I had the pleasure of spending past three weeks on the road talking to many members of the automotive IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) software supply community in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Interestingly, a little-known fact: IVI represents up to 80% of all software running in today’s premium class cars (up to 100 million lines of code). The design of such systems includes over 1500 use cases! Now, back to the subject of this blog…
Week one included the Open Source Think Tank event in Napa, CA, and included discussions about community development and new business models among many open source industry luminaries and top executives from the GENIVI Alliance. As you may know, GENIVI Alliance is building a Linux-based IVI platform so that automotive industry can leverage it to build OEM-specific offerings on a common core. The use of OSS throughout this platform creates exciting new opportunities and enables new business models that, eventually (and sooner rather than later), will shake up the industry.
The second week included speaking on the GENIVI panel at Content + Applications for Automotive Summit in Munich, Germany – home of BMW, which founded GENIVI, along with Intel and Wind River (FYI: BMW is now in the company of another dozen OEM’s who joined GENIVI community). The conference provided a forum for many European automotive applications suppliers to discuss industry directions and challenges in building reliable SW supply chains to deliver safe, secure and flexible modern IVI solutions. It is interesting to note that similar issues were resolved in the traditional automotive manufacturing supply chains with Just In Time (JIT), Lean and ISO 9000 best practices. The challenge, and thus, the opportunity, is to create similar rigor for software supply chain best practices to efficiently design and deliver differentiating IVI products.
The last week on the road included the GENIVI Alliance All Member Meeting in Paris, France – well, in EuroDisney, but close enough. ;-) The event attracted nearly 500 of industry’s sharpest minds who are working together on creating an OSS-based standard IVI platform. In addition to doubling the size of its member community during 2011, industry support for the GENIVI initiative was evident from the almost 40 live demos of upcoming GENIVI-based product offerings (many of which are expected to ship within the next few months, starting in 2013). The collaborative spirit of “coopetition” is alive and well throughout the GENIVI Alliance, indeed!
If I were to offer some observations and take-aways from these past three weeks, they are as follows:
- Automotive IVI business models are causing top-tier players to evolve from decades of proprietary R&D practices to collaborative OSS development. As Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation put it, “You can either be at the table or be on the menu”. Clearly the industry visionaries are going with the former.
- Cloud-connected cars, including car-to-car capabilities, are around the corner. This will enable real-time traffic, point of interest (POI), location of gas or charging stations and weather information to be delivered to the IVI head units in cars — to mention a few of the more popular applications. Similar capabilities have already transformed fleet management and are very likely to have a similar effect on the consumer and small business automotive space.
- Automotive app stores are coming, whether operated by OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers, Telco’s or other third parties. In my opinion, these will become a reality (if not broadly-adopted), in the next three to five years, bringing exciting new possibilities for travel, safety and infotainment, along with new ways to monetize these opportunities.
- Increasingly, more automotive OEMs will require compliance with GENIVI Alliance platform offerings. As a member of the IVI supply chain, vendors will either adopt the same transparent and efficient OSS practices as GENIVI, or will not be able to continue doing business with such OEMs. As GENIVI moves to Compliance 2.0 (as announced last week in Paris) and beyond, the reference platform will continue to bring more value-add features to build upon to all members of IVI supply chains.
- China has emerged as the new battleground for automotive market players. With an expected annual growth rate at nearly 2-3x that of the rest of the world over the next 7+ years, it is already the largest market in the world, and predicted to grow production to over 30 million vehicles per year by 2017. It is expected that two-thirds of this volume will be midrange and premium brands, all loaded with next-generation IVI features. With the country’s shipment volumes approaching the combined volume of US and EU in the next 5-7 years – this is clearly the market to be in.
I’d love to hear back from you – please share your thoughts, observations or counterpoints in this blog.
