CUSTOMER SUCCESS: CARFAX Reduces Manual Tasks by 70 Percent with BMC Software, Boosting ROI and Expediting Customer ServiceBMC’s Business Service Management platform helps CARFAX handle dramatic increase in customer requests while continuing to provide quality serviceHOUSTON, May 21, 2009 – All businesses rely on data but, for some, data is also their product. At CARFAX, managing a huge volume of constantly changing data requires a reliable, high-performance IT infrastructure. Customers expect the company’s online vehicle history reports to be delivered immediately, so CARFAX turned to Business Service Management (BSM) solutions from BMC Software [NYSE: BMC].
With the implementation of BSM solutions, CARFAX’s IT organization adopted IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) best practices and improved its ability to align IT services with business needs. BMC solutions help CARFAX’s 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. Together, these capabilities have increased IT efficiency and productivity and enabled CARFAX to support rapid data and customer growth alongside an increasingly complex IT infrastructure.
“By giving us a clear understanding of the link between business and IT, BSM solutions from BMC challenged us to look at IT differently and helped transform the way our IT organization operates,” said Robert Stinnett, senior analyst, CARFAX, Inc. “We now view our technology assets through the lens of business priorities and how we can support critical business services. The IT staff is no longer in the business of maintaining servers; we’re in the business of delivering information to our customers.”
CARFAX’s database contains nearly seven billion vehicle history records gathered from more than 23,000 data sources. To keep pace with the increasing number of records and requests, CARFAX runs thousands of batch jobs per day with nearly 60 percent tied to Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In order to successfully meet its SLAs, CARFAX implemented BMC CONTROL-M, a solution that addresses the complexities of the growing batch environment with Workload Lifecycle Management, providing end-to-end change and version control across multiple environments and platforms.
Using BMC CONTROL-M and BMC Batch Impact Manager together, CARFAX has eliminated manual tasks and created a fully automated batch process. As a result, CARFAX reduced manual tasks by 70 percent, increased employee productivity to negate the need for additional hires, and positioned the IT organization to support continued growth in batch processing.
CARFAX also implemented BMC Performance Manager to monitor and manage the performance of its disparate systems, which include VMS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows platforms on 300+ servers. In addition to providing the ability to proactively spot and correct problems, BMC Performance Manager’s inherent integration with BMC CONTROL-M proactively notifies the IT staff of scheduling problems that helps the staff reduce downtime.
With the foundation set for a solid BSM strategy, CARFAX has also implemented the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to provide a central repository for comprehensive information describing the company’s technology assets, IT processes, and people. The BMC Atrium CMDB also maps the physical and logical relationships of applications, application servers, database servers, and networking components, moving CARFAX ever closer to its goal of 100 percent automation.
View the CARFAX video case study and the CARFAX written case study for more information.
About BMC CONTROL-M
BMC’s newest release of BMC CONTROL-M with Workload Lifecycle Management simplifies enterprise job scheduling and improves service to the end-user, whilst reducing costs. The release further sharpens BMC’s edge over competitors and strengthens its leadership in IT Workload Automation and BSM. For more information go to Enterprise Job Scheduling/Workload Automation and to obtain a copy of the Gartner, Inc.’s recently released “Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling” research report1 which positions BMC in the Leader’s Quadrant, go to CONTROL-M Magic Quadrant. ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries. 1 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling” by Milind Govekar, April, 28, 2009. Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software. The most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC’s comprehensive approach and unified platform help IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.87 billion. Public Relations Contacts:
Katie Ryan
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