As advertising shifted from the printed page to the computer screen, Classified Ventures, LLC/Cars.com was founded in 1997 by a joint venture between several media companies, including Graham Holdings, The Washington Post, and the Tribune Company, among others. Because of these visionaries and pioneers of the digital age, Classified Ventures and Cars.com are where they are at today. Jim Houska of Classified Ventures, LLC/Cars.com joined Jeff Frick and Dave Vellante on theCUBE at the recent EMC World 2014 conference in Las Vegas.

When asked how things had changed in his five years at the company, Houska talked about how the company had seen double-digit growth every year, both in revenue and in visitors to the Cars.com site. As far as the technology the company uses, in 2011 Cars.com went through what Houska termed an agile transformation. The goal was to improve the time it took to bring its products to market. The company went from doing 20 to 30 projects per year to 450 releases using its new agile framework, allowing them to deliver superior products and services.

The company was able to make all this happen by working with EMC to deploy Isilon. When asked what appealed to the company about Isilon, Houska said, “Simplicity, manageability, quick time to deployment would all be appealing from an Isilon perspective. There is a tradition mindset within the Hadoop community that if it’s not data locality of storage, it’s not efficient. But if you look at leading-edge companies, Web-scale companies like Facebook, they’ve realized they have to decouple the compute from the storage via a high-speed rack. Because they either had too much compute or too much storage, or essentially purchasing access capacity, they weren’t effectively using it.”

When asked how Classified Ventures/Cars.com dealt with Big Data, Houska talked about how the company uses a wide variety of third-party aggregators to help them pull in its data from various dealer management services. As the car dealers update their data, the process pulls the inventory into the Cars.com system. This is another area where Isilon has helped the company. According to Houska, “Isilon provided a lot of value … we used to process around 80,000 images an hour, and now we can do almost 300,000 images per hour.”

See Houska’s entire segment below: