Cox Automotive is transforming the way the world buys, sells and owns cars with industry-leading digital marketing, software, financial, wholesale and e-commerce solutions for consumers, dealers, manufacturers and the overall automotive ecosystem worldwide. The Cox Automotive family includes Autotrader, Dealer.com, Dealertrack, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, NextGear Capital, vAuto, Xtime and a host of other brands.
“Digital transformation is reshaping the automotive world and our business, and Splunk solutions are helping keep Cox Automotive ahead of the competition,” said Ken Gavranovic, vice president of technology, Cox Automotive. “Having an application or infrastructure service go down during an online auction, for example, is not an option. Splunk ITSI and Splunk Cloud have drastically improved the way Cox Automotive monitors its business critical services. Splunk ITSI delivers a cohesive way to interpret and visualise our machine data – helping us protect and discover new sources of revenue.”
Cox Automotive uses Splunk solutions across all of its brands. For example, Manheim, which provides auction services for specialised dealerships, has a dealer-to-dealer car auction simulcast business that has become increasingly complex. In these auctions, dealers bid on inventory in-person, from desktop computers or mobile devices. There are up to 32 lanes of bidding at each auction, all of which generate real-time machine data from network gear, switches, routers, cameras, Wi-Fi access points and more. Cox Automotive now has visibility into issues that affect the performance and availability of each lane. Like an e-commerce website, every minute the auction service is down or sluggish adds up to tremendous financial losses. Cox reports that Splunk solutions boost the bottom line by reducing auction incidents by more than 90 percent and shortening the mean-time-to-resolution.
While Cox Automotive runs in a hybrid environment, the company’s cloud-based IT infrastructure is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cox Automotive also relies on Splunk Cloud and the Splunk App for AWS to support its digital business across all environments.
“Every organisation in the world is undergoing digital transformation, and organisations such as Cox Automotive are seizing the advantage by turning massive amounts of data into an opportunity to gain a competitive edge,” said Rick Fitz, senior vice president of IT markets, Splunk. “As a machine learning-powered monitoring solution, Splunk ITSI and Splunk Cloud fuel success at organisations by employing analytics to find root cause faster and lower mean-time-to-resolution.”
