As the inventor of the world’s first sport utility wagon, Subaru of America knows how to drive a profit with cutting-edge innovation. That’s why Subaru decided to place their global, mission-critical operations in the cloud, so they could power their Starlink system with ease and flexibility.
No other company has made a bold move like this before—which means that Subaru, once again, is becoming a trendsetter.
Subaru drives innovation
As the inventor of the world’s first sport-utility wagon, Subaru built their reputation on innovative solutions that make it easier for drivers to safely travel anywhere. In 2016, when the client chose to replace their aging Starlink system with new development, they continued their tradition of innovation by bringing all the world’s roadways to the cloud.
client
Subaru of America
challenge
Subaru needed a flexible platform for development and execution of their Starlink system, but the cutting-edge solution they envisioned didn’t exist yet.
solution
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (IaaS) and Oracle Cloud Platform (PaaS)
results
By leveraging an exponentially faster development timeline along with a lower TCO, consistent global service, and outstanding reliability, Subaru can now use Oracle Public Cloud to update and manage their mission-critical, in-vehicle technology for cars around the world.
Paving a new road to the cloud
Though business cloud adoption is increasing, companies typically use the technology only for small-scale, auxiliary apps. Subaru planned to break tradition by using the cloud in a mission-critical application, but initially took the same approach most large companies would: they intended to deploy a hybrid cloud solution.
Two factors convinced them that the public cloud was the right choice for their mission-critical operations instead.
First, Subaru discovered they could significantly reduce their development timeline using public cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which enables development teams to spin up environments within minutes instead of months.
Second, Subaru celebrated its eighth consecutive year of record sales in 2016. Since their Starlink network included a user portal and extensive analytics data for enabled vehicles, they found that public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) could provide critical scalability.
Finding a solution to meet Subaru’s driving factors
Speed, agility, and scalability were important for Subaru’s Starlink platform, but the key requirement was reliability. As Paresh Patel, Managing Partner responsible for Solutions Delivery at Centroid put it, “If you push that button in your car and nothing happens… that’s not a good thing.”
To begin their search for reliable global technology, Subaru did what most companies would do: they focused on the world’s largest tech vendors. They researched Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon Web Services – and since they were already running Oracle in-house, they gave Oracle a chance too.
Surprisingly, all of the largest tech giants failed to meet Subaru’s strict quality requirements.
Only Oracle was able to provide the perfect combination of flexibility, scalability, and full-stack integration that Subaru needed, along with a larger number of global datacenters than the competition. Oracle’s IaaS could run both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, and their PaaS was unmatched.
Because the project would be the largest Oracle Cloud IaaS/PaaS implementation in history, Oracle recommended an expert cloud consultant with long-standing cloud history: Centroid.
“With a project of this size, I know we will run into some challenges. I have complete trust in the Centroid team and am confident that, together, we will overcome any challenges we face.”
Brian Simmermon, CIO Subaru of America
Putting the pedal to the metal for implementation
It’s fortunate Subaru’s CIO understood the challenges he faced with cutting-edge tech because the process took nearly a year. Oracle was releasing and fixing software in real time as it was being implemented, which meant Centroid was reworking code around the clock to meet Subaru’s go-live date.
As Paresh said, “During the entire process, we worked directly with the product development teams at Oracle. It was very synchronized.” Through elective synchronization, Subaru was able to deploy their system before the 2017 holidays – and results were outstanding. Subaru plans to roll out the system globally within two years.