Composite Software announced that Carfax, the vehicle history expert, has developed and deployed a data abstraction layer using the Composite Data Virtualization Platform that will provide the company greater agility in managing its rapidly changing reporting environment. The first deployment consisted of publishing logical views to support reporting for the company's finance, sales, marketing and business development organizations.
Carfax maintains a large vehicle history database, which includes over eight billion vehicle records from more than 34,000 sources. According to Paula Mueller, Carfax director of BI responsible for internal data warehousing, business intelligence (BI) and customer data integration, Carfax utilizes Oracle for operational reporting and ParAccel for data warehousing and analytics and uses the Composite Data Virtualization Platform to combine its operational and warehousing data.
The company currently produces hundreds of crucial reports, some of which query hundreds of millions, if not billions, of records, with the number of reports growing rapidly. Carfax IT staff was spending an inordinate amount of time making sure key reports continued to run every time database modifications were made to accommodate Carfax's rapidly changing business needs.
"Providing downstream agility in supporting our rapidly changing business was the main driver in purchasing the Composite Data Virtualization Platform and building out our data abstraction layer," Mueller said. "We wanted the ability to be more responsive to the business, rather than simply maintain the status quo. Now, we simply make changes to the logical views which automatically results in the changes being implemented across our entire reporting environment, saving us considerable, and often tedious work."
"Rapidly changing businesses such as Carfax understand that new IT methods must be adopted to keep up in today's fast-paced environment. Data virtualization is a natural for organizations with ever-evolving business requirements and reporting needs," said Robert Eve, Composite Software executive vice president, marketing.
For more information about Composite, go to www.compositesw.com.