ITworld.com - Case Study: BMC paves way for rapid growth at CARFAX, Inc.

Business Need
Increase IT efficiency and productivity through automation, thereby enabling the staff to support rapid growth, including an increasing volume of data, an expanding customer base, and the need for a larger, more complex IT infrastructure

Solutions
BSM solutions from BMC Software help CARFAX automate batch scheduling, gain insight into the impact of batch business process issues, establish and meet customer service level agreements, and monitor servers to detect problems

Results

400 percent reduction in manual processes over a two-year period

Ability to handle dramatic increase in workload without adding headcount

Creation of a scalable batch environment at an extremely low cost

Enhanced ability to meet service level agreements

"I'd estimate that without the BMC solutions, our group would have needed to grow from four people to 20. Now, we've been able to reassign some of the original four to other areas of IT, enabling them to broaden their skills and increase their value to CARFAX."

-- Robert Stinnett
Senior Analyst
CARFAX, Inc.

In Detail:

Car buyers are becoming increasingly savvy, particularly when it comes to selecting used vehicles. Global marketing information firm J. D. Power and Associates estimates that more than half of all used-vehicle buyers use the Internet as part of their shopping process. With millions of visitors each month, www.carfax.com is one of the top five Web sites on which consumers rely for vehicle information. Moreover, thousands of auto dealers, major auto classifieds Web sites, and even banks and finance companies subscribe to CARFAX to increase their effectiveness in pricing, selling, and financing used vehicles.

Today, the CARFAX, Inc. database contains nearly five billion vehicle history records gathered from more than 20,000 data sources, including all departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) in the United States and Canada, as well as many vehicle inspection stations, auto auctions, fleet management and rental agencies, automobile manufacturers, and fire and police departments. CARFAX depends on its IT organization to provide a reliable, high-performance infrastructure to support the huge volume of constantly changing data and meet customer expectations for immediate delivery of vehicle information.

One of the IT organization's keys to success in addressing these business needs is the adoption of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices and the implementation of Business Service Management (BSM) solutions from BMC Software. BMC solutions are helping the IT staff automate cross-platform batch scheduling, assess the impact of batch business processes on service delivery, establish and meet customer service level agreements, and monitor systems to detect resource issues that might disrupt business services.

Enhancing the batch environment

Ensuring the timely completion of batch jobs is critical to meeting the needs of CARFAX customers. Batch jobs keep vehicle histories current by incorporating new information gleaned from multiple sources. Batch jobs are also vital to servicing major customers who submit lists of vehicles for which they need to receive history reports. AutoTrader, for example, offers people who sell cars on its site the option of providing a CARFAX vehicle history report to potential buyers. This leading auto classifieds site submits the requests to CARFAX for the generation and delivery of reports.

"We used to handle this type of task by having people monitor the e-mail inbox and the FTP folder for customer requests," Stinnett recalls. "When a request arrived, they would start a job to create the reports. When the job was completed, they would return the completed reports to the customer. But the number of records and the number of requests kept growing, and we realized that the only way to continue meeting our service level agreements would be to eliminate manual tasks and create a fully automated process."

BMC® CONTROL-M and BMC® Batch Impact Manager have enabled the IT staff to achieve high levels of automation and consistently meet service level agreements (SLAs). BMC CONTROL-M monitors the company's e-mail and FTP systems for customer requests. When a file arrives, BMC CONTROL-M starts the batch job automatically. Once the job is complete, the resulting file is automatically sent to the customer. BMC Batch Impact Manager monitors the progress of each business process, watching for conditions that might cause a failure or degrade performance in a way that would jeopardize SLAs, and also alerting staff when intervention is required.

"We've reduced manual tasks by about 400 percent in the past two years," Stinnett says. "As a result, we've been able to absorb the expanding workload without hiring a lot of people just to watch for files coming in. I'd estimate that without the BMC solutions, our group would have needed to grow by a factor of five. Now, we've been able to reassign staff resources to other areas of IT, enabling them to broaden their skills and increase their value to CARFAX."

Using the BSM solutions, the IT staff has created a scalable batch environment at an extremely low cost. As a result, IT is positioned to support continued growth in batch processing, which is expected to exceed 400 percent in the next three years.

Monitoring performance

With batch scheduling under control, the staff turned to the issue of managing performance on its disparate systems, which include VMS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows platforms. The staff implemented BMC® Performance Manager to monitor its 200 servers to provide insight into utilization rates and variations in workloads, and to become proactive in spotting impending problems and taking corrective action. Inherent integration between BMC Performance Manager and BMC CONTROL-M is helping to increase automation levels by connecting BMC CONTROL-M management-by-exception and alerting capabilities with BMC Performance Manager monitoring capabilities. Proactive notification of scheduling problems helps the staff reduce downtime, further enhancing the ability of the company to meet SLAs.

According to Stinnett, the BMC solutions are enabling the IT staff to monitor the entire infrastructure with a single integrated tool. "We can look into our Oracle databases, our SQL server databases, our Web farm - everything - with the same interface, whether we're working on Linux, VMS, or Windows." Stinnett adds that the solutions are also enhancing capacity planning efforts. The staff can combine data on utilization rates with projected growth rates and predict when additional resources will be required.

The Future - BSM

BMC CONTROL-M, BMC Batch Impact Manager, and BMC Performance Manager have provided a solid foundation for the CARFAX BSM strategy. The company is also implementing the BMC® Atrium™ Configuration Management Database (CMDB), BMC® Topology Discovery, and BMC® Service Impact Manager. The BMC Atrium CMDB will provide a central repository for comprehensive information describing the company's technology assets, IT processes, and people - along with the physical and logical relationships of applications, application servers, database servers, and networking components. CARFAX is using its existing asset management tool to feed IT asset information into the BMC Atrium CMDB, and BMC Topology Discovery will provide logical dependency mapping of components, identifying which IT components comprise enterprise applications.

BMC Service Impact Manager will assist the staff by automatically creating service models that map IT components to the business services they support. Consequently, the staff can quickly determine the impact of events on critical business services and address problems based on business priorities.

"These next steps will help us move closer to our goal of 100 percent automation," Stinnett concludes.