Software Product Engineering
In order to become a software company, organizations will need to embrace what we call Software Product Engineering (SPE). SPE is a suite of software development capabilities, from digital product development to embedded software to underpinning platforms that enable digital product portfolios to scale to accompanying value-added digital services. All are needed to transition from an engineering company with some software to a software company. Combining this suite of capabilities across the organization helps set engineering teams up to continuously innovate in software, creating relevant products in a modern competitive landscape. At Capgemini, we offer engineering teams the most comprehensive software development capabilities, partnering to support them along their software product transformation journey.
In this document, we discuss four main areas of software transformation:
Digital Product Software, which powers smart products, platforms, and mobile applications.
Embedded Software, which controls the physical product.
Industry Platform Software the foundation on which digital products are built, hosted, and scaled.
Experience Engineering an emerging area that uses 3D and VR to deliver new customer experiences.
First, let’s consider an example to illustrate why engineering companies need to combine a wide variety of software capabilities to create their next generation of products. A next-generation car will have some form of ‘assisted driving.’ That will require autopilot software that can analyze its surroundings and make decisions about how the car will respond – mixing AI systems with rules-based software wrapped in millions of lines of code that can run on a car operating system. That software will need to deliver instructions to control systems on brakes, steering, etc., with their own ECUs (electronic control units). Each will need its own embedded software – software on the device itself.
But carmakers won’t want to stand still – they want to have their eye on the next product differentiation. That could be windscreens with augmented reality driving instructions – such as overlaying lane markings during night driving or alerting to upcoming gas stations.
Passenger windows could display information about the local area, or interactive games based on the surroundings. These 3D experiences require a new type of software and skills.
Most importantly, these companies need to build platforms to innovate. The cars of the future require operating systems on which the software can run. They need backend systems where new products (like improvements to assisted driving or new AR services) can be tested, developed, and pushed onto the device when requested. They require a product management system to track products and gather data. And they need standards, frameworks, and reusable code to make innovation faster and ensure everyone works seamlessly together. And, of course, they require the people and culture that allows them to use these systems to continually create new software innovations.
Embedded Software Engineering
Digital Product Software
Industry Platform Software
Experience Engineering
Smart, scalable software solutions for a new generation of intelligent products
Digital product software is at the heart of today's most innovative products and platforms. It transforms traditional products into intelligent, connected experiences - from self-driving software that powers autonomous vehicles to intelligent systems in medical devices that monitor health and provide personalized advice. Even a manual thermostat can be transformed into a smart, energy-saving device. Additionally, it encompasses purely digital platforms such as mobile apps, SaaS solutions, and on-demand service platforms. Our Digital Product Software practice excels in creating these diverse digital solutions, whether standalone software products or integrated systems that interact seamlessly with hardware.
This software creates new ways for enterprises to deliver personalized experiences to customers. It provides unprecedented data on customers and product performance in the real world to support future product development. It unlocks new as-a-service billing models. All of which increasingly define revenue generation.
At Capgemini, we guide companies through this process, partnering with them to co-create digital software that is a product in itself - whether an app, a SaaS platform, or a next-generation digital tool. In all cases, we focus on user experience, and ensuring that solutions are designed for deployment and rapid scale-up within a digital ecosystem.
We work with organizations in a variety of ways, from providing access to experts to support product development, through to a full build-operate-transfer service, where we take the software to a fully operational and scalable point, ready to hand over. These services are supported by our accelerators, which include new capabilities in generative AI to streamline code generation, optimization and testing for faster time-to-market, and our product testing services that guarantee quality and regulatory compliance.
For companies undergoing digital transformation, Digital Product Software accelerates the roadmap of product development, enhances product quality, and ensures the ability to scale. It includes user-focused design, development strategy, building a robust software development environment with DevSecOps workflows, security by design, testing with code quality analysis, test case generation, test automation, and industry-specific compliance.
A leading travel booking platform faced challenges in its main digital product of outdated data architecture, stalled payment transactions, and talent shortages stifling its growth. Capgemini provided an extended engineering team that optimized data pipelines and processes to extract business insights from data and implemented machine learning to detect stalled payments. Capgemini ensured compliance with international privacy regulations, driving secure scalability and operational efficiency.
We worked with a major media company to upgrade its software platforms to reduce costs and generate value. Our teams enhanced its fast-growing Games offering, ensuring a consistent user experience across all games and backend processes to accelerate new feature development. We created a user verification system to allow single sign-on across its products, speeding the time to value of new acquisitions. We upgraded print distribution databases to optimize distribution and took over ownership of their international subscriptions platform, freeing up time to focus on innovating in domestic markets.
A large computing company faced challenges managing support for current and legacy products. Capgemini implemented AI-driven triage of issues, process improvements, and a shared service model that supported cross-product training, leading to over 20% performance gains, 10% annual cost savings, and improved customer satisfaction.
An energy resource company needed help to create a digital strategy that would enable it to routinely develop smart digital products in areas like construction, operations, and emissions reduction. This was further hampered by the challenges of attracting digital talent to its sector. Capgemini reviewed legacy digital assets and developed a migration strategy towards a next-generation digital portfolio while setting up processes, best practices, IT architectures, and talent management systems to ensure a cohesive approach to future innovation. This decreased time-to-market for new products and reduced the costs and time requirements to sustain legacy ones.
Advanced capabilities and enhanced safety, seamlessly integrated into the device
Embedded software lives on and interacts with the device. It is different from digital product software in that is integrated into the hardware and enables devices to perform specific functions or control physical components, often in real-time. It can perform safety-critical functions on the device without connectivity and respond to instructions from product software to control the device in useful ways. This software drives cars, controls railway signals, and precisely focuses ionizing radiation beams on tumors. If digital product software is the management team, embedded software is the people on the ground who turn the vision into reality.
This type of software is crucial in industries like automotive, aerospace, defense, and medical devices, where it powers everything from simple sensors to complex vehicle control units.
As products become more functional and software-driven, embedded software allows the digital world to take precise control of increasingly mechanically versatile devices, allowing companies to create smarter, more connected products with enhanced functionality and safety. Once a commodity that executed simple instructions on the device, embedded software is now a strategic asset for delivering new on-device experiences.
Linked to this is silicon engineering - the design, development, and testing of microchips and integrated circuits (ICs) on which the embedded software runs. This is foundational to all modern electronics.
Embedded software and silicon engineering require meticulous design for optimal user experiences, quality, and seamless integration.
Embedded software is critical to defining future products, but industrial companies face challenges. They want to design embedded software architectures that are fit for complex future products, like self-driving cars, and can scale across product portfolios. But they also need to work with legacy embedded software, which was often designed in silos to perform a single task, such as braking.
We can help businesses navigate these challenges. Our engineers can help design the embedded software itself, considering functionality and adaptation needs for different products and geographies, without compromising the ability to integrate and scale. In doing so, we can cover coding, chip selection (including flexible and cost-effective ‘chiplet’ architectures), and integrated circuit design.
For companies needing to rationalize and modernize their existing embedded software, we offer refactoring and legacy systems migration, with testing throughout the process.
We can also help set up a software house for innovation and renovation, which includes leveraging generative AI to streamline embedded software production processes.
At the most strategic level, we help companies create the core of their future products. We draw on our specialist labs and academic partnerships to create innovative architectures for next-generation embedded software. Such architectures are used to design the systems and processes that ensure embedded software is scalable and interoperable across multiple products that are running ever more complex, autonomous digital product software.
A defense manufacturing client sought to enhance their combat aircraft's legacy voice-based communication systems with modern connectivity solutions. Capgemini introduced 4G/5G capabilities, enabling seamless data transmission and communication with diverse entities, like other combat aircraft, carriers, command centers, and allies. Using agile software development methodologies and adhering to stringent cybersecurity needs, Capgemini delivered new interoperable features, improving aircraft communication precision and streamlining future upgrades.
A global rail manufacturer encountered challenges in scaling its products and sought to embark on a software-driven transformation journey to position itself for future success. Capgemini conducted an extensive cross-industry analysis to understand optimal product transformation opportunities and delivered business and technical plans to move them to a software-driven company. We are currently developing an embedded software platform to support this transition.
A commercial plane manufacturer upgraded their in-seat power system hardware from USB B to USB C, requiring rapid verification of the associated embedded software. Capgemini provided an offshore team to manage software verification, testing, and certification, reducing software development lifecycle time by 20%. This allowed the next-gen system to be launched quickly and without problems for customers.
A leading semiconductor manufacturer needed maintenance and enhancement support for existing modem chipsets to free up time to work on new products. Capgemini has supported the company for over ten years, scaling to 500+ engineers to become its extended engineering arm and taking full ownership of modem and platform software build, integration, verification, and technical support. This partnership has supported five generations of chipsets, accelerating time-to-market and helping the client secure OEM contracts, all while delivering cost-benefits up to 40%, through improved operational efficiency.
Powering software-driven growth
Platforms are the linchpin of software-driven transformation, offering an efficient way to manage large fleets of digital products at scale.
A software platform is the foundational environment where software applications run. Firstly, a platform will include an operating system specifically designed to run on a particular device (think iOS or Android, but tailored for a car or medical device) where customer software applications can run (e.g. assisted driving or heart rate tracking). This is the foundational enabler of the software-defined product.
Secondly, it will include a product management environment hosted on a private or cloud server. This will track and manage devices, collect data, spot issues, push updates over-the-air, perform analytics, present insights, and manage access (eg. via medical portals or patient apps).
Sitting behind this are the digital environments that build and test new products. This provides a virtual space to innovate digitally and collaboratively, defining a standard and providing reusable code (eg. security, connectivity, and computer vision). It makes innovation faster by building on past successes and ensuring all digital products – product software, apps, embedded – speak the same language and seamlessly integrate. Stellantis, for example, has developed three core software platforms – for the car itself, the cockpit, and safety-critical systems – that are used across all its car brands and models.
For companies undergoing digital transformation, software platforms are crucial. They provide scalable, flexible, and standardized environments that significantly speed up the development and deployment of new software solutions and the upgrading of legacy products. Building a digital product ecosystem product-by-product is a time-consuming process, but a platform provides the foundation for quickly upgrading existing products and launching new ones.
In Life Sciences, companies must launch new medical devices that integrate into digital clinical workflows while meeting evolving privacy, security, and safety regulations. In automotive, there's a push for customizable, secure, and upgradeable vehicle features, along with seamless integration of services from multiple partners to enhance applications for drivers.
In both cases, companies require additional services to consistently and efficiently build digital products by reusing standard components like privacy and communication protocols. And few can do all of this independently, so there’s a need for standardized approaches that enable sourcing from multiple hardware partners, ensuring component compatibility.At Capgemini, we bring extensive expertise in software architecture, software development, and verification and validation capabilities to help develop platform services that future-proof organizations.
Our capabilities are designed around sectors to ensure platforms meet different industry and regulatory needs.
Our Industry Software Platform for Automotive offers end-to-end services tailored to the functional domains and systems of software-defined vehicles. These include dedicated capabilities for developing and testing software for ADAS and in-car mobility experiences, ensuring systems integrate with back-end systems via in-car connectivity.Our Industry Software Platform for Life Sciences provides a modular platform for Digital Health. It allows life sciences companies to leverage reusable components from our comprehensive library, maximizing interoperability with partner applications and even with new emerging technologies, like VR simulations for medical training.
In all cases, our Generative AI-enabled software development, testing, and maintenance help speed up long and complicated development processes.
In addition, we provide expert guidance and consultancy to help our clients adapt their culture, processes, and tools, ensuring that these platform capabilities are maximized and our clients accelerate their journey to becoming software-driven organizations.
Working with Capgemini, OpMobility, an automotive manufacturer, grew Op’n Soft, an aentity dedicated to the development of software for its own products and services. By partnering with Capgemini, the company gained access to the tools, methods, and business skills essential to industrialize the growth of the Op’n Soft software development center while boosting the skills of the teams using it worldwide.
In 2020, Phonak, a hearing aid company - part of Sonova, wanted to launch an app for children with hearing loss, supporting them and their parents to manage their hearing aid settings and connect to hearing professionals. Capgemini helped develop the app and accompanying medical device software and ensure integration between the two while adhering to the challenges of a regulated medical environment. Thousands of children now use the app, which has a 4-star rating and even won a hearing technology award.
Capgemini partnered with a pharmaceutical client to centralize clinical trial monitoring and implement predictive risk analysis. By consolidating siloed data and introducing a real-time platform, the solution reduced decision-making time from months to days. The initiative also laid the groundwork for future AI/ML optimizations. It has been adopted across the organization to become one of the world’s largest, near real-time clinical trial platforms, improving efficiency and the speed of commercialization for new drugs.
A global automotive OEM partnered with Capgemini to develop its digital cockpit software platform, which would be the foundation for new multi-display infotainment and driver information systems. Using new software architectures combining AUTOSAR, Linux, and containerization, Capgemini developed a scalable, customizable environment that included easy software reutilization, over-the-air updates, and remote configuration. The project delivered significant cost reductions in SW development and maintenance and created new revenue streams from third-party applications.
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Creating new user experiences and revenue opportunities with real-time 3D
The art of the possible isn’t just about imagining—it’s about delivering today. As technology advances, companies must go beyond what’s possible now to stay ahead. Experience Engineering is the next generation of software product development, transforming physical assets into interactive digital experiences that redefine how we design, validate, and innovate.
In a world where consumers demand hyper-personalized, seamless engagement, integrating real-time 3D, VR, and AR is the key to differentiation. Many companies are already using sophisticated data models of their products. The convergence of advanced real-time 3D technology is paving the way for solutions to be more powerful, interactive assets, enabling realistic digital twins, immersive simulations, virtual showrooms, and beyond.
This is more than a technological upgrade—it’s a strategic next-generation approach that fuels continuous innovation and competitive advantage. By integrating immersive experiences into your software stack, your organization leads with products that are as visionary as they are viable.
At Capgemini Engineering, we combine engineering, data, and design expertise with cutting-edge real-time 3D technology to deliver next-level digital experiences. With 100+ large-scale implementations across industries, we’re the trusted partner to unlock new revenue streams, optimize processes, and accelerate innovation.
The future isn’t just imagined—it’s engineered.
Leverage real-time 3D to digitally represent real-world environments to monitor and forecast operational aspects of assets, people, and processes. Operational Twin enables users to have key information delivered to make operational decisions that can improve efficiency, increase situational awareness, reduce operational costs, and ultimately deliver significant value to the business.
Capgemini developed a VR application for Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, allowing pediatric surgeons to visualize and manipulate 3D models of patients’ hearts for surgery planning. This tool enhances collaboration among medical teams, reduces surgery risks, and replaces manual CT scan simulations with interactive, hands-on planning, providing deeper insights into complex heart procedures.
HMI and Conversation Twin provide high-performance real-time 3D solutions for embedded systems, enhancing user experiences in resource-constrained environments like automotive HMIs and entertainment devices. We partnered with Mercedes-Benz to integrate 3D game engine technology into their OS, powering MBUX Surround Navigation for real-time navigation and the MBUX Virtual Assistant for AI-driven voice control. By pushing the boundaries of real-time 3D in embedded environments, we help brands redefine user interactions with seamless digital experiences.
First-in-class, multi-platform digital twins of products. 3D Configurator and Commerce has transformed the consumer products industry and experiences for customers by delivering rapid, real-time, and collaborative product design, marketing, and sales experiences. This next-gneration technology has allowed customers to explore products, learn about features, and engage with interactive tutorials—all from home. This solution has not just enhanced product understanding, but it has also completely transformed the online shopping experience, mimicking expert-guided showroom presentations.
