Authors

Robin Goibert

Associate Partner - Industry

robin.goibert@fr.ibm.com

Florent Guiraudie

 Executive Architect and AWS Technical Leader

fguiraud@fr.ibm.com 

About the customer

Stellantis is a constellation of 14 iconic automotive brands and two mobility arms that are about more than transportation: they're about moving people and making connections.

Problem Statement

Stellantis required to build a platform to support their ambition in generating new revenue from services (mainly connected). The platform is AWS cloud-native and hybrid using SaaS (Salesforce for customer and order management and Zuora billing, and accounting) and AWS (hosting open-source e-commerce website, commerce custom application, integration and business workflows).

Main opportunities for revenue generation are from Services and Subscriptions, Features on Demand, Data-As-A-Service and Fleet Services, Vehicle Pricing and Resale Value and Conquests, Service Retention & Cross-Selling.

The platform envisioned for this is as below:

IBM Solution

Put simply, this is a fully digital platform that manages the entire customer journey from start to finish.

As customers, once you take delivery of your vehicle, you receive an SMS informing you that your car includes a range of connected services. You click the link, browse the catalog, sign up for test drives, and activate features like connected navigation, smartphone-based vehicle access, and many other services developed by our business teams.

When you subscribe via your phone or the website, what you don't see is the complex backend infrastructure that enables the activation and deactivation of services across what will be 34 million vehicles by 2030. Simultaneously, we ensure high-quality customer support through integrated call centers.
Today, the platform handles about 400 million visits per month, supports five brands across 45 countries, and is being expanded to cover 14 brands in over 80 countries.

One final point: this platform allows us to decouple the vehicle’s lifecycle—typically three to five years—from the lifecycle of connected services. This flexibility means we can introduce new digital features six months, a year, or even three years after the car leaves the factory. That capability is crucial in the evolving software-driven automotive landscape.

IBM built and run the solution using several AWS components and services : Cloudfront, Load Balancing, Route 53, Fargate, Lambda, API gateway, SNS, SQS, Step Function, DynamoDB, Aurora, DocumentDB, ElastiCache, S3, EBS, Clouwatch, X-ray, Code Pipeline, Code Build, Code Deploy, WAF

Architecture

Building Blocks

Let’s now dive into the core architecture of the platform, known as SCEP. Conceptually, SCEP is a cloud-native platform built on three foundational technologies:

·        Salesforce: Handles all aspects of customer relationship management (CRM), providing a unified customer experience.

·        ZUORA: A SaaS-based subscription management solution used for product catalog configuration, subscription lifecycle handling, and billing operations.

·        AWS: Hosts the custom backend services that manage orchestration, provisioning, and system integrations required to support subscription-based services.

Customers can access the platform through multiple channels: a mobile app, machine-to-machine API interfaces, and over 150 branded websites—each localized by country and developed using Drupal, deployed at scale on AWS.

The product and service catalog is managed centrally in ZUORA, where we define offers, pricing, and subscription terms (e.g., 12- or 36-month durations), tailored by market and brand. For performance and scalability, this catalog is synchronized to AWS and rendered dynamically across customer touchpoints.

The customer-facing catalog is personalized based on two key dimensions:

1.     Vehicle context – Feature availability is dependent on the vehicle’s manufacturing date and hardware capabilities. For example, a model built 12 months ago may support fewer connected features than one produced today.

2.     Customer profile – Personalization accounts for brand (e.g., Fiat, Peugeot), market (country), business type (B2B vs. B2C), and any existing subscriptions.

Once a user browses the catalog and selects a service, the platform initiates a standard e-commerce flow: cart management, payment processing, and order confirmation. Order data is sent to ZUORA for billing and lifecycle tracking, while customer-related details are synced with Salesforce for CRM continuity.

A key technical capability is onDemand service activation. Many vehicle features—such as heated seats—are hardware-enabled at the factory but require remote activation post-purchase. Our AWS-based provisioning engine handles these over-the-air activations securely, eliminating the need for dealership visits.

Finally, the SCEP platform is not a siloed system—it integrates with over 30 internal Stellantis systems to ensure seamless data flow, service orchestration, and operational consistency across the enterprise

AWS Architecture Diagram

The technical architecture of the platform, is built around five core design principles.

1. Cloud-Native Architecture:
The platform is designed from the ground up as a cloud-native solution, leveraging microservices, containerization, serverless components, exposed APIs, and auto-scaling capabilities that dynamically adjust to workload demand. To ensure high availability and fault tolerance, the system is designed to be inherently resilient and is deployed across multiple AWS availability zones and regions.

2. Full Automation via Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
We avoid manual provisioning or configuration through admin consoles. Instead, the entire infrastructure is codified and managed through automated deployment pipelines. This ensures consistency across all environments—development, staging, and production. Observability is also automated, with proactive alerting mechanisms in place to detect and respond to anomalies in real-time.

3. Resilience by Design:
Acknowledging that every system can fail, the platform is engineered to handle failure gracefully. Services are loosely coupled, and redundancy is built in at both the infrastructure and application levels. Distributed deployment across AWS data centers further enhances robustness.

4. Cost-Efficient Design:
Cost-performance is a key consideration during the architecture and service selection process. We evaluate not only the technical and functional fit of a service but also its cost in relation to the expected workload. If the projected operating cost doesn’t align with performance needs, the architecture is reevaluated before implementation. Post-deployment, ongoing cost monitoring ensures we can optimize or refactor as needed.

5. Security:
Security is fundamental. While we won’t detail specific security implementations, the platform incorporates robust security measures including perimeter security, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and close coordination with the Stellantis Security Operations Centre.

Service Layer Architecture Overview:

The platform is structured into multiple layers, each using AWS services best suited to its functional needs:

• Content Delivery:
  To support a globally distributed user base and minimize latency, we use Amazon CloudFront to cache and deliver content closer to end-users.
• Application Layer:
  Two service models are employed based on process requirements:
• Stateful or long-running processes are handled using containerized microservices running on AWS Fargate within a serverless compute environment.
• Short-lived, stateless tasks are implemented using AWS Lambda functions for lightweight, rapid execution.
• Integration Layer:
  A key architectural decision was to adopt an event-driven model, allowing us to decouple service producers from consumers. This promotes modularity and flexibility, enabling independent service evolution and improved fault tolerance via asynchronous processing.

For orchestration and message handling, we use:

• AWS Step Functions for service orchestration and complex workflow management.
• AWS API Gateway for secure, scalable API exposure.
• Amazon SNS and SQS to manage asynchronous communication between components
• Data Layer:

The platform handles a wide variety of data types—structured data, images, metadata, and objects. Each type is stored and queried using AWS services optimized for its lifecycle and access pattern. Across the platform, we utilize 6 different data services, ensuring optimal storage, retrieval, and cost-efficiency based on data characteristics.

Outcome

The ambitions of Stellatis to generate new revenues ~€4B by 2026 is being realized by this robust solution.

The platform currently handles an average of 120 million API calls per month, though this volume can vary significantly.

Stellantis frequently launches marketing campaigns targeting connected services across various countries and brands. These initiatives often trigger substantial spikes in traffic—either through increased website visits or higher API consumption. Thanks to the platform’s elastic, cloud-native architecture, these surges are absorbed seamlessly, without degradation in performance or availability.

From an automation perspective, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables us to redeploy a complete environment in under 2 hours, ensuring rapid scalability and environment consistency across the delivery pipeline.

To accelerate time-to-market for new features, we've implemented a robust lifecycle management solution using AWS Step Functions. This orchestrates workflows for activation, deactivation, renewal, and disaster recovery of connected services. This solution was designed, built, and deployed in six months, and in the past month alone, it successfully executed over 400,000 workflows.

Stellantis enters a new phase marked by evolving customer expectations, emerging business models, and fresh opportunities.

The current platform is engineered to meet evolving customer expectations, emerging business models, and fresh opportunities with built-in scalability, robust security, and rapid time-to-market capabilities. This allows to stay closely aligned with business needs and deliver new services quickly and efficiently.

Stellantis roadmap is to deploy this platform across more than 400 markets, covering all Stellantis Group brands. The roadmap includes a launch in North America, followed by Latin America.

Long-term vision includes supporting 34 million connected vehicles and driving €20 billion in revenue by 2030, all powered by this platform and designed to deliver maximum value to Stellantis’ customers.