It is estimated that the number of cars on the road would increase from 800 million today to 3 billion by 2035. It is also predicted that the future generations of car buyers will place far greater importance on in-car entertainment services and software capabilities. The basic need of travelling would be accompanied by the want of discovering/ exploring the world and staying connected all the time.
It is also interesting to note that the ‘Connected Car’ technology is aided by the following elements:
There is absolutely no dispute over the fact that the auto Industry is witnessing an era of revolution- with the convergence of mobility/computing and services industry. The rules of game have definitely changed from the competition between devices to a battle of ecosystems.
Currently, the OEMs provide discrete devices for each application that customer wants inside the car. With convergence happening across consumer electronic devices, the same gets extended to the automotive space and the acceptance rate is bound to increase because:
With the Connected Car concept and space being premium in a vehicle dash board, automobile companies will move towards offering applications and services over the cloud. While a lot of consumer applications are already available over the public cloud to be downloaded, automotive specific applications are just about finding their way into the cloud with a few Tier 1s offering such platforms for their OEM clients.
HCL has been an active player in the automotive services space for more than a decade now and has an enviable list of customers. HCL has been regularly investing in the latest technologies/ services to provide cutting edge solutions to its customers.
The recent additions to HCL’s investments and solutions portfolio are its Service Aggregation/ Management Platform (Agora) and Home Gateway Solution (Aegis).
HCL proposes to leverage Agora as a - service management/aggregation platform as a first step towards offering cloud based services in the automotive space.
This platform would enable the following:
All of this access/control and monitoring would happen from the head unit display of the in-vehicle platform, which would be 3G enabled.
Please click here for a sample Use Case.
The OEM/Telematics service provider can open a part of the platform for ecosystem partners such as their employees, vendors, dealers and customers to write specific applications of interest for this eco-system. Such applications can be on-boarded on the platform and downloaded by interested users for a defined charge. The sale and billing can be enabled by the platform including sharing of revenue by the author of the application and the platform host.
As the platform supports N-tier architecture, such applications can be at OEM level and also dealer specific. This creates an additional stream of revenue for the host.
In auto industry, OEMs typically offer a host of Telematics services through their owned subsidiaries. HCL proposes to on-board such Telematics services on the platform to be delivered as a service over the cloud. The customer would have an option to select the applications & services he wants to subscribe to and pay for the same.
Please click here for a sample Use Case.
Platform also supports integration/aggregation of paid 3rd party services such as internet radio - Pandora, weather updates, traffic updates and route guidance. Services provider (can be the OEM) can buy minutes from the 3rd party service provider and bill the customer as per usage. The usage provisioning and billing to customers would be taken care by the platform. As per business model agreement between service provide and OEM/TSP platform would perform the transaction.
For more information on Cloud Based services for Automotive, please write to us at digital@hcl.com
