It’s a B2B sales marketplace for buying and selling automotive software, developed in collaboration between GM, Magna, and Wipro. It aims to revolutionize the automotive software sourcing and procurement process by providing a matchmaking marketplace for buyers and sellers of embedded automotive software. It is an independent, industry-driven, and standard-agnostic marketplace, which is available to all OEMs, suppliers, and any other company with relevant software offerings and tools.

Software development is exploding in the automotive industry – the automotive software market will come close to doubling in this decade. The race to develop the next generation of software defined vehicles is underway, along with the urgency to deliver features faster for less costs.

While the automotive industry is accelerating in the adoption of software defined vehicles, processes around software development and procurement are outdated. Buyers have a lack of transparency over the software ecosystem, which leads to challenges and inefficiencies in the make-or-buy decision. Sellers of embedded automotive software struggle with a lack of market awareness for their offerings and highly tailored specifications and requirements for each customer, which leads to a lack of IP reusability and cost-intensive RFI processes.

In the face of these challenges, GM, Magna and Wipro came together to develop SDVerse – a need-matching marketplace, which addresses the software-related pain points that companies across the automotive value chain are facing. They have designed the marketplace with the goal of increasing transparency and reducing friction between buyers and sellers of embedded automotive software. By using the marketplace, buyers can easily discover competitive software offerings from various vendors and sellers are able to promote their existing products to more customers than before.

It serves as a “matchmaking” marketplace between buyers and sellers of embedded automotive software. Sellers can list software products by attributes and link them to related or complementary software. Buyers can search software offerings, identify matching capabilities, explore product data, compare product attributes, view on-demand media supporting product capabilities and access files like certifications, documentation. Once a connection is made between a buyer and a seller, negotiations and financial transactions take place outside of the marketplace.

GM, Magna, and Wipro have a shared understanding of the crucial need for such a marketplace. Their primary driver to create this marketplace stems from the recognition that it should be an industry-driven solution that benefits the entire automotive ecosystem, rather than a captive offering that favors a single player. This collaborative approach ensures that SDVerse remains a marketplace that fosters mutual growth and collaboration within the industry, creating a level playing field for all participants. By putting the industry’s needs first, the Founding Members are pioneering a new era of software development and procurement in the automotive sector.

SDVerse software marketplace addresses the pain points that both buyers and sellers of embedded automotive software are facing. Buyers of automotive software face a lack of transparency over the ecosystem of potential suppliers as well as their offerings and capabilities, which lead to inefficiencies in software engineering, procurement, and the make-or-by decisions being made. Sellers of embedded automotive software often struggle with a lack of market awareness for their software offerings and capabilities, and highly tailored specifications and requirements for each customer, which leads to resource-intensive RFI/RFQ processes and a lack of reusability of IP resources.

There are various benefits that SDVerse provides to its users. For buyers, SDVerse provides exposure to more sellers, increases transparency between competitive offerings, and therefore helps them make better make-or-buy decisions. For sellers, SDVerse acts as a marketplace on which they can showcase their full scope of capabilities, reduce RFI costs through a standardized set of product details provided on the Software Marketplace catalog, and shape buyers’ requirements by joining them in the starting point for software development conversations (thereby increase IP reusability).

It follows an annual subscription fee model – it does not charge any fees for buying or selling products on the marketplace.

It is the only marketplace to date focusing on software commercialization – it complements existing industry-wide software initiatives (i.e., AUTOSAR, Eclipse, etc.) that focus on other elements of software development such as thought leadership, standard setting, and open-sourcing.

The target commercial go-live date for the SDVerse software marketplace is Q3 2024. Sellers can begin listing their software before the go-live date.

The SDVerse software marketplace is exclusively for vehicle software (embedded & cloud) and development tools – however, participants don’t need to be automotive-focused as long as they have relevant software offerings.

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