GENIVI Alliance Marks First Anniversary with Unprecedented Accomplishments

The GENIVI Alliance, an automotive and consumer electronics industry association driving the development and adoption of an open In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform, celebrated its first anniversary, and its noteworthy accomplishments.

— Launched at CeBIT in March 2009 with just eight charter members, the
GENIVI Alliance now boasts over 60 members. 

— Membership now spans the entire automotive ecosystem across all major
geographies, including five OEMs, key first tier suppliers, and the
majority of semiconductor providers to the In-Vehicle Infotainment
(IVI) market. 

— Through its membership, GENIVI is redefining the boundaries of the
automotive ecosystem by engaging consumer electronics-related
companies in the IVI market. 

— Also during its first year, the GENIVI Alliance, while maintaining its
rapid growth, developed and released to members its first version of
the Alliance Platform just nine months after launch. The platform was
demonstrated publicly for the first time at the Consumer Electronics
Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January.

Most importantly, the GENIVI Alliance has triggered the transformation of the automotive IVI industry and the way that IVI solutions will be developed in the future. With the continuing success of the Alliance, the acceptance of an open source software approach for automotive applications has reached new levels. By focusing on “pre-competitive” layers of the IVI software stack, GENIVI has facilitated cooperation among competing companies across the value chain.

“GENIVI’s performance for our first year has exceeded expectations thanks to the cooperation and efforts of our member companies,” said Graham Smethurst, GENIVI president. “The short development time for the first GENIVI platform version and the CES demonstrations serve as tangible proof points that GENIVI’s approach will deliver on its promise of shortening product development cycles and reducing costs while maintaining high quality and supporting product differentiation. Our industry needs GENIVI now more than ever.”

“GENIVI promises to permanently change the way the automotive industry develops products, values components, and collaborates to build both,” said Roger Lanctot, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics. “The first products built around GENIVI code are just now entering development and industry participation in the alliance has grown from a small core of industry leaders to nearly universal participation.”

In January 2010, ARM joined GENIVI to work directly with their licensees to ensure the applicability of the GENIVI stack across multiple microprocessor architectures. As GENIVI moves into its second year of operation the Board of Directors has been expanded and strengthened through the election of ARM, MontaVista Software and Renault.

GENIVI Alliance is a non-profit industry association whose mission is to drive the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open source development platform. GENIVI will accomplish this by aligning requirements, delivering reference implementations, offering certification programs and fostering a vibrant open source IVI community. GENIVI’s work will result in shortened development cycles, quicker time-to-market, and reduced costs for companies developing IVI equipment and software. GENIVI is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. www.genivi.org.