From advanced safety controls to engine management and driver assistance technologies, software now powers a vehicle’s most critical systems. At General Motors, almost 20,000 developers, collaborating across 150,000 repositories with 80+ technological partners, make this possible, accelerating software development and the vehicles that depend on it.
But at this scale and the speed of innovation today, GM’s legacy developer ecosystem couldn't keep pace. Fragmented across more than 40 tools, this complex infrastructure created friction for developers and slowed the entire development process. This sprawl of disconnected tools also made it difficult to enforce consistent security policies, creating unknown risks across the software supply chain.
By consolidating onto GitHub Enterprise Cloud and adopting GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Copilot, GM eliminated bottlenecks, embedded security into daily workflows, and empowered its developers to accelerate delivery of critical work. The results include significant annual savings, build times cut from hours to minutes, and engineers empowered to focus more on meaningful work.
Choosing a modern foundation for the future
To power the next generation of software-driven vehicles, General Motors’ DevOps Tool team knew they needed to overhaul their developer experience, starting by consolidating their fragmented toolchain and choosing a single, modern platform that could support secure access to internal networks, elastic on-demand scaling, and accelerated developer velocity. They evaluated their options, including standardizing on existing tools like Azure DevOps, but ultimately chose GitHub. “Transitioning to GitHub was a straightforward decision," says Mario Parisi, Software Development Manager, General Motors. "Our teams were spread across too many tools and inconsistent workflows. Today, we operate within a unified ecosystem that supports all of our developers.”
Transitioning to GitHub was a straightforward decision. Our teams were spread across too many tools and inconsistent workflows. Today, we operate within a unified ecosystem that supports all of our developers.
With the decision made, the team executed the massive consolidation to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, unifying ~150,000 repositories and nearly 20,000 developers with zero production impact during migration.
"It was like landing planes on a runway while the runway was still being built, and we stuck the landing," says Parisi, who attributes the success to a deep, hands-on partnership with GitHub's Expert Services and R&D teams.
With the foundational challenges solved, GM could shift its focus from managing infrastructure complexity to delivering new features.
A new threshold for developer velocity
GitHub Enterprise
