Automotive companies to improve fleet management by adopting horizontal data strategies

Frost & Sullivan’s paper, Intelligent Connected Mobility is Reaching an Inflection Point—A Data-centric Future Requires a Platform Approach, analyzes how IT and engineering leaders in automotive, mobility providers, and Tier 1 suppliers are addressing digital transformation challenges. It assesses the need for a platform solution strategy to manage future intelligent fleets and derive value from the escalating volumes of data. It also presents a checklist of critical questions and pragmatic recommendations to aid in clients’ transformation.

There are likely to be 250 million electric vehicles (EVs) and 90 million autonomous vehicles by 2030, generating diverse types of data across the transport ecosystem. A direct consequence of the data explosion is the need to manage, process, and apply it effectively to generate services and new business models. To succeed in the long term, automotive industry participants are expected to partner with technology companies that can help them create an enterprise data-centric platform that can intelligently manage the complexity of the data required to operate fleets of connected and autonomous vehicles and services.

“The current data strategies of the transport vehicle makers remain focused on data ingest, as they are yet to broaden their scope to include innovative solutions for orchestration, movement, and compute. They will need the help of the technology industry to better manage and monetize data,” explained Krishna Jayaraman, Head of Connected Vehicles at Frost & Sullivan. “Companies need to focus on partnerships with proven capabilities in data management and experience in scaling the services, which involves a horizontal data strategy cutting across multiple divisions within a company.”

“This horizontal/vertical data strategy will provide the ability to break down enterprise silos in data management and establish an organization-wide strategy spearheaded by the CIO, the CTO, and heads of connected and autonomous cars,” agreed David Lander, Senior Vice President, Dell Technologies Select | Automotive Industry Vertical at Dell. “Automotive organizations will be best served by a platform solution strategy that is cost-effective and flexible enough to enable vehicle makers and Tier 1 suppliers to rapidly integrate new technologies, services, and ecosystem partners.”

By efficiently collecting, processing, analyzing, and storing valuable data assets, industry participants can achieve distinct business outcomes, such as:

• Streamline product design and development processes, shorten time to market, and lower costs.
• Introduce autonomous vehicles that safely interact with their environment, whether on a city street, highway, port, farm, or in a mine.
• Identify, predict, and automatically fix mechanical or electrical problems in vehicles, making passengers and environments safer.
• Optimize ride-sharing and e-hailing services and lower personal transportation costs.
• Host new customer services and capabilities.
• Obtain higher revenue based on the ability to monetize the right data for trusted ecosystem partners, both public and private.
• Fund and support new business models and operations.