Case Study: General Motors achieves China data-residency compliance and rapid global rollout with VMware Tanzu

How GM's IT footprint went from zero to China in a year

General Motors, for which China accounts for about 40% of global sales, faced a sudden regulatory crisis when a late-2017 Chinese law required all data originating in China to remain in-country by the end of 2018. GM had outsourced key infotainment services to a provider with no China footprint, leaving the company with just over a year—and realistically about four months of development time once testing and infrastructure needs were considered—to rebuild the application and underlying platform inside China.

GM went all-in on Pivotal/VMware Tanzu technologies, using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud microservices, Pivotal Platform and Marketplace services, and Concourse pipelines to automate deployment. Working with joint-venture partner SAIC, GM stood up a local, redundant, scalable environment, transferred operational knowledge to onsite staff, and seamlessly switched testing from North America to China with no downtime. The team met the regulatory deadline, delivered a production-ready system, and scaled the solution to multiple regions—now supporting hundreds of apps and roughly 3,000 app instances worldwide.

General Motors

Zac Grantham

Senior Development Manager