Intelligent and autonomous vehicles are, by any measure, complex distributed systems that challenge engineers to find new and inventive ways of combining components into a system that is capable of analysing and reacting to complex environmental situations - all, of course, reliably and in real-time. However, this challenge is not unique since the same can be said of modern avionics systems, medical scanners, civil infrastructure control systems and robotics. And at the core of this challenge is connectivity. This session will describe how the OMG ‘Data Distribution Service’ (DDS) standard enables data-centric connectivity within distributed high-performance systems. We will explore how DDS works ‘under the hood’, how it’s technical attributes translate into practical benefits (such as reliability, scalability and real-time performance) and where users should start when embarking on a DDS path. Along the way we will answer questions such as ‘what is data-centricity?’ and ‘why does DDS map so well to the autonomy challenge?’