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How Digital Technology is Reshaping the Automobile Industry

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How Digital Technology is Reshaping the Automobile Industry

Digital transformation in the automotive industry is redefining the way vehicles are conceived, assembled, and operated.

Technology is reshaping the automobile industry from automating and speeding up the process of designing new models of cars to enabling cars to drive themselves,

From carts and carriages pulled by animals in the ancient ages to vehicles that automatically drive themselves today, the way we traverse over land has seen a massive transformation, to say the least. Cars, since their invention just about two centuries ago has gone from being an innovative marvel to a luxury, now, have become a necessity for most people. The automotive industry, pioneered by stalwarts like Ford and Benz, has seen a steady growth in the decades leading to today, but the evolution of the industry in the pre-digital era is nothing compared to the rapid transformation it is presently undergoing. The past decade has seen the pervasion of every conceivable digital technology into the process of making or driving a motor vehicle. Be it artificial intelligence, big data, the internet of things, or blockchain, every form of digital technology is converging in the automobile industry. The digital transformation in the automotive industry is poised to transform not just the way cars are driven, but also the way they are made and conceived.

Digital Transformation in the Automotive Industry

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1. Artificial Intelligence is Empowering Self Driving Cars

If you’ve been following the world of technology and automobiles in recent years, chances are you’re already aware of the inevitability of the worldwide mass adoption of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars, as the name suggests, refer to AI driven cars that do not require a human driver for operation. These cars, although not as common today as AI enthusiasts would have loved, are currently being tested on roads with real passengers. We are getting ever-closer to achieving totally self-driven with new advances like the development of vector-based navigation, which gives AI agents the ability to orient and move in physical space like humans and other animals do.

A future where the roads are exclusively filled with self-driving cars seems distant, both due to the technological hurdles that need to be crossed, and the fact that there will be people who would prefer to drive their own vehicles. Until the era of total automation of vehicles arrives, technologies like AR and IoT are being employed to enrich the experience of driving and owning cars. An ever-increasing number of IoT sensors are being included in automobile design to allow drivers to monitor vital parameters pertaining to the location and performance of the vehicle. Onboard vehicle telemetry, which has been in use for a while now, not only helps Government regulators to track the vehicle but can also enable them to force the vehicle to stop. Such systems that enable remote connectivity and data gathering are increasingly becoming common in modern cars. Vehicles have onboard sensors to track dozens of performance parameters that are relayed to the driver’s dashboard display, and in some cases even to the carmakers. The information gathered may also include driver behavior data that can be used to find patterns in drivers’ driving habits, which can not only help in adjusting vehicle parameters in real-time but also used in the future to improve vehicle features.

2. Digital Marketing & The Advent of the Internet are Helping Customers Evaluate Vehicles

Digital technology has perhaps made the greatest impact on the way customers buy, and manufacturers sell automobiles. Before the popularization of the internet and the recent progress in digital technology, customers did not have many ways to evaluate and compare their options before purchasing a new vehicle. Except for the short advertisements on television and print media, and time-consuming visits to vehicle dealerships, people did not have many ways to make an informed decision while buying new cars. With the advent of the internet and digital marketing, car buyers can now have extensive information, including opinions and reviews on vehicles to help them in making a purchase decision.

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Car manufacturers have more channels to market their vehicles to customers, and especially in a more focused manner with the help of big data analytics and targeted marketing. The digital transformation in the automotive industry has brought down the barriers between manufacturers and customers, which means manufacturers can have a better understanding of the market.

A new trend in automobile distribution is the increasing use of virtual reality. Manufacturers like Audi have started using virtual reality in their dealership facilities to give potential buyers a virtual tour of their offerings. Eventually, fully immersive VR test drives may become a common thing in the automotive market.

3. Industrial Internet of Things Are Improving The Manufacturing Process

The introduction of digital technologies such as analytics and the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) has been a major game-changer in the automotive industry. Predictive analytics has become a staple in manufacturing facilities, where it is used to monitor and maintain the health of manufacturing and assembly equipment. Predictive analytics has enabled vehicle manufacturers to cut down on breakdown times by minimizing unplanned stoppages. Continuous analysis of manufacturing processes using big data analysis is helping manufacturers to identify areas of improvements and bottlenecks in the assembly processes that were previously unnoticeable.

The advent of the internet of things has multiplied the influx of operational data that is gathered from the vehicle assembly lines, enabling further fine-tuning of the processes. Analytics is not only leading to improvements in the mechanical aspects of manufacturing but is also leading to better management of both material and human resources. The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the automotive industry has led to further leaps of improvement in the way cars are assembled, leading to shorter lead times, greater quality, and consequently, increased profits.

4. Artificial Intelligence Analytics is Creating New Vehicle Designs

In addition to redefining the way cars are manufactured, the digital transformation in the automotive industry has even changed the way vehicles are conceptualized. Artificial intelligence, which has already made significant inroads into the processes requiring repetitive precision, has also begun proving itself in tasks requiring creativity. Automobile makers have already started exploring the use of artificial intelligence to design cars. Car design, which used to be a completely a human process, is now slowly being ceded to intelligent systems that use a large base of knowledge and data as a reference to generate completely new car models that don’t just meet the aesthetic requirements but also the performance requirements of the mainstream public.

The use of IoT and big data is helping vehicle makers to continuously monitor their cars and the way they are being used by customers to determine what aspects of design are working and what needs to change. With increasingly flexible manufacturing systems, the time between the conception of a change in design and its execution is getting incredibly shorter. Thus, vehicle manufacturers benefiting from the digital transformation through increased design flexibility.

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Although digital technology continues to be a major transformational factor in the automotive sector, the role of other developments in changing the industry, such as the exploration of new sources of energy is undeniable. However, unlike innovations in the fields of renewable energy and material science that lead to the occasional yet radical change in the transportation sector, digital transformation in the automotive industry is an ongoing process that will continuously change the way cars are driven, distributed, and designed.


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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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