I want to introduce Adam Rasner, who is with AutoNation.
Adam, how are you?
Thank you for being here.
Hey, Michael.
Doing great.
Thanks.
I'm excited to be here today and talk to you.
Tell us about AutoNation and tell us about what you do there.
Sure.
AutoNation is the country's largest automotive retailer.
We're made up of a couple different lines of business.
We have about 300 locations made up of new car stores, preowned car stores, AutoNation
USA, as well as collision centers.
We also operate multiple auction houses, and then we've just launched a new line of business
called AutoNation Precision Parts.
We're about $22 billion in revenue.
The company is growing tremendously.
We're about 27,000 associates.
Tell us about your role.
What do you do for AutoNation?
I'm over the infrastructure and operations team.
It's basically made up of systems engineering, so data center operations, network services,
operations, so change management, incident management, enterprise monitoring.
We also have the end user computing team, so we basically have the whole underlying
infrastructure of all the systems that run AutoNation.
Tell us about the car buying experience.
It's an industry that hasn't changed much in 50, 60 years.
It's a four- to eight-hour ordeal at best, and it sometimes is painful.
We think that there's a lot of technology that can be added into the process to make
it easier, simpler.
We have a day in the future where we see an Amazon-like experience for buying a car.
I think that's coming very, very soon.
What are the technology elements that must be put into place in order to reach that kind
of Amazon experience you were describing?
There are things that are within our control: developing software and systems that can support
this kind of all electronic experience.
Then there are things that are regulatory that are government challenges.
In some states, they require live ink on every document to buy a car.
That's going to really challenge our vision.
Tell us about what you're doing with Cohesity.
What are you doing with Cohesity now?
Cohesity was brought to us by one of our value-added resellers as a really good candidate.
We vetted a couple of players in that space.
We did a great proof of concept with them.
The beat out the other competitors in what I'm calling the next-gen category.
As an added bonus, not only does it scale infinitely and easily.
That was kind of a big win for us.
We also now are able to use the Cohesity as a tier II storage.
Applications that didn't need our most expensive SSD storage on our very expensive SANS, we
were able to use Cohesity as a target.
We got this added benefit that we didn't really anticipate up front.
It was really going to be an enterprise backup solution.
Now, we're able to pivot and use it for other things.
A very successful implementation and very happy customers.
This type of product is completely mission critical?
If you ever have a problem with your systems or your data and you can't get back to where
you were, I mean the results for your business can be catastrophic.
How do you evaluate trust?
If things fail during the POC process, you've lost the trust to go forward.
Even though things can be fixed, you're always nervous that it's not doing what it's supposed
to do.
That's where I think things went really right for Cohesity and didn't go right with the
competitor that we brought in.
Are there metrics or KPIs?
How do you go about making that evaluation?
There are hard metrics.
The solution we were using previously, we were dealing with something like 6,000 backup
failures a month from hardware issues, software problems.
Basically, almost 60%, 70% of an FTE, a full-time employee, babysitting backup jobs to now we're
dealing with a few a month, and we actually can go in and have a good understanding of
what's causing those and remediate.
There are soft things that you measure and feelings that you get, and then there are
kind of hard statistics.
We're winning on both ends of that.
It's funny because, backup is not the most sexy technology.
Right.
But it sounds like you love it.
Yeah.
It's sexy, geeky stuff.
I can tell you.
Our team never really was excited about backup, but when we finally made the decision, they
said, "This is going to make our lives easier."
The interface is easy to use.
We were up and running very quickly.
Again, they're the ones they call at 3:00 in the morning that an upgrade didn't go well
and they need to revert back and restore something.
Those guys have a new level of comfort that the data is going to be restored quickly,
that it's not going to be corrupt, and so we're happy.
I just have to say I'm still floored by the notion of 6,000 backup failures a month.
How does that even happen?
Yeah.
Without naming the vendor, we were on a hardware/software platform again that didn't scale to the size.
We're over a petabyte of data, which is pretty significant.
All of that data is being backed up.
What advice do you have for organizations that are looking to replace mission-critical
systems?
Make the time investment to try it out.
Installing it, seeing how it operates in your environment, and then getting a really good
feel for how hard it is to deploy, what's the learning curve for your team going to
be, those sorts of things.
Then there's the easier stuff, which is talking to your peers, reading the trade magazines.
If you do all of that I think, at the end of the road, you should be at a place where
you're relatively comfortable to make a big decision.
Thanks so much for sharing those lessons today.
Thanks for having me, Michael.
I really appreciate it.
We have been speaking with Adam Rasner from AutoNation.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.