Cloud-based subscription management platform provider Zuora has joined the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council to enable BlackBerry IVY Ecosystem partners and automotive OEMs to monetize in-car subscription services at scale, using the BlackBerry IVY intelligent vehicle data platform.
Recognizing the incredible growth of in-car technology and features, Zuora says it chose to join the Council because of BlackBerry’s position as a leading embedded software partner for the automotive industry, and because of BlackBerry IVY’s potential as a strong catalyst to drive and enable OEMs to deliver subscription services for their entire customer base, spanning every make and model.
The two companies will collaborate to develop a holistic data monetization strategy for all players across the BlackBerry IVY value chain, including ecosystem partners, automotive OEMs/Tier 1s and consumers.
“Zuora is thrilled to join the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council to support BlackBerry IVY Ecosystem partners and OEMs in providing a best-in-class, in-car subscriber experience that will strengthen customer loyalty and drive incremental revenue,” said Amy Konary, vice president and founder of the Subscribed Institute at Zuora.
Juniper Research predicts that by 2025, in-car-payments will reach $86 billion.
“Zuora will help secure these new revenue streams, from billing to revenue recognition, with a frictionless experience in the car,” continued Konary.
With automotive customers including Ford, Suzuki, and Toyota, Zuora enables businesses to launch and manage any combination of subscriptions, one-time transactions, and usage-based offers, automating the entire order-to-revenue process.
“The fast-growing Subscription Economy is opening up countless monetization opportunities for OEMs beyond just the car itself, with savvy consumers increasingly demanding in-car experiences that mirror their at-home lives – where they can sign up for subscriptions to their favourite content and services, and do so with flexible pricing and packaging options that can be customized to meet their individual tastes and requirements,” said Peter Virk, vice president of IVY Product and Ecosystem at BlackBerry.
“With Zuora, we have a partner who has successfully helped support both high-growth disruptors and established OEMs to pursue subscription-based, connected-car strategies.
And with BlackBerry IVY, together we can now accelerate that shift and ensure a frictionless experience for drivers that makes subscribing to new services as simple as subscribing to their favourite streaming service.”
Launched in June 2021, the previously invitation-only BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council, comprised of leading companies across the transportation and mobility industries, is now expanding with the addition of Zuora.
The BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council’s purpose is to accelerate the BlackBerry IVY development community by focusing on the creation of high-impact technology use cases and solutions that leverage in-vehicle data.
Council members will help drive the BlackBerry IVY roadmap, focusing on co-value development with a view to addressing key pain points that OEMs are looking to solve for.
Announced in December 2020 as part of a multi-year, global agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that will allow automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud. Automakers can use this information to create responsive in-vehicle services that enhance driver and passenger experiences.
BlackBerry IVY addresses a critical data access, collection, and management problem in the automotive industry. Modern cars and trucks are built with thousands of parts from many different suppliers, with each vehicle model comprising a unique set of proprietary hardware and software components.
These components, which include an increasing variety of vehicle sensors, produce data in unique and specialized formats. The highly specific skills required to interact with this data, as well as the challenges of accessing it from within contained vehicle subsystems, limit developers’ abilities to innovate quickly and bring new solutions to market.
BlackBerry IVY will solve for these challenges by applying machine learning to that data to generate predictive insights and inferences, making it possible for automakers to offer in-vehicle experiences that are highly personalized and able to take action based on those insights.
BlackBerry IVY will support multiple vehicle operating systems and multi-cloud deployments in order to ensure compatibility across vehicle models and brands. It will build upon BlackBerry QNX’s capabilities for surfacing and normalizing data from automobiles and AWS’s broad portfolio of services, including capabilities for IoT and machine learning.
BlackBerry IVY will run inside a vehicle’s embedded systems, but will be managed and configured remotely from the cloud. As a result, automakers will gain greater visibility into vehicle data, control over who can access it, and edge computing capabilities to optimize how quickly and efficiently the data is processed.
With BlackBerry IVY’s integrated capabilities, automakers will be able to deliver new features, functionality, and performance to customers over the lifetime of their cloud-connected vehicles, as well as unlock new revenue streams and business models built on vehicle data.
For instance, BlackBerry IVY could leverage vehicle data to recognize driver behavior and hazardous conditions such as icy roads or heavy traffic and then recommend that a driver enable relevant vehicle safety features such as traction control, lane-keeping assist, or adaptive cruise control.
IVY could then provide automakers with feedback on how and when those safety features are used, allowing them to make targeted investments to improve vehicle performance.
Additionally, drivers of electric vehicles could choose to share their car’s battery information with third-party charging networks to proactively reserve a charging connector and tailor charging time according to the driver’s current location and travel plans.
BlackBerry IVY could also provide insights to parents of teenage drivers who may choose to receive customized notifications based on insights from vehicle sensors when the number of passengers in the vehicle changes, when the driver appears to be texting, distracted, or not observing speed limits, or when the vehicle occupancy level rises above the parents’ desired safety threshold.
Similarly, parents of infants could receive a reminder to engage the child safety lock when the vehicle detects a child in the rear seat.
BlackBerry IVY will enable automakers to compress the timeline to build, deploy, and monetize new in-vehicle applications and connected services across multiple vehicle brands and models.
Instead of investing in one-off solutions that conform to the unique engineering of different vehicle models (as they do today), automakers using BlackBerry IVY will be able to leverage different types of data as common building blocks for new services that could work across a range of models.
Automakers will be able to use the platform’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data and outputs with their software development teams, giving them the ability to innovate, while also protecting customer privacy and security by controlling whom can access vehicle and app data and at what level of detail.
In addition, BlackBerry IVY will make it easier for automakers to collaborate with a wider pool of developers to accelerate creation of new offerings that deliver improved vehicle performance, reduced costs for maintenance and repairs, and added convenience.
For instance, by analyzing real-time performance data, automakers could recognize the first signs of potentially faulty parts, deploy code to identify affected vehicles, notify impacted drivers, and perform targeted recalls.
Automakers will be able to remotely deploy and update the software from the platform’s Cloud Console (a web interface for managing BlackBerry IVY) to continuously improve the functionality of the system.
