From the Earth up to the cloud

R&D base

Just a year after the company was founded, it built an industrial park in Taiyuan, covering 100,000 square meters.

The park has about 1,000 research and development staff in three specializations: industry project engineers, software programmers and application experts. The latter group translates abstract data into concrete uses.

Bao Liangyu, aged in his 20s, who studied automation in college, said of her work: "This is really a high-technology enterprise. All of the employees are experts in their fields. The management is like a foreign company."

The Wangcun coal mine project, started in 2010, is an example of RocKontrol's partnership with the mining industry. The mine, in the nearby Shaanxi province, has an annual output of 2.1 million tons.

RocKontrol set up 19 application sub-systems covering 12 mining and management departments. It also created three-dimensional "live" maps of every road in the mine. On computer monitors, the maps display a range of real-time safety data.

The mine's managers can remotely control all underground equipment through their office computers. They can also get real-time information on every miner in the pit.

Wang Quanli, the director of the mine, said: "The condition of every pipeline is now easily seen on the monitor. The new IOT system makes the mine safer and more efficient.

"For example, the conveyor belt, which was operated by five workers before, can now run with just one."

RocKontrol started making intelligent equipment in 2003, the year it was established. It started research on mission control center chips in 2005 and data-mining software in 2006.

RocKontrol was awarded the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's certification of capability maturity model integration in 2009, which gave it recognition as a world-class software provider.

The production of IOT-capable devices-sensors, RFID chips, instruments and meters-and embedded system development, remain backward in China compared with developed countries.

Most IOT enterprises in China import equipment and systems. Only a few make their own hardware. RocKontrol is one of them.

"I want to offer customers our own cloud-computing services," he said. "I found that customers don't just want us to build the system; they also want us to provide them with more timely services.

"As a real IOT enterprise, we must have our own cloud-computing team."

Li established a strong cloud-computing team in 2010 so that the company wasn't limited to cooperation with cloud-computing service providers.

"It's meaningless to operate a local area network. We offer real-time service. The business model is the large-scale collection, analysis and application of big data. The massive data bring value,"

"Customer loyalty is high in this field. After-sales services are the key factor that will determine the prospects of the industry." Energy conservation and environmental remediation are other major markets for RocKontrol.

"At first, companies were cool to us when we proposed helping them monitor their pollution conditions. But after they learned that we could help them trade their pollution quotas to better fit their production conditions, their attitudes changed," Li said.

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