PressClub Global · Article.
AWS and BMW Group Team Up to Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation.
Tue Dec 08 09:01:00 CET 2020 Press Release
AWS and the BMW Group will jointly develop innovative cloud-enabled solutions and upskill up to 5,000 software-engineers in cloud technologies.
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BMW Group
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Martin Tholund
BMW Group
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Munich. Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the BMW
Group announced a comprehensive strategic collaboration. The goal of
the collaboration is to further accelerate the BMW Group’s pace of
innovation by placing data and analytics at the center of its
decision-making. The companies will combine their strengths as
industry leaders to jointly develop cloud-based IT and software
solutions that increase efficiency, performance, and sustainability
across all company processes, from vehicle development to after-sales services.
“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.”
As part of the wide-ranging collaboration, the BMW Group 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
Group’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 to empower the BMW Group’s global workforce to make
better use of data.
“AWS provides the most comprehensive suite of cloud offerings to
enable automakers to build applications that touch every point in the
customer journey. By combining the domain expertise of the BMW Group
with AWS’s demonstrated leadership in the cloud, we’re expanding our
impact across the automotive industry so that stakeholders, from parts
manufacturers to mechanics, can benefit from greater visibility and
insights,” said Matt Garman, Vice President of Sales & Marketing,
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Qualification of 5.000 Software-Engineers.
The BMW Group has launched a major qualification program for
cloud technologies. With the support of ‚AWS Training and
Certification‘ up to 5.000 software-engineers will be trained
globally. Around 2.000 of these will become AWS certified with an
emphasis on machine learning and data analytics. This enables global
teams of the company to prepare existing data in a structured manner,
use it intelligently and generate added value for the company and its
customers. AWS Professional Services and the BMW Group’s data experts
will work with BMW Group employees to identify business challenges and
develop new cloud-enabled solutions for the automotive industry. For
example, the companies plan to develop a natural language processing
solution, optimized for terminology used in the automotive industry,
that can automatically extract, process, and translate data from
diverse text sources.
Unlocking the power of data.
A key element of the collaboration is the further development of
the so-called Cloud Data Hub of the BMW Group. It is the central
platform for managing company-wide data and data solutions in the
cloud. The Cloud Data Hub offers BMW Group employees across all
corporate divisions a central starting point for implementing
analytical and data-driven applications. Via the Cloud Data Hub,
employees use various AWS services already today to process,
interrogate and enrich development-, production-, sales- and vehicle
performance data in the order of several petabytes and to gain
insights through the application of machine learning. For example,
this 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.
More transparency in the supply chain opens up new opportunities.
The PartChain
Platform developed by the BMW Group uses AWS services to enhance the
traceability of automotive parts and critical raw materials throughout
the automotive industry’s highly complex global supply chain. The goal
is to link specific parts and vehicles to assist in defect
investigations, as well as validate that materials are coming from
sustainable and socially responsible sources. By also using AWS
services, the BMW Group will be able to analyze vehicle data to
predict the operating characteristics of parts, proactively make
maintenance recommendations and inform parts suppliers about potential
problems in their manufacturing processes, thus improving quality.
The BMW Group will contribute its expertise from these use cases
to the recently announced Automotive Alliance, which will be based on
GAIA-X standards. As founding member (BMW Group) and "Day 1
Member" (AWS) of GAIA-X, the two companies are striving to
further develop the Cloud Data Hub towards the GAIA-X standards for
sovereign, secure and innovative data spaces.