RALEIGH, N.C. -

Cox Automotive sees all kinds of customers pouring into its online portals — from dealers in the auction lanes to potential buyers considering a vehicle purchase.

Open source technology solutions provider Red Hat highlighted on Tuesday how Cox Automotive deployed three major tools — 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, officials said Cox Automotive greatly decrease its production development time and has achieved “millions” in savings.

As the Internet has emerged as the way for user to research vehicles, Red Hat detailed Cox Automotive has digitized and moved its major existing brands online, making it easy to use familiar companies such as Autotrader, Manheim and Kelley Blue Book. However, the companies acknowledged that 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 can enable 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 can provide 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.

“Red Hat CloudForms is a Swiss Army knife,” said Jason Cornell, manager of cloud and infrastructure automation at Cox Automotive. “You can do many different things in the IT environment with it — including insights and intelligence on our infrastructure.

“We analyzed the numbers to see what resources we deployed and how much time it took, and we realized that with the Red Hat solution, we saved almost 10 years of time spent waiting for resources to be delivered and almost $5 million in soft savings since 2014,” Cornell continued.

Beyond those dollar figures Cox Automotive is using Red Hat Insights, Red Hat's operations analytics service, to proactively manage its IT environment. Red Hat Insights can bring 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.

“With Red Hat Insights, we can resolve critical issues before they occur,” Cornell said. “We no longer have to look at individual systems because we have one tool that gives us much more comprehensive and actionable information on our infrastructure.

“It’s important to have a company like Red Hat that’s working toward the same goals we are, that understands our business and what we’re trying to accomplish, and understands our infrastructure and our businesses,” he continued.

“As the market continues to change and new technologies are released, we’ll continue to change as well, and we expect Red Hat to be an important partner to help us on that journey,” Cornell went on to say.

Red Hat vice president of management Joe Fitzgerald described what it’s like to have a customer such as Cox Automotive.

“Cox Automotive is a fantastic example of a company that has embraced digital transformation to better meet its customers’ needs,” Fitzgerald said. “With this digital transformation comes new management challenges for cloud infrastructure, and user expectations for new self service capabilities.

“With its Red Hat CloudForms-based solution, I’m thrilled that Cox Automotive can not only effectively manage this hybrid cloud infrastructure, but that they have also experienced compelling ROI not only in terms of costs, but also significantly accelerated production development times,” Fitzgerald added.