SHARE NOW and IBM drive sustainable mobility forward
SHARE NOW is a car-sharing provider from BMW and Daimler, a joint venture formed from the merger of car2go and DriveNow, and a game-changing concept for urban mobility.
The business model is a practical way of being able to rent a car in large cities at any time from a fleet readily available on the street and leave it anywhere within a designated service area. “We basically entered the Internet of Things before there was anything called the Internet of Things,” says Erik Bak-Mikkelsen, Head of Cloud Operations at SHARE NOW.
“To develop this product for our customers, we needed global IT operations, a fast and agile way to provision IT resources, and a means of easily scaling our services.”
Additionally, it was imperative that SHARE NOW continues adapting and evolving its service as quickly as its customer base and changing business landscape demanded. “We wanted to be able to develop software and deploy improvements for customers faster, more efficiently and with higher quality than we were able to with a classic waterfall development model,” says Bak-Mikkelsen.
With just one app, we put thousands of the world’s coolest cars at our customers’ fingertips.
With just one app, we put thousands of the world’s coolest cars at our customers’ fingertips.
Considering the full scope of its needs, SHARE NOW evaluated leading cloud platforms and chose an IBM Cloud® solution. “We found that the only way to meet our needs would be to work with one of the major cloud providers,” explains Bak-Mikkelsen. “We had a need not only for cloud resources but also for additional services on top of these resources. When we put this together, it pointed us right at IBM as our preferred cloud provider.”
SHARE NOW teamed with IBM® Global Technology Services® – Outsourcing and Managed Services to migrate all running systems from its traditional data center environment to IBM Cloud infrastructure hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. “We migrated everything live in production into the IBM Cloud,” says Bak-Mikkelsen. “We already had a huge customer base, and it was not an option to shut down the SHARE NOW business. It was a challenge, but with support from IBM, we made the move to cloud successfully, and we’ve been operating there ever since.”
To streamline and accelerate its development processes, SHARE NOW’s IT team shifted to a DevOps model, establishing an agreement with IBM to provide DevOps capabilities and managed services.
Additionally, SHARE NOW uses cloud-based solutions on the IBM public cloud to support the complex rental process on the back end. It was developed with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and is managed with DevOps and agile methods such as Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)s. With those advanced technologies and public servers that scale on demand, IBM ensures that the platform adapts quickly and flexibly to market changes and keeps SHARE NOW in its leading position as a car-sharing provider.
“In our arrangement with IBM, we’ve been able to fully implement a new DevOps way of thinking, developing and operating,” says Bak-Mikkelsen. “We have an IBM team working with exactly the same tools, methods and processes as our internal development teams.”
The IBM Cloud solution provides on-demand resources to help SHARE NOW speed to market with new product features and apps.
All SHARE NOW cars are constantly on the move in and around the 16 European cities where the service is available. Users can rent a car nearby, including electric vehicles, anytime using SHARE NOW’s smartphone app. The complex tracking, managing and rental processes in the background are made possible with powerful IBM public cloud technology, which is designed for reliability and security. The app developed by SHARE NOW displays available cars nearby, allows users to unlock the selected cars and handles the complete rental process, including payments, in an intuitive and straightforward way.
“With just one app, we put thousands of the world’s coolest cars at our customers’ fingertips,” says Bak-Mikkelsen. “With the technology and managed services power of IBM behind this, our heritage from a long line of pioneers in the automotive industry and our experience in the car-sharing market, we are able to think big.”
With highly scalable IBM Cloud technology, SHARE NOW can seamlessly accommodate continuing business expansion. The company now has roughly three million customers throughout Europe, manages a fleet of 11,000 vehicles in 16 major cities and supports rentals every second. “This is a race,” says Bak-Mikkelsen. “We have to keep up with what’s happening in the market. Having our flexible IBM Cloud infrastructure in place means there are virtually no limitations to what we can do.”
Bak-Mikkelsen greatly values SHARE NOW’s unique services arrangement with IBM. The companies are continuing their successful collaboration in the area of public cloud and managed services and will continue to work together to accelerate SHARE NOW’s journey into a multicloud environment.
“Our cloud migration with IBM was one of the most critical aspects of our services relationship, along with our continuing DevOps collaboration,” he says. “IBM works and functions like an extension of our team, which is not something you can find with other cloud providers and is a huge advantage for us.”
As market leader and pioneer of free-floating car-sharing, SHARE NOWExternal Link offers a sustainable solution for urban mobility and makes a significant contribution to reducing traffic congestion in cities. The car-sharing provider is represented in 16 major European cities with about 11,000 vehicles, of which 3,200 are electric. About three million customers already use the service. SHARE NOW operates purely electric fleets in four locations and with four partially electric cities is Europe’s largest provider of electric free-floating car sharing. The fleet portfolio consists of vehicles of the brands BMW, Fiat, Mercedes-Benz, MINI and smart. The company is one of five mobility services that emerged in 2019 from the joint venture between the BMW Group and Daimler AG.
As market leader and pioneer of free-floating car-sharing, SHARE NOWExternal Link offers a sustainable solution for urban mobility and makes a significant contribution to reducing traffic congestion in cities. The car-sharing provider is represented in 16 major European cities with about 11,000 vehicles, of which 3,200 are electric. About three million customers already use the service. SHARE NOW operates purely electric fleets in four locations and with four partially electric cities is Europe’s largest provider of electric free-floating car sharing. The fleet portfolio consists of vehicles of the brands BMW, Fiat, Mercedes-Benz, MINI and smart. The company is one of five mobility services that emerged in 2019 from the joint venture between the BMW Group and Daimler AG.
