Advancing innovation for more than 100 years, Audi prides itself on making fun, sporty vehicles that combine high build quality and progressive design. The company’s passion for innovation shows up in everything from the development of the Audi e-tron electric cars to its continued progress in autonomous driving.
Audi extends its use of advanced technologies to innovation on the factory floor. A few years ago, the company launched its Edge Cloud 4 Production (EC4P) platform to transform factory automation and make employees’ work easier, powering worker support systems to guide them through the vehicle part installation process.
The Audi team recognized that this software-defined platform could substantially reduce expenses. By implementing a virtual programmable logic controller, and merging IT with operational technology (OT), Audi planned to eliminate the existing decentralized control system that used numerous costly, high-maintenance industrial PCs.
Because the system is software-defined, the development team would be free to rapidly deploy new applications, reconfigure production lines, and scale resources—without the major IT overhauls required by a hardware-based infrastructure.
“The use of virtual programmable logic controllers (vPLCs) in the body shop was an important productivity leap in our 360-factory strategy for efficient and data-driven manufacturing,” says Gerd Walker, Audi board member for production.
Building the EC4P on a Private Cloud Platform
For EC4P to work, Audi needed to create a “golden image” of each PC, hosted in the data center and rolled out to wherever needed. Rather than dozens of independent PCs, there is one governing software linking the entire process. EC4P also needs scalable, low latency storage, where compute is disaggregated, with the capacity to add new, virtualized PCs when needed. Importantly, if it is to protect mission-critical workloads against data loss, Audi needed a solution that could endure a site level failure.
The Audi team built its new platform on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)—cloud infrastructure from Broadcom that combines private cloud performance and security with public cloud agility and scale. “VMware Cloud Foundation underpins our EC4P project, virtualizing our production environment with an on-premises infrastructure platform,” explains Sven Mueller, project lead for the Edge Cloud 4 Production, Audi.
VMware vSAN, a capability of VCF, was central, providing flexible deployment options. VMware vSAN enables Audi to optimize infrastructure for performance, resiliency and cost. Audi deployed vSAN Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) and stretched vSAN storage clusters in their manufacturing facility based on the data and application availability requirements. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) workloads, among others, run on two discrete HCI clusters, hosting users' desktops in two different data centers. Stretched vSAN storage clusters mounted on these HCI based VDI clusters host manufacturing state information, allowing for Audi manufacturing to significantly reduce downtime—from days to minutes—in the event of a failure in one of the two data centers.
“The engineering team has significantly sped up the delivery of the required features, particularly the synchronous storage for multiple VCF instances. This agility has allowed us to implement the solution much faster than anticipated, providing immediate benefits to our operations,” says Christopher Kolb, domain architect for the EC4P, Audi.
“The implementation of vSAN as a synchronously replicated storage solution for multiple VCF instances in production has been seamless. This has greatly enhanced our infrastructure's reliability and performance,” Kolb says.
After a year of testing EC4P, Audi put it into production at the company’s Böllinger Höfe plant in Germany, which manufactures multiple vehicle models, including Audi’s electric e-tron GT cars, and controls worker support systems across 36 production cycles on the e-tron GT assembly line. “We want to bring the local cloud for production to all plants,” says Walker.
Reducing Costs, Enhancing Efficiency, and Improving Resilience
The new platform has helped Audi achieve its goals of ramping down capital expenditures. “Thanks to our collaboration with Broadcom and the use of VMware Cloud Foundation, we were able to massively reduce the number of industrial PCs in our production environment and shift the workloads to our EC4P platform,” says Kolb.
Beyond immediate capital expense savings, the Audi team anticipates cutting spend further by shrinking its hardware footprint. Additionally, the team is enhancing the efficiency of IT. With the new platform, Audi is automating and centralizing multiple management tasks, which will save time and enable team members to focus on other, more strategic work.
Automation and centralization also help strengthen resilience. The Audi team can automatically patch systems more easily and capture immutable system snapshots. In the event of an attack, breach, or other unexpected event, the team can roll back systems to the last known good state and minimize production line disruptions. “Our systems are robust and can handle any unexpected issues without disruption,” says Kolb.
Earning the Broadcom Cloud Innovator Award
The Audi team’s use of a private cloud platform to bring smart manufacturing to the factory floor earned them the Broadcom Cloud Innovator Award for 2025. Broadcom innovators are visionary customers that embrace technology solutions to maximize benefits across their organizations.
Mueller appreciates how VMware Cloud Foundation is helping Audi set new standards for precision, customization and environmental impact by using less hardware and fewer manual operations. “The collaboration between Audi and Broadcom is core to building a manufacturing future that is more efficient, cost-effective, and secure,” says Mueller.
“Winning the Cloud Innovator Award is a great honor to us and just the icing on the cake when it comes to the successful partnership of Audi and Broadcom,” says Kolb.
Exploring the Road Ahead with New Capabilities and Greater Business Agility
With the VMware-based EC4P platform now in production, the Audi team can dig deeper into VCF capabilities to automate additional factory work. “We are still in the process of developing new features and enhancements for our product. This includes the enablement of VCF 9 and the integration of our real-time workloads,” says Kolb.
As it moves forward, the Audi team will explore using VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities included in the operations and automation suite to drive even greater IT management efficiency. The team aims to simplify delivery of infrastructure and applications across multiple clouds, continuously optimize performance, quickly identify possible problems and streamline security tasks.
Now the Audi team also has the agility to explore new applications and use cases without large-scale IT deployment projects. For example, the team is considering using the platform for AI-driven production, IoT applications, data analytics, and computer vision applications. “With VCF, we have the flexibility to scale the platform to a broader spectrum of use cases in the future,” says Kolb.
In the near term, the Audi team plans to roll out its platform at larger production facilities. By building EC4P on VCF, Audi can scale up factory automation for those larger plants rapidly. Looking farther down the road, the Audi team looks forward to seeing what the partnership with Broadcom will continue to deliver. “My message to Broadcom is to just keep going,” says Kolb. “Keep progressing, innovating, and helping us improve the future of production at Audi.”