Why ANX?

The automotive industry depends on strategic collaboration between manufacturers and suppliers. In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, most vehicle design was done by and within OEMs. Collaboration was a challenge consisting of sharing product information between internal OEM locations across geographic boundaries and time zones. From a technology standpoint, OEMs were putting systems in place to facilitate simultaneous development and release of product information from each of the geographies in which they did business. That paradigm has shifted. Today, although the time-to-market has been reduced from 36 months to less than 24 months, more people are involved in the development of a vehicle than ever before. To complicate the matter, the majority of the “hands” that touch the design of a vehicle and its components are outside the four walls of the company. All the data needed to support Product LifecycleManagementg (PLM) must be seamlessly shared between partners involved in a vehicle program. This means that intellectual property is continuously flowing between companies, geographies and time zones. After the release of the vehicle to manufacturing, partners must continue to exchange time critical information to coordinate orders, shipping and manage inventory levels.

The key to enabling the highly interdependent relationships between OEMs and suppliers is the secure and reliable flow of information. The stakes are high. Even a brief disruption of eBusiness applications can impact profits by millions of dollars each minute. The ANX Network was created by the automotive industry to solve the automotive collaboration challenge. In 1998, ANX became the network of choice for exchanging critical and confidential information within the North American automotive industry. With over 20 million transactions processed per annum with zero data breaches and zero virus proliferations to the core network, the ANX was a resounding success.

Over the past decade, the automotive industry has continued to globalize. The number of automobile producers with factories in the United States has tripled since the 1980s to 15 in 2008. Vertical integration has decreased while the number of alliances and partnerships between firms in North America, Europe and the rest of the world continues to grow. Globalization has created new demands to securely exchange data among all the participants, big and small, within the automotive value chain.  During this same era, Public Internet connectivity has become ubiquitous. Data suggests that growth in Internet utilization is outstripping growth in capacity and that security threats continue to grow in quantity and sophistication. Cyber criminals stole more than $1 trillion of intellectual property last year and that trend continues to grow. Moreover, targeted cyber attacks such as distributed denial of service can severely disrupt business-to-business communications. Although new solutions, such as IPVPNs, have been developed that provide a level of security, CIOs have expressed concern over the rapidly evolving threat landscape and are viewing private cloud solutions such as ANX with renewed interest.  ANX community members exchange information using a secure, private infrastructure that’s not vulnerable to threats originating from the Public Internet. In a recent survey, over 95% of ANX network customers indicated they were satisfied with their service.