CoEnterprise Helps Cox Automotive Modernize Legacy MFT Platform, Achieve 99% Uptime and 100% Reliable Payment Processing

Customer Story

Cox Automotive, a unit of Cox Enterprises, was formed in 2014 to consolidate all of Cox’s global automotive businesses, including Kelley Blue Book, Xtime, Autotrader.com and Manheim. They offer auto auction and wholesale services as well as financial, media, software, and international services. Cox focuses on continually improving their products to create faster vehicle transactions, enabling consumers to have a seamless online-to-offline experience.

The Business Challenge

The team at Cox Automotive was utilizing an older, legacy IBM Sterling File Gateway environment that wasn’t properly designed or scaled to meet their business needs.

That system, which processed all vendor payments, had gone many years without an upgrade and was becoming very problematic for their bottom line and overall customer satisfaction.

“We had over 100 servers between our legacy systems and new setups that weren’t quite running at the pace of business today,” said Mohammad Butt, Sterling Product Owner/Chief Architect at Cox Automotive. “Because those system versions hadn’t been upgraded in close to a decade, it was creating some major headaches for the business.”

Why CoEnterprise?

Cox had a prior relationship with CoEnterprise and after positive experiences from those engagements, they decided to utilize them once again–this time to help bring their platform, team, and processes to an enterprise caliber level.

This included migrating to a new platform, improving IBM Sterling File Gateway uptime, and achieving reliable payment processing. Cox cited CoEnterprise’s expertise and recognition in the market in addition to the trusted relationship as deciding factors to go with the 9-time IBM B2B Partner of the Year.

“CoEnterprise was there for us in the past when we needed a version upgrade, health check, or setup of a disaster recovery environment,” said Butt. “It was all excellent work so when we found out Sterling File Gateway version 5 was coming to end of support, we knew they had the experience to help us. So we reached out to them again for some guidance and from there they put us on the right path.”

CoEnterprise helped Cox achieve faster, more streamlined partner onboarding that will accelerate time to value and allow them to gain a competitive advantage.

Measurable Results

With CoEnterprise leading the way for Cox, the migration to a modernized IBM Sterling File Gateway platform was a success.

“Their framework is what really sets them apart from other partners,” said Butt. “It’s helping us significantly reduce the complexity of onboarding, solve our complex infrastructure challenges, and remove our security risks. Their team completely knocked it out of the park!”

Cox has also attained nearly perfect uptime and payment processing with the help of the CoEnterprise team and their proven methodology and delivery framework.

“They have helped us achieve 99.999% uptime for SFG and 100% reliable payment processing–numbers that we didn’t even think were possible,” said Butt.

“Improving these KPIs has been instrumental in not only helping us recoup lost revenue, but in making our customers happier and in turn gaining repeat business. In addition to the technical achievements, CoEnterprise has been fundamental in providing us with useful thought leadership on a daily basis and supporting us in our move towards an enterprise solution.”

With the help of CoEnterprise, Cox can now quickly onboard partners due to a new, modernized file transfer platform, dependable and reliable server uptime, and reliable payment processing.