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 centre of its decision-making. The companies will combine their strengths 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.
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.
Alexander Buresch, CIO and Senior Vice President, BMW Group IT said, “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.”
A key element of the collaboration is the further development of the 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.