Waterloo, Ontario – A strategic partnership between Canadian technology authority BlackBerry and e-commerce giant Amazon aims to bring automakers and suppliers a standardized cloud-based software medium to increase vehicle data regulation and implementation of new profit-generating features and services.
The new vehicle data platform, called IVY, has been developed by BlackBerry and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide automakers and suppliers with condensed build times along with deployment and monetization of in-vehicle applications and connected services across numerous brands and models. These functions will allow automakers to more easily collaborate with a varied amalgamation of developers in order to speed up app and service evolution.
Though vehicle manufacturers have so far been reluctant in sharing the data generated by their vehicles with outside tech providers, IVY has been designed to run simultaneously with new digital developments from Volkswagen, General Motors and others.
BlackBerry’s vehicle operating system, QNX, that is in 175 million vehicles worldwide served as the base in which IVY was built. The hope for the new platform is to establish it as a standard for the automotive industry, much like Apple and Google have done through iOS and Android.
“The biggest challenge that most carmakers have in getting applications in the vehicle or monetizing their data is that there is no standardized way to access the data,” John Wall, head of BlackBerry technology solutions, told Reuters.
Wall continued on to say that without standardization automakers can’t establish an ecosystem or leverage the broader community of app developers.
AWS executive Sarah Cooper confirms that IVY is expected to be installed on the first production of 2023 vehicle models, though both BlackBerry and AWS have not commented on which companies will be the first to use IVY.
