Digital marketplace for automotive software opens, supported by GM, suppliers

Aimed at reducing the time and cost of developing software-defined vehicles by matching the needs of automakers with those of software vendors, SDVerse opened Monday.

It was created and financially supported by a partnership between General Motors Co. and suppliers Magna International and WiPro. It is the first digital marketplace in the automotive industry that brings together car companies, suppliers and software providers.

“If you think about how they do it today, it takes months for them to find software, talk to vendors, do RFIs (requests for information),” Prashat Gulati, CEO of SDVerse, said in an interview. “Our claim is that we reduce those months to minutes. That’s why we’ve done the work with GM and others to identify approximately 80% of the time savings across the entire procurement process. That’s the beauty of software, right? Faster development cycles.”

The founders wanted to save not only time, but also money, by developing software in-house, Gulati explains.

As vehicles become increasingly dependent on software to operate advanced technology, demand increases.

“Because of this transition to software-defined vehicles, the automotive software market is expected to double this decade,” said Daniel Nicholson, vice president, strategic technology initiatives at GM, during a panel discussion last April.

That outlook is supported by McKinsey & Company, which predicts that the global automotive software and electronics market is expected to reach $462 billion by 2030.

Setting up the membership is quite simple. Potential buyers and software providers pay a flat fee for access to SDVerse, for which there are no transaction fees, Gulati said.

There are three subscription levels for buyers depending on their revenue: under $100 million, $100 million to $1 billion, and over $1 billion.

“Everything is included: unlimited login and all your majority-owned subsidiaries can join for free within that amount,” Gulati explains.

Once a buyer has found the software they want, discussions begin with the supplier to request more information and negotiate price.

In addition to the three founders, ten other companies have joined SDVerse, including Forvia, Bosch and Valeo. Cummins and Groupe Renault.

The speed with which software was found and purchased was a key incentive to join, said Karin Matthes, Chief Technical Officer and Vice President of Innovation and Technology at Groupe Renault, during the panel discussion in April.

“The process is very long, and so make versus buy, and then you have to know different suppliers, and a lengthy monthly decision process, and that is contrary to the objective of SDVs to deliver new value quickly and incrementally throughout the life cycle. our vehicles,” explains Matthes.

That sentiment was echoed by Joan Wills, executive director of software and electronics engineering at Cummins Components and Software.

“By leveraging the SDVerse ecosystem, we expect to significantly reduce the time and effort required to implement connected vehicle capabilities and deliver even more value to our customers,” Wills said in a press release announcing the membership of the company was announced on July 24.

However, Gulati makes it clear that SDVerse falls short of matching software buyers and sellers, rather than closing the deals, explaining: “we facilitate the communication and so on. But once software is found, the companies still go through their own RFQ process, asking for more details and more clarifications, but we’ve already done a lot of the preparatory work for them. But they still have to go through a legal negotiation process, so that is offline.”

The bottom line, he says, is that companies that go it alone in software development are likely spending too much time and money, when the solutions they seek may already have been developed by vendors who specialize in them. talent and capital in the world to do everything yourself.”

Then it’s time to hire a digital matchmaker.