Visteon Puts Its Trust in CenturyLink As We Drive Toward an Autonomous Future

Tokyo already has self-driving taxis. If you call a Lyft in Las Vegas, you could likely get an autonomous vehicle. In Scottsdale, Arizona, an eight-foot-long vehicle called the R1 delivers groceries to homes without human drivers. Autonomous vehicles aren’t just on their way, they’re on the streets now.

The excitement—and financial investment—is substantial. Leading automobile manufacturers, tech giants, and start-ups have invested more than $50 billion over the past five years to develop advanced autonomous vehicle technology. Nearly 70% of the capital is contributed by individuals and organizations other than in the automotive industry.

Self-driving cars are made possible through a plethora of technologies: Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cameras, lasers . . . the list goes on and on. But the single most important technology is arguably the network. It must carry the huge amounts data generated by the image-recognition systems, neural networks, and machine-learning analytics systems between each other, and both cloud-based and traditional data centers, to calculate precisely what to do in what can be life-and-death situations.

On the edge of innovation

Visteon, a spin-off of Ford Motor Company, is a global technology company that designs, engineers, and manufactures innovative cockpit electronics and connected car solutions for the world’s major autonomous vehicle makers. Visteon is a major innovator in creating the smart—and always learning—digital cockpit of the future, to both improve the safety of self-driving cars, and to enhance the experiences of users.

Because of the dizzying pace of the industry, Visteon is growing rapidly. It knew it needed to transition from a highly centralized IT model to a decentralized one in order to support its ever-evolving business strategy to keep up with competitors. It required an extremely flexible infrastructure to provision servers and storage quickly to respond to the increasing demands of the business. Specifically, it needed to migrate off a centralized legacy data center to a decentralized one to facilitate spinning off different business divisions as they flourished and grew independently.

CenturyLink expertise makes the connections

After an extensive supplier evaluation process, Visteon chose CenturyLink. CenturyLink’s first step was to design and build a decentralized IT infrastructure for Visteon distributed over four data centers throughout the United States and Europe, each with its own distinct production and development capabilities. Secondly, it integrated and connected all this complex technology. Among other services, Visteon deployed CenturyLink’s private cloud, dedicated cloud compute, unified storage and backup, and intelligent hosting services. And by providing Ethernet virtual private line connectivity to link data centers while deploying dedicated firewall services, CenturyLink was able to ensure optimal performance and security across all its distributed environments.

CenturyLink also delivered migration support and managed services to ensure that Visteon’s business was not impacted during the transition to the new infrastructure. Finally, by giving Visteon an online provisioning portal, CenturyLink gave the Visteon IT team the control it needed to respond quickly to business shifts when it required additional space, memory, or CPU capacity.

Today, lightning fast response times

Today, Visteon is much more agile and competitive as a direct result of a move to a decentralized model. Provisioning response time for compute, storage, and connectivity has been slashed from eight weeks to as little as four days. It has also reduced network outages while lowering support and management costs. Globally, the enhanced infrastructure allows IT managers to redirect IT maintenance and support personnel toward projects that have greater impact on the business.

“Since the CenturyLink partnership, we’ve been able to provide a more stable environment to the business by way of our infrastructure,” says Monty Logan, associate director at Visteon. “The number of outages [and] the support management that we require have been reduced [because of] our relationship with CenturyLink.”

Watch the video to find out more about CenturyLink’s unique cloud solution for Visteon.

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