Ferrari, the luxury car brand driven by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lindsay Lohan and Nicolas Cage – as well as the Kardashians and Beckhams, naturally – has signed a deal with Amazon Web Services to become its official cloud, machine learning, and artificial intelligence provider.
It is claimed that the partnership will accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire Ferrari organisation, including its road cars department, GT Competitions, the Ferrari Challenge, and the Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 team.
Ferrari will use AWS’ services and global infrastructure, including the AWS Europe (Milan) region, to streamline design and testing of its cars, with the aim of giving customers top driving experiences.
In addition, Scuderia Ferrari will use AWS to launch a digital fan engagement platform, through its mobile app, to engage hundreds of millions of fans worldwide with exclusive, personalised content.
Scuderia Ferrari principal Mattia Binotto said: “Ferrari and AWS both represent excellence in their fields. As our official cloud provider, I firmly believe AWS will enable our company to become a data-driven organisation that uses the power of technology to improve our products, increase engagement with Ferrari enthusiasts worldwide, and deliver continuously more exciting driving experiences.
“We chose AWS because of its relentless focus on innovation, unmatched portfolio of capabilities, and proven experience supporting partners in the automotive and sports industries.
“Throughout our history, Ferrari has had racing and innovation at our core, and now we look forward to applying AWS machine learning, advanced analytics, and high performance computing across the company to deliver deeper insights and even more powerful cars.”
Ferrari will tap into AWS’ advanced analytics, machine learning, compute, storage and database capabilities to speed up insights into car design and performance on the road and track.
The company will also implement Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, with a range of specialised instance types for efficient high performance computing, to run complex simulations that test car performance under a wide variety of driving conditions and racing scenarios.
As Ferrari moves from simulation to assembly of its new road vehicle prototypes, it will apply AWS analytics and Amazon SageMaker – which helps data scientists build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge – to inform testing and gain deeper insights into how its parts and cars perform under real world conditions.
To support this work and its simulations, Ferrari will build a data lake with Amazon Simple Storage Service and use AWS Lake Formation to quickly and securely gather, catalogue and clean hundreds of petabytes of data.
Ferrari will examine factors that impact car performance and driver handling, such as engine temperature at different vehicle speeds, vehicle vibration patterns on different road surfaces, and suspension loads that affect how the vehicle grips the road.
The car marque will also use AWS to make it easier for current and prospective customers to build, purchase and maintain their cars. Using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Amazon DynamoDB, it is claimed that Ferrari will be able to quickly create, deploy and scale improved digital experiences such as the Ferrari Car Configurator.
Consumers can use the Configurator to custom-build their car and then immerse themselves in it using high-resolution 2D and 3D visualisations.
As if that was not enough, for F1 racing fans, Scuderia Ferrari will use AWS to power a new digital fan engagement platform through its mobile app, designed to inform, educate, and entertain their fans.
Upon creating customised profiles, fans will receive exclusive content such as virtual access to the Scuderia Ferrari garage and hospitality suite on race days. Moving forward, Ferrari plans to build virtual and augmented reality experiences on AWS that bring fans into the garage to interact with drivers and team personnel.
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