Auto Trader – Trading up to success.

We helped move 81 million email records. Driving Auto Traders’ new digital future, together.

email archive migrations made simple

Founded in 1977 based on the ‘Auto Trader Concept’ introduced from the US, Auto Trader has become the UK’s no. 1 automotive classified website. It specialises in new and second hand sales, including cars sold by private sellers and trade dealers.

Customer
Auto Trader
Source
Enterprise Vault
Target
Microsoft Office 365
Data Size
10TBs
Messages
81 million
Product
Transvault Sprint

Migration Motivations

On the outset, the Company’s primary route to market was via printed magazines. After 36 years, however, in June 2013, the final editions were published, with the company concentrating on its online business, which now benefits from over 11.5 million visitors each month.

From simple classified listings to highly advanced internet car retailing technologies, Auto Trader has an advanced portfolio designed to bring consumers, retailers and advertising partners together.

Driven by cost-saving requirements, Auto Trader decided to move their email system to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service. However, so as not to negate the cost savings of this move, tight budgetary constraints were placed on the process of migrating legacy email records from their on-premise Symantec Enterprise Vault archives.

The Company had over 1,600 archived mailboxes stored in an on-premise Symantec Enterprise Vault archive. This equated to over 10TB – around or 81 million email records – that had to be moved into Office 365 In-Place Archives.

Auto Trader had to find a cost-effective solution but did not want to compromise in terms of the migration product’s technical sophistication. A demonstration of any proposed migration software was going to be an absolute must!

Having been engaged with several migration software vendors, Auto Trader arranged a demonstration of the innovative Transvault Sprint, a new migration product aimed at low complexity projects for a cost-effective price point. In fact, Auto Trader were able to make use of Sprint’s evaluation mode, meaning they could physically test the output from their Enterprise Vault source before making a purchasing decision.

Potential Migration Challenges

James Moody, partner manager at Transvault explained:

“Auto Trader’s project was very cost-sensitive due to savings targeted elsewhere in their overall migration project. They were however, understandably, demanding over which migration software they would use. Seeing the proposed solution in action was a stipulation before any deal could be agreed. Sprint’s evaluation mode allowed us to put their concerns by proving we could extract data from Enterprise Vault in a meaningful and efficient way.”

The partner consultant working on the project commented:

“They seemed really impressed with the new user-interface that Sprint brought to the table. It’s pretty slick-looking and strips away a lot of the complexity formerly associated with this sort of archive migration to the cloud. Despite being fairly new to the market, the product is back-ended by proven technology that I’ve used many times before in other projects. With this in mind, we could make exactly the same assurances as always with regards to data integrity and migration auditing.”

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