Cox Automotive leads digital transformation with Red Hat-based solution

Cox Automotive, a leader in vehicle remarketing services and digital marketing solutions for car dealers and consumers, has deployed Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to scale its internal cloud infrastructure to meet the increasing requests from its customer base. Since moving to Red Hat CloudForms, Cox Automotive greatly decrease its production development time and has achieved millions in savings.

 

As the internet has emerged as the way for consumers to research and purchase cars, Cox Automotive has digitised and moved its major existing brands online, making it easy to use familiar companies like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book to buy and sell a car. The online automotive marketplace continues to expand, as does Cox Automotive's volume of requests for customer applications and tools – more than two thirds of car buyers in the United States use a Cox Automotive company at some point in their car buying process. Cox Automotive companies need to quickly deliver new web-based products in order to maintain its leadership positions, but the increased traffic and requests for IT service were slowing deployment and service times.

 

Building on a continuing relationship with Red Hat that dates from 2005, Cox Automotive chose Red Hat CloudForms to manage its cloud infrastructure and deliver self-service access to IT resources for its portfolio of more than 25 brands. With Red Hat CloudForms' single unified interface, workers from all areas of the company serving various customer groups can view a shared IT environment, enabling easy access to self-service offerings for developers, enterprise architects and QA specialists. Red Hat CloudForms enables various Cox Automotive business units to work together more cohesively and deliver new products to consumers faster, cutting a nearly three-week wait time for new product development and testing down to under twenty minutes.

 

The Red Hat CloudForms dashboard also provides cross-system visibility and granular metrics, enabling the Cox Automotive teams to better use the capacity in its environment. Cox Automotive has also built an Apache Hadoop Infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the foundation of its big data initiative, also using Red Hat Gluster Storage, an open software-defined file storage system, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as part of its big data strategy. Presenting more data in one location enables Cox Automotive to see the interactions between customers and its various websites, creating a more customized shopping experience for users.

 

Additionally, Cox Automotive is using Red Hat Insights, Red Hat's operations analytics service, to proactively manage its IT environment. Red Hat Insights brings Red Hat's expertise supporting hundreds of thousands of customers and provides real-time risk assessments related to critical areas of IT infrastructure. With Red Hat Insights, Cox Automotive can identify specific, verified deployment issues and receive guidance to help resolve risks related to system stability, performance and security – enabling them to avoid disruption and optimize performance of their IT operations.