Customer: autoTrader Corporation
Website: www.autoTRADER.ca
Customer Size: 630 employees
Country or Region: Canada
Industry: Automotive
Customer Profile autoTRADER.ca is Canada’s largest online community search engine for buying and selling vehicles. In addition to connecting more than three million users to new and used cars each month, the company provides dealers with a wide range of software products and services to help them sell more effectively.
Software and Services
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Microsoft .NET Services
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Microsoft Azure platform
− Microsoft .NET Services
− Microsoft Azure Storage
− Microsoft Azure Websites
− Microsoft Azure SQL Database
− Microsoft Azure Search
− Microsoft Azure Notification Hubs
For more information about other
Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/customers
Allen Wales, Vice President of Technology, autoTRADER.ca autoTRADER.ca is on the road to creating an IT infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities. The company started using Azure to host and serve its millions of images. It is now moving its application search functionality to Azure and is poised to migrate all its web properties to Azure. As a result, the company is better able to improve services and create new offerings—all while eliminating the need to manage its own infrastructure.
If you’re a Canadian in the market for a businesses, such as software that helps new or used car (or bike, boat, RV, ATV, or snowmobile), there’s a good chance that you’ll use autoTRADER.ca. Every month, the company serves more than 5 million users and handles millions of searches by consumers looking for everything from hybrids to trucks.
And even if you go straight to a dealer, bypassing the web entirely, autoTRADER.ca still powers your transaction in one form or another. The company offers a wide variety of solutions that integrate with dealers’ dealers advertise and inventory products, determines the best pricing, and provides market data on which vehicles are in high demand, and more.
In other words, autoTRADER.ca has enormous market penetration—and
Microsoft Azure is a huge part of its strategy moving forward.
The journey starts with photos
Not surprisingly, vehicle photos are an integral part of the service that

autoTRADER.ca provides. Individuals and dealers upload an enormous number of high-quality photos—literally millions of them.
A couple of years ago, the company started using Microsoft Azure to host all of these images. “It was a natural evolution for us,” says Anand Kulanthaivelu, Solutions
Architect for autoTRADER.ca. “We use the entire Microsoft stack, and Azure is completely integrated with Microsoft Visual
Studio and our development processes. It made the most sense, and it was the most efficient.”
By shifting all its images to Azure, autoTRADER.ca eliminated the need to host and maintain its own infrastructure, which saved the company from having to manage both SAN and server infrastructure. Azure provides a scalable solution and removes the need to worry about scalability, which is important given the company’s rapid traffic growth.
But this initial shift to Azure also helped the company meet changing consumer demands, specifically around mobile devices. “The way people access online services has changed,” explains Shane
Sullivan, Director of Software Engineering for autoTRADER.ca. “Half of our users are on mobile devices. Our mobile apps have been downloaded more than 2 million times.
These users want information faster than ever; they demand a real-time experience.”
Using Azure for photos helped meet these demands. Not only are photos served more quickly using Azure Storage and Microsoft
Azure Web Services, but they can also be optimized for display depending on whether people are accessing them through their iOS, Android, or Windows Phone autoTRADER.ca apps—and even by device whether phone or high-resolution iPads and
Windows tablets, or on a desktop.
“Photos were our first move with Azure,” says Sullivan,” and it’s what got us hooked.”
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2015
The need for better search
The next item that autoTRADER.ca wanted to tackle was its search engine. The application infrastructure surfaced information relatively quickly after it had been uploaded and indexed. However, the company’s shift to mobile drastically changed usage patterns, and the current system could not keep pace with this growth.
As a result, the company jumped when
Azure Search was released. Although it had explored some different options, including
Amazon Web Services, no other solution integrated so completely with existing
Microsoft solutions. “After having used
Azure for the past couple of years, we don’t want to do it any other way, and the capital cost savings were just too compelling.” says Kulanthaivelu.
The pre-existing search engine was meeting the immediate needs of the consumer marketplace, but it needed to be faster. Every millisecond counts for better conversion! autoTRADER.ca needed the search experience to scale with traffic growth and—at the same time–speed up under increased visit loads.
Getting a new auction site up and running—fast
One of the growth opportunities the company had identified was a new dealerto-dealer auction site. autoTRADER.ca started developing this auction platform in
April 2014. By November—the site and app were live. “Azure Search enabled us to launch the dealer auction site. We couldn’t have been able to do it otherwise,”says
Kulanthaivelu.
With the auction platform, dealers can upload an auction item in real-time. The information is stored in Azure SQL
Database, and pushed out to Azure Search.
The platform also includes Azure
Notification Hubs, which notify other dealers when a vehicle comes online that they are interested in.
Thanks to Azure, the autoTRADER.ca team was able to create and deploy a very complex system, which spans both desktop and mobile, in a very short amount of time. Dealers love the ability to quickly use the Azure-powered Dealer App to manage their vehicles, capture photos, and source the right cars.
“Azure has enabled a new way for dealers to source vehicles, capture inventory, interact with us,” says Sullivan. “They’re not stuck at their desk; they’re using our mobile app to manage their inventory whenever and wherever they want.”
Deploying Azure Search to the consumer marketplace
But that’s not all. The company had also realized that using Azure Search on its auction site was the perfect way to stress test it before deploying it to the consumer marketplace.
Although functional, the old search engine, which was hosted on multiple servers, had to be maintained, patched, and scaled up during times of peak consumer demand. autoTRADER.ca recognized that that it had a real opportunity to get something more cost-effective and scalable. In addition, it saw the potential of better meeting the needs of its fast growing mobile users, which now make up more than 50 percent of traffic.
Building upon its successes using Azure, the company is proceeding with plans to replace the old search engine entirely.
“We’re really excited about using Azure
Search for marketplace,” says Sullivan. “It gives us an opportunity to provide better and better services to our customers with instant, seamless experiences across all devices.”
Kulanthaivelu adds: “Microsoft Azure unlocks a lot of potential for us. Just for

search, we can scale up down, and quickly adapt to our usage to provide more speed.
It’s a whole new way of doing business.”
Moving operations to PaaS
And the story keeps getting better. autoTRADER.ca has transitioned from hosted photos to photos hosted in and served from Azure. It is replacing its search engine with Azure Search. And now, the company is also shifting its entire web operations to Azure too. “Right now, we use a host for the bulk of our web properties,” says Sullivan. “Soon we are moving everything the Azure—all our web properties, all of our APIs, everything.”
The company expects to see a huge amount of savings from not having to continue to maintain and scale traditional infrastructure.
And it’s gotten this all this while providing a best in class experience across the web and mobile.
PaaS fits with the company’s long-term vision. “We wanted our IT team fully focused on building websites and apps that help consumers buy cars with confidence, not running a datacenter,” says Allen Wales,
Vice President of Technology at autoTRADER.ca. “Azure takes care of that for us, like a utility we know can keep pace with our explosive growth.”
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2015