Jaguar Land Rover has been awarded 'Business Project of the Year' for its Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) and High Performance Computing (HPC) programme at the UK IT Industry Awards, held by the British Computer Society (BCS), The Chartered Institute for IT.

The project was launched in August 2010 in response to JLR's aggressive growth plans which will see the UK's leading automotive employer deliver 40 significant product actions over the next five years, thanks to a £1.5 billion a year investment. To support the company's ambitious expansion programme significant investment in people, technology, processes and facilities was required. The JLR IT team took this opportunity to redesign a CAE/HPC environment to provide high performance technologies that would enable greater use of virtual simulation in vehicle development.

The project, which was completed in July 2011, has already delivered considerable business efficiencies and environmental improvements, providing improved capacity and network capability, increased storage, and improved performance to JLR users. The upgraded system has increased the use of virtual simulation delivering tangible benefits in the vehicle production process from reduced job turnaround time and improved vehicle safety and quality, to improved environmental efficiency due to the need for fewer physical prototypes and test facilities. Beyond this, the project will have long lasting effects for the business having provided a core IT environment for JLR product development.

Peter Gilbert, Senior Business Relationship Manager, Product Development said: "We are delighted to have won this award for driving forward JLR's growth plans with the CAE/HPC project. The project has demonstrated the critical role IT can play in enabling the business to deliver on its ambitious vehicle product plan. The success of the project wouldn't have been possible without support from some of our key IT suppliers including HP, Isilon and Platform Computing who supplied servers, storage and scheduling software. "