The FINANCIAL — BMW announced a new collaboration, with Amazon Web Services. The announcement comes literally days after it was revealed that the Bavarians and several other big German companies are joining forces to set up a cloud-based solution for data sharing. Apparently, the collaboration with AWS is only going to help in the long term, while the other collaborations between BMW, Siemens, SAP, Bosch and Deutsche Telekom will be more of a local platform.
The goal of the BMW-AWS collaboration is to accelerate the pace of innovation by placing data and analytics at the center of the decision-making process. The companies will develop cloud-based IT and software solutions that increase efficiency, performance, and sustainability across all company processes, from vehicle development to after-sales services. BMW will migrate data from across its business units and operations in over a hundred countries to AWS.
The move will encompass a number of the BMW’s central IT systems and databases for functions such as sales, manufacturing, and maintenance, and will help increase agility, achieve new insights from data analysis and more quickly innovate new customer experiences. In addition, the companies will invest in enabling and training up to 5,000 software-engineers in the latest AWS technologies with 2.000 of these becoming AWS certified with an emphasis on machine learning and data analytics.
“The BMW Group is driving digitalization and innovation in the automotive industry,” said Alexander Buresch, CIO and Senior Vice President, BMW Group IT. “We are making data central to the way we work and we look forward to collaborating with AWS to merge our talents, continuing to raise the bar for innovation among automakers and delivering exciting new experiences for our customers around the world.”
One example, where the vast amounts of data can come in handy if it is processed accordingly is in the forecasts for the EV trend. For example, machine learning will enable the BMW Group to better forecast the demand for its range of vehicle models and equipment options worldwide. In this way, planning in purchasing, production and sales can be optimized and, as a result, customer satisfaction can be increased.
