Continuing our member blog series, this week I caught up with Cameron Hosner, Executive Director – OEM Business Unit for Alps Alpine North America. Alps Alpine is a founding member of the eSync Alliance and is involved in the Technical Working Group and the Marketing Working Group. The company played a key role in driving the eSync Alliance automotive OTA specifications. Cameron shared his thoughts about how Alps Alpine is utilizing eSync to assist its  customers and the auto industry as a whole with the growing need for a sophisticated standardized OTA pipeline.

– Mike Gardner, Executive Director, eSync Alliance

Mike: Alps Alpine is one of the founding members of the Alliance. Is OTA becoming more of a strategic tool for the company?

Cameron: Our involvement in the Alliance was born out of recognizing the value that standardization could serve to the industry and our customers. In general, we expect evolving OTA solutions to serve increasing importance as the need for more frequent and remote updates, or queries, increase in correlation with rapidly evolving feature and topology complexity; whether it’s diagnostics, software dynamics through adaptive learning, or simply planned changes.  Our ability to deliver effective solutions within this space is essential and our work with the Alliance will only serve to bolster that activity.

Mike: How is Alps Alpine managing customer RFQs that offer options for OTA solutions?

Cameron: We aim to please and inspire our customers, by showing methods and solutions for achieving the requested requirements, as well as, offering improvements where available to yield additional feature enhancements.

Mike: Is Alps Alpine becoming more active in offering OTA to its customer programs?

Cameron: Alps Alpine is more active now at an R&D phase. We continue to offer OTA against customer programs and this rate does seem to be increasing; largely as a function of increasing needs from our customers and the increasing complexity of the vehicles they represent.

Mike: Can you share how you envision OTA and Data gathering  changing business models or market strategies?

Cameron: OTA and Data Gathering have very interesting and somewhat unique value when considering both standard and autonomous drive applications. Standard applications have the ability to inform at scale and update at scale, which can yield useful insights in the former, and significantly increase efficiency in the latter.  Autonomous applications benefit from the same but also gain needed adaptability to improve on performance based on personal and fleet data modeling and frequent incremental update deployment.

Mike: Where do you see the Alliance heading in three years?

Cameron: In three years, I see a greatly expanded member base, supporting multiple workgroups, building off the foundation that represents the great standardization concept today, and providing extensions to those ideas to serve increased value towards the industry. I imagine the onset and increasing adoption of Alliance specification compliance into OEM requirements as a means to realize these benefits, both internally and externally, with some reflected in active product development.  Ultimately, our goal is to achieve standardization more broadly, and the aim is to be on a path to reach that.