The first attempt (called LoApp) was implemented using the legacy technology platform and while it demonstrated the benefits of the approach, the platform could not scale.

This was a monolithic platform, designed 5 years ago for a B2B business model and not designed to support the data and interaction volumes produced by an increased number of customers nor the increased number of sensor signals that had to be processed in real-time to offer those services

Although the exercise has not been without pain, Lo/Jack Latam wanted to double down on the approach: delivering tranquility to customers does not stop at the car!

Lo/Jack Latam was already growing its home security and automation business under two additional business models.

That is when Lo/Jack Latam turned to Leapsight as innovation and technology partner.

The challenge was to explore the idea of converging the three business models under a single one and recommending the way forward for the required digital transformation to deliver a platform that would be scalable and always-on to handle the connection with potentially millions of devices and 100s of thousands of users.

Results

The project was delivered on-time, on-budget, in-full, covering all planned features.

Strix went live in Argentina in March 2018 after two successful pilot phases that started in October 2017 involving employees first then followed by customers.

By May 2018, the platform had 3,000 connected vehicles. Since then the platform has grown by and average of 6,000 new vehicles and hundreds of smart home devices per month. In 2019 Strix was launched in Chile and Uruguay.

How Leapsight Helped

Leapsight's Discovery and Ideation phase yielded the recommendation to to converge the three business models (and the underlying operating models) triggering two strategic initiatives:

1. an enterprise systems transformation, and
2. the creation of a new value proposition "Strix" integrating the connected vehicle offering with home security and home automation, enabled by a greenfield IoT Platform, codenamed "Magenta".

Bringing Magenta and Strix to life

Using Leapsight's Systems Architecture and Design methodology, which combines software architecture methods with agile software development, the blended Lo/Jack and Leapsight team designed, implemented and launched Strix.

Magenta is a polyglot microservice architecture that uses the Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP) internally and exposes both WAMP and HTTP/Rest APIs. The platform uses bleeding edge technologies such as Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) to ensure its high availability.

Magenta uses several of Leapsight technologies including Bondy, an open-source, always-on and scaleable application networking platform connecting all elements of a distributed application—offering service and event mesh capabilities combined.

Magenta continuously turns sensor data into actionable knowledge, act and react to significant events based on dynamic business rules, alert users and allows to control smart devices for responsive automation. It provides continuous availability through a distributed system with selfhealing capabilities and the latest innovations in distributed concurrent computing, Big Data and stream processing.

Stealth Startup

Accelerating product development through API-driven architecture, microservices and a universal application protocol

We have been working in secret with a startup in Silicon Valley that is operating in stealth mode, therefore we are unable to share further information with you at this time. We can't wait for them to show the world what we've been up to.

Privacy Policy

Last updated March 12, 2023

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Trademarks

Leapsight and Bondy are registered trademarks of Leapsight Technologies Limited

The name Leapsight or a similar variation of Leapsight may not be used by any company trading within the computer software, consultancy and computer consultancy, business administration, office functions, advertising, educational services business sectors without written permission from an appropriate representative of Leapsight Technologies Limited.

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