Silver Lining in the Cloud
Speed limits keep some semblance of order on our highways. But the cloud—through its ability to flexibly host a global ecosystem of partners and suppliers to make rapid iterations during the product ideation and development process—is what helps you break speed limits to meet launch dates and revenue and quality targets in this fast-changing market.
Today’s transportation and mobility sector is a modern day gold rush, with some company, technology, or strategy staking out new claims almost daily, like the Klondike miners of 1896. Electric, hybrid, autonomous, augmented, ride-share, and ride-hail… these last few years have seen a dizzying array of ideas and development efforts race toward fruition, get unseated by another idea, blend with an alternative approach, or a revolving door of partners, and into a new variant.
The upshot is constant development, perpetual tinkering, and continuous collaboration in an environment of increasing complexity, courtesy of an explosion of new mechanical and electrical components and software code. And it’s not just technology driven—the goalposts keep changing outside the development walls. Ford’s global operations chief told the Wall Street Journal that his company has to be flexible not only in the face of unknowable demand, but because of market influences like fuel prices and government incentives and regulations.
Today’s cloud has grown beyond its origins as a huge parking lot with cavernous space for data, and is increasingly the place where this high-stakes design, development, and engineering dash-to-market takes place. Cloud extends the boundaries of automotive innovation, providing more options, benefits, and agility for collaboration across wide-ranging transportation and mobility value creation networks with their thousands of sites.
Development costs money, and automotive innovators are leveraging cloud-based solutions for more cost-efficient design, engineering, and manufacturing. The money is saved not only by minimizing IT infrastructure, but by putting in place a shared information exchange framework where each stakeholder operates as a node in a virtual development chain. This lower-cost, scalable way to view, use, and analyze data from all corners of the enterprise and outside its borders allows you to move faster and enter markets more efficiently.
The cloud now hosts 3D collaboration platforms with the key technologies for transportation and mobility innovation—design, engineering, modeling, simulation, data, process and configuration, change, and revision management; 3D visualization, analytics and dashboards, to share knowledge and make data-driven decisions across the development communities; and even targeted sets of applications to accelerate specific initiatives, like EV innovation.
Cloud has also become the dais of choice for cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to strut their stuff, parsing almost unfathomable amounts of data to hone in on trends and shifting business conditions. These insights underpin the higher-order business analysis needed to constantly tune and prioritize investment in support of a fast-track transportation and mobility strategy.
Transportation and mobility may be the modern gold rush, but the cloud is the silver lining that helps make it happen.
Editor’s Note: Interested in learning more about advancing future mobility? Register here for the 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM 2019, taking place May 13-16 at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas.
