In the past several years, cars have transformed from being a hardware-oriented vehicle to a software-oriented one. Each stage of the entire lifecycle of any product or software, right from its conceptualization, development, deployment, and post-delivery support is crucial to gain customer confidence and long-term relationships. Customers look for speed and agility and it is no cakewalk for independent software vendors to pull it off.
Automotive software providers need to develop specialist solutions with the latest technologies. They face many challenges in terms of their capabilities and limited resources while creating these solutions for their clients.
According to the Coding Sans State of Software Development 2019 report, 21.29% of software development companies agreed that dealing with a backlog with limited capacity while delivering software is the most significant challenge they face. Here are some more common challenges automotive ISVs face:
Data Management Challenges: Automotive software providers help companies by building products and software that integrate their standard legacy system with technology innovations. They face challenges in data modelling, data configuration and dealing with large and poor-quality data.
The One Size Fits All Approach: Most ISVs make a typical list of issues faced by automotive industry professionals and formulate a standard solution to resolve those issues. Although it works for some automotive software providers, this approach will not work for all. The reason is, every company has different manufacturing, inventory management, and billing process. The idea is to create customized software that takes care of the exact requirements of clients.
Lack of Infrastructure Knowledge: The customers working with the automotive software vendors expect them to offer quick, versatile, and scalable solutions that can seamlessly extract information and insights from legacy data sources. It is crucial to find common grounds with developers working on the solutions and create a Center of Excellence team to streamline processes from development to deployment.
Schedule and Cost Overruns: One of the biggest challenges for automotive software providers is to deploy customized solutions for their clients within the given timeline. Sometimes, they lose many precious clients due to lack of resources and technical expertise followed by the issue of cost overruns. As several automotive manufacturers start encountering problems with SaaS-based system even before it goes live, resolving those issues sometimes need investments in creating a robust support infrastructure system.
Quality of Service Delivery: The quality of service is a critical factor for automotive ISVs. To establish a strong customer base and enhance the reputation of their organization, they need to implement advanced product engineering processes. Not just that, they also need to evolve with emerging technology innovations.
How Can Automotive ISVs Overcome These Challenges?
It gets complicated to stay relevant with digital transformation in the automotive sector when there is a dire need to stay ahead in the competitive market. ISVs need to constantly innovate and evolve using advanced technologies, strike the right partnerships with automotive leaders, and interact with global key industry players. Moreover, once you develop the automotive solution, you need to make continuous improvement by embracing a dynamic product architecture and the emerging requirements of the markets.
This might not be practically possible for ISVs due to lack of the right resources and technical expertise. This is where a fruitful technology partnership can be of help.
Gateway Digital: Helping ISVs to scale up their software offerings
At Gateway Digital, we understand the significance of efforts that the independent software vendors put in while formulating the solutions or offerings to their customers for better experiences. We work as a co-creation and co-innovation partner with automotive software providers to help them with software and product engineering expertise and redefining customer experiences in this digital era. We provide the right technology insights and solutions to ISVs and businesses and support them in their growth journey.
If you are a software provider looking for support to co-innovate and co-create digital strategies and solutions for your automotive clients, get in touch with us at hello@gatewaydigital.no. To know more about the partnership opportunities, visit http://www.gatewaydigital.no.
Digital Transformation Consulting 