It’s hard to envision a technology that has endured for more than 80 years. Yet, when TransCore LP installed radio communications in 1939 on the country’s first toll road in Pennsylvania, it sparked an engineering solution that has grown exponentially as the nation’s transportation infrastructure expanded by leaps and bounds.

As automated systems replaced human toll-takers on roads across the United States, TransCore saw its volume rise dramatically. This put a strain on not only its manufacturing process, but the company’s information technology systems as well.

“We’ve gone to millions and millions of tags being produced in a quarter where it used to be hundreds of thousands,” said Kevin Smith (pictured, right), information systems manager at TransCore. “That required scalability so we could grow with our systems.”

Smith spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney) during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. He was joined by Sazzala Reddy (pictured, left), co-founder and chief technical officer of Datrium Inc., and they discussed the network issues faced by TransCore and how Datrium provided a scalable and productive solution. (* Disclosure below.)

Goodbye vendor management

To find the scalability necessary to keep pace with rising demand, TransCore turned to Datrium for a solution that would maximize storage and provide flash capability to run applications faster. And Smith wanted to get out of the vendor management business.

“We went looking for a product that could give us a one-stop solution,” Smith said. “I wanted to get out of the storage business and out of the management business. I didn’t want to be worried about all these different vendors and all of these different solutions.”

Datrium’s self-protecting enterprise cloud combined with “always-on” compression and deduplication provided a scalable and faster solution for the toll systems company. It’s an example of how enterprises are increasingly seeking IT capabilities that don’t require a lot of advanced work or time-consuming monitoring.

“We should aim for zero user interface,” Reddy said. “It should be transparent and just work. That’s the goal.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Datrium Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Datrium nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE