Uwe Hollatz

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IT Drives Volkswagen's Autostadt IT is central to the company's customer-centric automotive theme park Julia King Today’s Top Stories or Other Web Site Management Stories

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August 11, 2003 (Computerworld) -- In 1999, Volkswagen AG's top executives directed Chief Technology Officer Claus Hohmann and his IT team to design and build an IT infrastructure that would flawlessly support a unique and highly customer-centric automotive theme park. The idea was to create a spectacular and ever-changing marketing venue where visitors could experience state-of-the-art automotive technology. Buyers would pick up their new cars from one of the park's two gleaming 20-story, fully automated glass-and-steel towers.

The Autostadt, or "car city," which is near Wolfsburg, Germany, celebrates its third birthday this month and has attracted more than 6 million visitors. Some 6,000 per day have toured its car museum and six brand pavilions, which offer a variety of interactive and computerized exhibits and Web-based point-of-information (POI) terminals. They've dined in the park's restaurants and bars and shopped in its stores, paying for goods and services with computerized stored-value cards issued upon arrival. Perhaps most important, 349,000 of Autostadt's visitors have taken delivery of new cars. This is the theme park's key success indicator, since its ultimate goal is to wow every person who comes through Autostadt to the point of buying a new car.

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1. IT drives Volkswagen's Autostadt - Computerworld www.computerworld.com/developm - [Cached]

Published on: 8/11/2003 Last Visited: 8/13/2003 One of the biggest integration challenges is negotiating the IAS's sophisticated security mechanisms "to pull all of the information I need to publish to the right people," says Vignette developer Uwe Hollatz. To get production manufacturing information from Volkswagen's mainframe system, for example, the Autostadt uses RVS, a system to share files to authenticated users over a remote directory.

"The data structure of these files is known, so I can write a filter in TCL [Tool Command Language] to parse the files and store the results in our Oracle database. From this database, I have all the possibilities to publish the data to the channels that are needed because the Vignette system uses this database as the content database for its delivery applications," Hollatz says.

The Autostadt's various channels include two completely new Web sites, the POI terminals scattered throughout the park and an intranet.

The ability to separate content and format means that new Web pages can be produced quickly and easily, with a minimum of specialist skills. This in turn allows for more content contributors, which Hohmann notes is critical to Autostadt's mission of providing an ever-changing venue to Autostadt's physical and digital visitors.

Since its opening, Autostadt has migrated to Vignette V6 Content Suite, which uses a newer TCL interpreter and has several new and improved functions, including new services to build reports and the ability to dock onto a servlet engine such as Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat or BEA's WebLogic to deliver Java applications, according to Hollatz.