AWS and BMW Group Team Up to Accelerate Data-Driven Innovation.

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.