VP and CIO of ATD Tony Vaden shares his Oracle story on theCube at #OOW

As part of our ongoing coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 we have Dave Vellante, Wikibon Co-founder on theCube.  He sat down with Tony Vaden, Vice President and CIO of American Tire Distributors, who discussed their relationship with Oracle.

Vaden stated that Oracle is the backbone of their system because it helps them handle all their incoming data, such as transactions per second related to delivering and receiving tires via e-business.  With the help of Oracle, they’ve expanded on their e-business core.

Vellante pointed out that ATD is an important piece in the automotive supply chain, and asked how technology has affected their business over the years.

Vaden relates that their main goal is to always have tires available for customers – independent retailers, big time tire companies, businesses etc.  Over the years, they’ve experienced the transition of how their customers purchase tires from either directly going to their center, to placing an order over the telephone then by ordering online.  He stated that with the help of Oracle, they were able to meet their customers demands, no matter how they purchase the tires, by making it possible to always have the tires available and ready at their distribution centers.

Vaden also sees that in the future, big data will be an integral part of the company and should be something to invest on largely.  He noted that a lot of companies in the supply chain are struggling in keeping up with the advancements in technology and if they can’t keep up with the change, then they won’t be able to deliver on time and provide quality services.

“In the last two or three years, we’ve pushed the envelop on virtualization, how we’ve been able to replicate to our secondary data centers, what we’ve done with the elimination of tape, and all those seem very tactical but at the end of the day, if we can’t recover and fail-over, and support the business, they get nervous,” Vaden says. “So I think they’ve looked at what I would call ‘growth form the core.’”

Vaden also mentioned that, even if you think that the cloud computing would be your business core, if your company doesn’t have a “roadmap for technology direction”, then it will be hard to get into big data because you don’t have the needed data to begin with.
ATD’s priority is backing up data and knowing when the data was backed up and they are currently managing a little over 2 petabytes of data.

To watch the full interview with Tony Vaded, see below.