Sep. 26, 2006

Almost universally across the board, the B2B segment specifically has changed the way people and companies thrive using modern Internet technology. However, there are still many companies that are still using outdated and very inefficient technology.

As a practical example, we can take the case of R.L. Polk, a firm that has been in the field of aggregating market data and serving it to automotive companies.

Over many years, this business model has become more refined, with the company now helping clients better understand the real dynamics of automobile pricing, customer buying preferences, vehicle acquisition, registration history and CRM (customer relationship management) applications.

Overall, R.L. Polk has been in business since the 19th century and some of its technology was almost as old! "We have some IBM mainframe applications that have been around since the 1970s," says Kevin Vasconi, CIO of R.L. Polk. "We also have state-of-the-art service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications built during the past six months. There's really an interesting breadth of technology here."

Despite the appearance of SOA-era applications, R.L. Polk leaned on the mainframe for the business-critical functions of data compilation, standardization and normalization. This meant taking a batch approach. "We'd bring in data until it reached a critical mass, then process the hell out of it," says Vasconi. "It was a very expensive proposition."

R.L. Polk actually moved to an Oracle database and gained a new set of abilities. "We now process the data as it is received, then put it into the data store," adds Vasconi.

The result of all this is that our B2B customers can get data a lot more quickly. Back in the batch days, technology conditioned both R.L. Polk and its customers to wait until the 15th and 30th of every month to get information out of the system.

Today, a combination of newer technology, more demanding customers and an increasingly real-time business environment have changed all of that.

Vasconi offers two examples of this ability in action right in the field. "When we received files into the company, the older processes were manual," he explains. On some occasion, this meant that data would sit around for several hours or more until it went in for processing.

Also, back in the old days, compiling product databases used to take several days. Now it takes less than a day.

On the surface, the case of R.L. Polk illustrates how a company whose business model involves serving certain kinds of data to customers would be better off with a new database and surrounding infrastructure.

However, keeping in mind that companies also need to serve a host of increasingly complex and voluminous data to partners, customers and other constituencies, and it becomes clear that R.L. Polk's efforts to become better at data processing should serve as an example to all companies.

Source: Line 56