Inside Look At General Motor's OnStar SystemInside Look At General Motor's OnStar System

As General Motors prepares to make its OnStar in-car safety and navigation system available outside North America, OnStar CIO Tim Cox faces the most challenging work of his career. In the next two years, Cox's job is to build out OnStar's complex voice and data network to support an expected doubling of its current subscriber base of five million drivers.

OnStar handles about 70,000 daily calls from subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, which drivers make by pressing buttons in their autos to request routing directions, road-side assistance, accident help, and other services. These calls are wirelessly routed to two data centers that interpret requests through voice recognition software, pull subscriber information and related data from various servers, and then pass it on to advisers in one of three U.S. locations. These transactions must happen almost instantly, since time is critical, particularly if there's an injury accident.

The complexity of this process has limited the service to drivers in U.S. and Canada. But late last month, GM announced its first foray into globalizing OnStar, striking a deal with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. to make the system available in 2009 to drivers in China, one of GM's fastest growing markets. That's going to require new data centers, Mandarin-speaking advisers, and the ability to handle millions more subscribers. "This is what keeps me awake at night," said Cox during an interview at GM's Detroit headquarters Tuesday.

That's because OnStar's IT infrastructure will need to support 10 million subscribers by 2010, a hugely ambitious two-year growth plan, considering it's taken the automaker 11 years to grow OnStar to half that number. GM offers two service packages -- $19 a month for basic OnStar and $29 for the deluxe version -- making it a roughly $1.5 billion-a-year business in 2007.

GM's lead in safety telematics is sizeable: it has more than 400 OnStar patents and files for a new one about every six days. It offers OnStar in 95% of its fleet, yet competitors are on its heels. Hughes Networks earlier this month announced a new system that offers both safety features and infotainment features -- including voice commands for MP3 players, similar to Ford's new Sync system -- and it has deals with Chrysler and Mercedes Benz to offer subscriptions starting in 2009. Toyota is believed to be working on a similar service, said OnStar communications manager James Kobus. "We know competitors are coming," Kobus said. OnStar's system is particularly complex because every call for assistance involves both automated data transactions and the involvement of real-life advisers. Ford navigation systems, by comparison, require dealers to download maps into autos via DVDs (drivers must get updated DVDs each year or so if they want maps that include new roads). A driver, while sitting in park position, can type in an address on a touch-pad screen and the system, using GPS, calculates a route and delivers voice turn-by-turn directions after the car is shifted into drive.

With GM OnStar, a driver presses a blue button that passes the request through a data center and then connects the driver with an adviser, who talks to the driver and downloads, over a Verizon Wireless network, a routing package based on the driver's GPS coordinates. An automated voice then delivers the turn-by-turn directions. If the driver deviates from the advised route, the system automatically reconfigures the route. For routing requests alone, OnStar gets about 600,000 calls a month, Kobus said.

If an accident occurs, sensors throughout a car automatically alert OnStar via a wireless cellular network that an impact has occurred, as well as what parts of the auto received impact. OnStar advisers can instantly pass this info on to emergency response personnel to ensure they bring the right equipment. In certain situations -- say an airbag's sensors send an alert that the airbag deployed but OnStar doesn't get a call from the driver, indicating the driver is unable to make one -- advisers will send emergency services to the driver's GPS coordinates.

When calls are made, they come into either a data center in Auburn Hills, Mich., or a new one GM is building out in Plano, Tex. The big brains behind OnStar is GM's Vehicle Communications system, or VehCom, which includes telephony integration and advanced routing logic and ensures calls and accompanying subscriber data get to the right advisers, based on their areas of expertise. "VehCom is really the black box that connects vehicles to back-office IT," Cox explained. The OnStar data centers include databases, servers and other technologies from top tech vendors such as Oracle, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard, Cox said. Advisers who receive the information from these systems might total around 2,500 people on a busy day, located in one of three centers in Michigan, North Carolina, or Canada.

OnStar's Command Center sits within GM's headquarters in the soaring Renaissance Towers in downtown Detroit. Analysts there monitor the IT infrastructure that supports OnStar, and keep track of call patterns and trends on maps of North America and metropolitan regions located on large overhead screens. Bar graphs on an overhead screen track adviser center performance and response times. Satellite weather maps and news feeds in the Command Center help analysts anticipate conditions or events that may affect service or subscribers. If there's a tornado warning in a particular region, for example, OnStar might distribute extra hands-free calling minutes to subscribers in that area. During the San Diego wildfires earlier this year, OnStar provided free additional services to some 240,000 subscribers, Kobus said.

This combination of technology and human interaction might seem unusual in an era of mostly automated telematics, but GM sees it as a differentiator and an important part of the automaker's brand image, Cox said. "We're people you can talk to," he explained.

Cox is considering ways he can simplify the IT infrastructure of OnStar to support its globalization. The system is already mostly voice-over-IP, but he's looking farther down the road at unified communications, combing voice and data in one big pipe. But the reliability and uptime of still-fledgling unified communications technologies will need to improve before GM is comfortable using them for OnStar, he added.

In the area of telematics, GM has tried to differentiate itself with a focus on driver and passenger safety. Ford may have its new voice-controlled Sync for iPod users, but GM's surveys show that consumers consistently rank safety over infotainment, Kobus noted. And as for GM, more infotainment choices in vehicles are coming, he added.

But for the immediate future, the focus at GM's OnStar will be scaling out an IT infrastructure that supports the needs, and helps ensure their safety and well-being, of millions more drivers in the next few years.