Case Study: Cox Automotive achieves 50% reduction in total cost of ownership and real-time ad and inventory insights with Cloudera

Cox Automotive Bringing Value and Insight into Data from 20 Previously Separate Brands

Cox Automotive, a Cox Enterprises subsidiary that brings together 20 brands including AutoTrader, Kelley Blue Book and Manheim, needed an enterprise data strategy to unify vehicle, customer, product and user data and deliver new customer experiences. Its legacy systems (Netezza, Oracle, SQL Server) couldn’t scale or support rapid, near‑real‑time ingest and cross‑brand analytics, leaving analysts unable to access combined datasets quickly enough for new products and insights.

Cox deployed Cloudera’s enterprise data hub on Apache Hadoop—creating five subject‑based EDHs and using Impala, Hive, Spark Streaming, Kafka and visualization tools—to centralize more than 1 PB of data. The platform cut data TCO by about 50% per terabyte, enabled real‑time ad‑impact dashboards (moving from hourly/overnight to live Super Bowl tracking), and delivered inventory and pricing insights that help dealers optimize supply and accelerate product development.

Cox Automotive

Scott Salter

Vice President, Enterprise Data Services, Cox Automotive