by Al Sacco

BlackBerry’s Latest Foray Into Automotive Tech is System for OTA Software Updates

Opinion
Jun 05, 20132 mins
Computers and PeripheralsMobileSmall and Medium Business

BlackBerry today announced a new system that's designed to help automobile makers easily and securely send out wireless software updates to customers' in-car computers and "infotainment" systems.

Today at the Telematics Detroit conference, BlackBerry is previewing a new automotive technology for in-vehicle software updates that’s designed to make it easier for automobile manufacturers to send wireless software updates to customers’ cars.

BlackBerry In-Vehicle Computer Bentley

From BlackBerry:

“Modern vehicles are equipped with sophisticated infotainment systems and dozens of electronic control units (ECUs). Keeping these systems up to date with new or enhanced software functionality is critical, but must be achieved in a way that is economical for the automaker and seamless to the end user…The BlackBerry solution provides automakers with a secure, robust and highly efficient platform for performing these ‘Over-the-air’ (OTA) updates that is independent of network type, hardware, OS, software, and applications…By leveraging BlackBerry’s proven global data infrastructure, this solution is highly scalable to support millions of vehicles and removes the complexity and overhead of automotive manufacturers having to build out and maintain their own internal OTA infrastructure.”

BlackBerry has in the past expressed its interesting in the in-vehicle technology market, and its new BlackBerry 10 mobile is built on a code foundation from QNX, a company acquired by BlackBerry in 2010 that has a background building software for automobile computers.

BlackBerry Software Update Management for Automotive infrastructure

You can learn more about the upcoming Software Update Management for Automotive system on BlackBerry.com

AS