Put Your Business in the Fast Lane with a Data Mindset

By Adrian McDonald, President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Dell Technologies

At a time when business success is ever more dependent upon digital innovation, it’s hard to overestimate the scale of the opportunity that awaits the automotive industry. Autonomous and connected vehicles, as well as mobility services, will be key drivers of double, even triple, digit revenue growth over the next decade. This will lead to data deluge – around 1 zettabyte of data across the entire industry – which is set to unleash unprecedented transformation and much disruption for vehicle manufacturers.

Yet, as a new report from Frost & Sullivan, commissioned by Dell Technologies, highlights, successful growth will be defined by those that learn to fully utilize and monetize this unprecedented ocean of data. In the digital economy where data is as valuable as oil, no company can afford for this asset to sit unmonetized.

Thankfully, automotive executives understand this. They have a clear vision for the future and, despite vast market challenges, are relatively confident about it. They also are keen to adopt new technologies to improve customer experience, business models and develop new products and services. However, it seems concern exists over their ability to truly monetize the daunting volumes of data expected over the next few years.

Embracing A New Data-centric Paradigm

According to this new research, leaders across the mobility landscape – including vehicle manufacturers, digital service providers and tier one suppliers – are experiencing a high degree of caution over the next steps required to seize the data-centric opportunities ahead. This is not surprising. The shift to a data-centric, value creation business model will require vehicle manufacturers to utilize vast amounts of data to inform engineering, vehicle design, and marketing. For an industry that today only monetizes around 300 MB of vehicle data, this is an entirely new paradigm to work within.

Frost & Sullivan suggests that the key to a truly digitally connected autonomous future is a platform-based solution strategy. As digital-savvy players have shown, this requires infrastructure that allows the business to architect for choice and engineer for change, guarantees cyber resiliency, and crucially, keeps costs down as it scales. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy can help to achieve this as it enables executives to deploy multiple cloud solutions for different workload requirements – as and when they need them.

It’s clear that, despite the perceived barriers, many vehicle manufacturers are in a very good position to seize the data-centric opportunities available. They have an enthusiasm and an understanding of the challenges ahead. Yet, in the digital era, whoever gets there first will win. Technology that is not only limitless in scale, AI empowering and developer friendly; but, crucially, supports the economic model for monetizing vast volumes of data.

The report also acknowledges the need automotive executives have for partners to help leverage the vast volume of data anticipated. At Dell Technologies, we’re proud to be drawing on the expertise across our integrated, end-to-end portfolio, including capabilities from Dell EMC, VMware, and Pivotal. These allow us to create an enterprise platform that helps simplify the data challenges facing automotive executives, and intelligently manages the data required to operate fleets of connected and autonomous vehicles and services.

About the Author: Dell Technologies