For most car manufacturers today, staying competitive turns on being able to deliver compelling digital services. That’s a challenge that BMW understands very well, as it ships 2.7 million cars a year. However, it’s an equally urgent challenge for the organization to ensure that any new digital service—each powered by an array of software applications and computing infrastructure—works reliably and globally.
“Availability is incredibly important, and so is the reliability of those services,” says Guy Duncan, Vice President of Digital Services and Operations at BMW Group. “As users come to rely on things like remote start and keyless entry, as well as myriad other digital functionality, it’s important they just work—effortlessly.”
BMW also wants to gain insights from data about how customers are using its systems. However, that raises challenges about how to manage information about specific individuals to protect their privacy.
To solve these challenges, BMW implemented Cisco AppDynamics to help it manage service performance and predict problems, rather than waiting for downtime to happen. “I like to call it an MRI of your enterprise,” says Duncan. “We can see all the corresponding layers. We can see the cloud. We can see these services. We can see what’s exposed. And we can roll that into the enterprise so quickly.”