Studio Linux Services Case Study: Accelerate Automotive Innovation

The Problem

One of our automotive customers needed to develop new features that could be quickly integrated into upcoming models in a more agile manner. Its developers wanted to leverage the innovations in open source software while maintaining a level of quality that matched their brand.

But they quickly realized that the cost to build up an in-house team to manage their Linux distribution would be prohibitive and an impediment to continuous innovation, especially given the 10–15 year lifecycles of automobiles. The management of the multiple Linux platforms across product lines were not a value add to the business, and our client needed to prioritize investment in developing new and differentiating features related to safety and security.

Wind River Solution

Wind River® architected and implemented a Yocto Project–based Linux solution that provided the maximum flexibility in adding critical features such as real-time performance, enhanced security, and over-the-air update capabilities. Wind River also provided:

• Lifecycle security monitoring and mitigation for the escalating volume of high-risk common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).
• Ongoing maintenance updates whenever a new version of the Yocto Project was released, which gave our customer the flexibility to implement the updates during regular scheduled maintenance or on demand.
• Long-term premium support with a service level agreement (24-hour response time, for example) on all versions of the Yocto Project platform for 10 years, with an option to extend even longer.

Business Result

Our client was able to completely offload the management of its Linux distributions to Wind River Studio Linux Services within 10 months, and the result is a custom-configured system with regular updates and security monitoring services.

The customer has transitioned its entire Linux team of 15 to focus on building and integrating new features and capabilities regularly. The company has accelerated time-to-new-feature by at least six months and is realizing an increase in total return on investment for new applications of more than 30%.