Elon Musk announced that Tesla is making major changes to its internal corporate operating system (OS), and that the software team will focus on securing customer accounts next with two-factor authorization.
While most automakers use commonly known enterprise software from third parties like SAP, Tesla instead decided to build its own from scratch.
Tesla’s longtime chief information officer Jay Vijayan, who quietly left in January 2016, is credited for leading the development of the system, which Tesla calls “Warp.”
Vijayan discussed what pushed them to develop their “Warp” system in-house during an interview with CIO Insight in 2014:
Elon’s vision is to build a vertically integrated organization where information flow happens seamlessly across departments and where we have a closed feedback loop to our customers. By doing this, we can provide the best possible product, service, and overall experience to our customers in the fastest way possible, while also operating efficiently as a business.
To bring this vision to life, we had to have simple and central business operations software that could connect all departments and enable information flow seamlessly across departments. Again, we couldn’t find one software program in the market that satisfied this need.
Elon Musk has since pushed his companies to develop even more new enterprise engineering systems to be used across his multiple companies.
For example, we previously reported on Tesla and SpaceX sharing some custom software platform developed for materials research.
Now Musk says that Tesla is making some “foundational upgrades to its core Tesla corporate OS”:
Fair point. Coming soon. We’re making foundational upgrades to the core Tesla corporate OS. 2FA right after that.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2019
Sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla’s custom OS has been outdated in some aspects, despite being useful for its integration throughout the different divisions.
Musk has been emphasizing that Tesla is focusing on software across all its platforms and not only in its cars.
He wrote on Twitter last night:
Connected, autonomous cars require great software. Advanced factories also require great software. The car industry is not very good at software.
After updating its corporate OS, the CEO says that the software team will focus on deploying two-factor authorization in order to secure customer accounts.
Tesla has been increasingly working on securing its vehicles, including with cryptographic validation of firmware updates.
With the advent of self-driving vehicles, Musk said that preventing a “fleet-wide hack” is Tesla’s top security priority.
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