Chinese auto company SAIC announced on February 22 that it will hold a developer conference in April to invite car users and developers to build a smart car ecosystem on the SOA platform.

SOA is short for Service-Oriented Architecture, which SAIC says is the software foundation for "software-defined cars.

SOA, a core approach to software design that has matured in the Internet, is being implemented by SAIC for the first time in a vehicle product.

According to SAIC, it is much more difficult to introduce SOA platform into automotive products than cell phones and computers, and it is very meaningful to open up the collaboration between tens of thousands of automotive parts and applications.

Through the SOA platform, users, car manufacturers and developers will be able to work together to create a smart car ecology with user experience at its core, SAIC said.

In this ecology, in addition to producing cars, auto companies will also develop and iterate software to meet users' diverse car needs.

Users can purchase cars and software out of their own needs, set up different functions of car products through software and enjoy subscription-based services.

Third-party developers can incorporate Internet resources into the ecology and develop software for diverse application scenarios, and the cooperation of multiple parties on the SOA platform will help the continuous evolution of software cars.

The SOA platform can call on nearly 1,000 hardware in the car to provide a huge number of application scenarios, bringing a huge number of applications like smartphones, SAIC said.

SAIC's NEV sales reach 58,000 units in January, up 446.6 percent YoY