Mercedes-Benz (MBGn.DE) announced the opening of a new 200 million euro ($217 million) software centre in Sindelfingen on Friday, marking the company’s latest investment in bolstering in-house software skills as it strives to bring its own MB.OS operating system to market by 2024.
Around 750 of the 3,000 new employees the luxury automaker expects to hire worldwide to work on the operating system were employed in Sindelfingen, where they worked on everything from in-car entertainment to autonomous driving.
The centre is part of Mercedes-larger Benz’s endeavour to simplify its software strategy from a patchwork method of bringing in technologies from a variety of vendors to controlling the core of its software offering.
Chief Software Officer Magnus Oestberg said in a roundtable, “We take responsibility for software architecture and integration – that is our main goal.”
“We don’t do everything ourselves – we place value on partnerships, but of course the parts that are most important for us, we do in-house.”
One such collaboration is with Nvidia, a leading computer graphics company in the United States, with whom Mercedes-Benz signed an agreement in 2020 to create assisted and self-driving functionalities for the MB.OS system, which will be available in two years.
The automaker is 600 software engineers short of its aim of building a worldwide staff of 10,000 in Berlin, China, India, Israel, Japan, and the United States.
In a poll of 572 car executives conducted by research firm Capgemini, 97 percent claimed that four out of ten in-house staff, ranging from IT architects to cloud management specialists to cybersecurity experts, will need software capabilities within five years.
