Renault Group leads with innovation to create tomorrow’s automotive ecosystem with Google Apigee

About Renault Group

Renault Group is at the forefront of a mobility that is reinventing itself. Strengthened by its alliance with Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors, and its unique expertise in electrification, Renault Group comprises 5 complementary brands - Renault, Dacia, LADA, Alpine and Mobilize - offering sustainable and innovative mobility solutions to its customers. Established in more than 130 countries, the Group has sold 2.7 million vehicles in 2021. It employs nearly 160,000 people who embody its Purpose every day, so that mobility brings people closer. Ready to pursue challenges both on the road and in competition, Renault Group is committed to an ambitious transformation that will generate value. This is centered on the development of new technologies and services, and a new range of even more competitive, balanced and electrified vehicles. In line with environmental challenges, the Group’s ambition is to achieve carbon neutrality in Europe by 2040.

Industries: Automotive
Location: Boulogne-Billancourt, France

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Renault Group breaks down silos between business units to create a powerful, reusable ecosystem of APIs that positions the company at the center of tomorrow’s connected world.

METRICS

  • 40+ Million API requests per day
  • 1200+ APIs created and managed
  • 6+ consumers on average per API
  • Unified 2000+ enterprise information systems

“We’ve had zero crashes, zero issues with Apigee. It’s been a great way to open our data safely so we can share it securely with partners both internally and externally.”

Mourad Abbas, Head of Master Data Management and API governance, Renault Group

Renault Group and the enterprise data challenge

Renault Group is one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world.

With so many business units across its enterprise, data silos had emerged between and even within them, making it difficult to surface and share impact-making insights. These silos also resulted in an extremely complicated point-to-point backend that made onboarding external data consumers slow and complex.

Looking to power its digital transformation and position itself at the center of the connected future, Renault Group turned to Apigee’s intelligent API management platform.

Breaking data silos to unlock value

Recognizing the strategic value of its enterprise data, Renault Group began breaking down the silos. The heart of this streamlining was establishing a data governance plan between businesses to define a single unified business information model, with the associated data sets and glossary. Then defining or identifying the Single Points Of Truth or referential to deliver data with a good quality level and 360° vision. So different teams like engineering, sales, and customer service could all discover, share, and benefit from the same insights. Finally, implementing an API communication layer with high level APIs to link efficiently and easily business units, share data and services and warranty data integrity, avoid non useful replication of data. And the key to making those connections was Google Apigee.

“We did some investigating and found that the same data was sometimes referenced locally by several different systems within the company”. “Now, thanks to our data governance strategy, data is shared through APIs so we can break down those silos and make that data accessible across the company.” says Mourad Abbas, Head of Master Data Management and API governance, Renault Group.

“Our aim was to implement high-level API management as modular, reusable and secured components to lower costs and reduce time-to-market for new projects. With Apigee, we have this common API communication layer that simplifies how we exchange data and services between providers and consumers”

Mourad Abbas

Reusing APIs for simplicity

Apigee is also helping Renault Group simplify how it shares its data externally with partners. With over 2000 different information systems, each with its own rich functionality, the company’s point-to-point link system had become a “plate of spaghetti” that was time-consuming to individually manage and made for an inefficient onboarding process.

Now Renault Group onboards new partners faster without having to build net-new APIs for each one and can do so quickly with a simple process that completely conceals the backend complexity from the end user.

“Our aim was to implement high-level API management as modular, reusable and secured components to lower costs and reduce time-to-market for new projects. With Apigee, we have this common API communication layer that simplifies how we exchange data and services between providers and consumers” says Mourad Abbas.

Building an ecosystem for tomorrow

That easy-to-use simplicity is allowing the company to create an ecosystem of partners with Renault’s Group data and APIs squarely at the center, so it can position itself not just as a car maker, but also as a data company. And Apigee is helping Renault Group monetize these emerging opportunities.

“We understood clearly that to stay competitive in the market, you need to adapt your company to new business models and new partnerships with startups, dealers, smart cities, energy providers, etc.” Mourad ABBAS explains. “As the car itself becomes a connected component, you ask, ‘how do you make it easy to interface with that system?’ The answer for us was APIs.” Using Apigee’s monetization module, Renault Group is working on creating an “API store” to create a thriving ecosystem around its data products.

And because Apigee makes it easy for Renault Group to keep its APIs secure, innovation doesn’t come at the cost of security. “It allows us to share data and services in a secure way, so we maintain security guidelines with our community of developers, partners, and clients” Mourad Abbas says.

Renault Group is moving boldly into the future with a digital transformation. High level APIs exposed through Apigee are a good answer to interact with the ecosystem, to share data and services in a secured way, and to go up to the data monetization.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Renault Group

Renault Group is at the forefront of a mobility that is reinventing itself. Strengthened by its alliance with Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors, and its unique expertise in electrification, Renault Group comprises 5 complementary brands - Renault, Dacia, LADA, Alpine and Mobilize - offering sustainable and innovative mobility solutions to its customers. Established in more than 130 countries, the Group has sold 2.7 million vehicles in 2021. It employs nearly 160,000 people who embody its Purpose every day, so that mobility brings people closer. Ready to pursue challenges both on the road and in competition, Renault Group is committed to an ambitious transformation that will generate value. This is centered on the development of new technologies and services, and a new range of even more competitive, balanced and electrified vehicles. In line with environmental challenges, the Group’s ambition is to achieve carbon neutrality in Europe by 2040.

Industries: Automotive
Location: Boulogne-Billancourt, France