VW Teams With Amazon in Industrial Cloud
Volkswagen is joining the carmakers’ rush into cloud computing in a deal teaming up with digital giant Amazon.
Following hard-on-the-heels of a similar announcement by the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, VW and Amazon aim to create the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud to combine data of all machines, plants and systems from all 122 existing facilities of the VW group. The move is hoped to promote improvements of processes in production and of productivity improvements at the plants.
It is further hoped that, in the long term, the global supply chain of VW, with more than 30,000 locations of over 1,500 suppliers and partner companies, could also be integrated. Third party partners in industry, logistics and sales could also benefit from improvements through the open-source cloud.
“We will continue to strengthen production as a key competitive factor for the Volkswagen Group. Our strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services will lay the foundation,” said Oliver Blume, chairman of the executive board of Porsche AG and member of the board of management of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft responsible for production. “The Volkswagen Group, with its global expertise in automobile production, and Amazon Web Services, with its technological know-how, complement each other extraordinarily well. With our global industry platform we want to create a growing industrial ecosystem with transparency and efficiency bringing benefits to all concerned.”
— Paul Myles is a seasoned automotive journalist based in London. Follow him on Twitter @Paulmyles_
