By Julian Offermann
In the words of Harvey J. Miller, “If civilization is to survive the 21st century, we must figure out how to design, build, and manage sustainable and resilient urban mobility systems.” The current COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the need for continued development of sustainable mobility to handle the ever-growing demand due to population growth.
As with all big challenges, it starts with the right mindset. At Sulzer US, we ask ourselves “How can we support the transformation of mobility into a more sustainable and reduced emission service?” Many of our sustainability initiatives over the past 8 years have taught us that this transformation requires leaders across industries, including energy, automotive and IT, as well as policymakers to work hand-in-hand. Our clients and partners within the EV space demonstrate a commitment to the vision of making mobility sustainable without focusing only on immediate return on investment. This mindset is what brings change.
Major challenges for evolving this transformation remain, including the integration of services, mostly legacy, across systems, infrastructure and companies. This is especially true for connected devices, which generate valuable data and often need to be integrated with legacy backend systems in order to allow for proper optimization, as well as detection of patterns and inefficiencies. Another big challenge is ensuring data privacy and security. With the positive developments regarding customers’ rights to consciously opt for sharing of data, it is fundamental for companies to think how data sharing works for each particular business case. Especially when partnering with other companies to create richer sets of data, this is a fundamental consideration. Differential privacy is a great approach to continue to leverage statistical power of datasets while withholding information about individual devices or users.
Long term competitive advantage will be realized by players who understand the technological efforts needed to integrate systems efficiently and can quickly and efficiently iterate on use cases. Our broad technology skillset and deep understanding of cloud technologies helps overcome challenges to drive our clients’ transformational efforts needed to adapt to new software development and operating paradigms.
If you’re interested in partnering on a sustainable mobility project or learning more about what we do at Sulzer, we look forward to hearing from you.
About the author: Julian Offermann is the founder and CEO of Sulzer US. He founded the company after forging a long-term partnership with BMW in Germany and has since expanded the business to include a number of other automotive leaders and Electrify America. A developer by trade and business leader by design, Julian is the mastermind behind innovation at Sulzer US.
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