Customer Success: BMC Software Helps Drive Operational Excellence, Best-in-Class Customer Experience at Edmunds.com

HOUSTON--Massive cost cuts and restructuring in the auto industry have turned reliable automotive data into a precious commodity. As the industry continues to redefine itself, customers are looking online to Edmunds.com for the most accurate and authoritative information, including True Market Value^® pricing tools, sophisticated financial calculators, and industry commentary. Edmunds.com relies on BMC Software to support the development of these automotive tools and services.

“We are continually improving our Web site navigation and supplementing pricing information with vehicle reviews, feature articles, photos, videos and community services,” said Philip Rowe, director of Systems Administration at Edmunds.com. “BMC significantly reduces the time and cost to develop, test, deploy, and maintain new application environments, which helps us better meet the needs of our customers and partners.”

Using BMC Service Automation, Edmunds.com has slashed the time required to provision its servers and doubled the number of servers each administrator can manage. Edmunds.com has also improved the overall stability and operation of its Web site by maintaining consistent operating system and application configurations and tracking and reporting changes that could affect performance.

In addition to managing user and application growth while holding down costs, BMC provides Edmunds.com with a number other competitive advantages.

• Centralizing on a policy-based approach to automatically configure and update servers has reduced the IT staff’s manual workload, freeing them to focus on more strategic business initiatives.
• Consolidating and centralizing management activities has allowed Edmunds.com to increase the finance and inventory data feeds it receives from partners and more quickly syndicate that content.
• Consistently enforcing compliance with regulatory and security policies improves data protection by automatically deploying security credentials for servers, monitoring changes to management rights, and notifying administrators of violations to security policies.

“Reducing costs and complexity is only part of the equation. We also have to be more responsive to the changing world around us,” continued Rowe. “BMC gives us the capability to match our IT resources to the needs of the market so we can meet business challenges head-on.”