Davidson Auto’s ColdFusion Overhaul
The Cf Hobbits At Davidson Auto Needed Help, And Teratech'S Cf Wizards Came To The Rescue.
How do you save a legacy CF app destined for the scrap heap?
Phil Petkovsek, the proactive and forward-thinking Chief Financial Officer of Davidson Auto Group in Rome, New York, found himself holding the One Ring of a severely outdated ColdFusion application, filled with deadwood, technical debt, and in desperate need of modernization. Like Frodo Baggins, he was tasked with a journey to overhaul this precious burden, a journey fraught with challenges yet essential for the future of his company.
“We've been at the forefront of leveraging technology, which is my background,” Petkovsek said. “It's a traditional industry in a lot of ways, but one that we're trying to introduce technology into. Part of my role here is growing and maintaining that.”
Faced with an outdated, inefficient application, Petkovsek sought an experienced ColdFusion consulting company to not only modernize the company’s mission-critical IT tools but also to future-proof its technological backbone.
“I always think about the cost of ownership,” Petkovsek said. “Something that’s always breaking or something that’s always got to be fiddled with, it's quite expensive.”
Davidson Auto’s Problems
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TeraTech’s Solutions
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A lemon of a CF app
The steady drumbeat of sales and maintenance requests at a car dealership demands a stable, reliable, and intuitive intranet application. A crash or even a minor flaw can snowball into a major headache for any C-suite exec, much like the ever-growing threat of Sauron's forces in Middleware-earth. Petkovsek, standing as Aragorn leading his team, knew well the importance of uniting his CF fellowship around a robust solution to safeguard the kingdom of Davidson Auto from descending into chaos.
The winter sports buff (loves snowmobile rides) has worked at the auto dealership group since 2015, creating many of the company’s internal business intelligence solutions. It’s a complex operation, comprising five dealerships, three collision centers and 14 car washes.
Facing a languishing app full of spaghetti code, Petkovsek discovered Davidson Auto’s then-systems administrator couldn’t upgrade the company’s systems to a more modern version of ColdFusion.
A good ColdFusion consultant to look under the hood
Petkovsek found TeraTech through a basic Google search. TeraTech’s longevity and experience working with ColdFusion apps made them a logical choice.
“It's hard, hard to find good partners, because there's a million people out there doing it, especially in the software space,” Petkovsek said. “You never quite know what you're going to get. And a lot of times, you don't get what you're asking for.”
The company’s nearly three decades of experience modernizing and maintaining ColdFusion applications helped diagnose the actual problem. “It was [TeraTech’s] expertise that I was reaching out to, to troubleshoot issues that were beyond my scope of knowledge and keep us up and running, which was important for our internal end users,” Petkovsek said.
The company found and fixed a server failure, which unexpectedly shut off and corrupted key parts of Davidson Auto Group’s system.
“As we hit applications in production, we weren’t able to fully administer them,” Petkovsek said.
One “Check Engine” light was fixed. But the CFO would soon contact TeraTech again, this time with a more pressing problem.
Missing a key part: the developer
Petkovsek parted ways with the company’s in-house tech guy, leaving a glaring hole in his push to innovate within the auto dealership space.
ColdFusion developers are notoriously hard to find, so the CFO found a simpler solution: hire TeraTech to provide monthly maintenance and modernization.
“I expanded our relationship and created a retainer agreement to help keep everything up and running,” Petkovsek said. “TeraTech could be responsive to any issues that I had and proactively do the updates as they came along.”
Though he’s not a software developer, he collaborated with TeraTech to work through four enhancement projects, helping to maintain and simplify Davidson Auto Group’s applications.
“I know what I want to do. As I'm expressing my requirements or what I want to do, [TeraTech] can offer counterpoints or solutions,” Petkovsek said. “I think human nature is for the end user who's passing requirements to solve the problem rather than tell the developer what the problem is, and letting them solve it in the best way. [They’ve] been very good about helping come to a really simple, eloquent solution from a software perspective.”
His push for innovation paid off. Literally.
An In-House CF Mechanic
Davidson Auto’s slow system threatened the company’s revenue. Its end users — mechanics and customer-facing staff — noticed a difference in a widely-used app after TeraTech cleaned up its code.
“It’s about taking existing code and working through and greatly simplifying it and making it more efficient and quick,” Petkovsek said. “They definitely helped me get to the vision of having simple, simplified software that is very reliable and stable and easy to maintain.
“The performance gains in our code simplification project helped significantly. Everyone's like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe how much faster this is.’”
But every once in a while, an app acts up. “[The apps] go down periodically for various reasons,” Petkovsek added. One app kept losing label-printing abilities every time it was updated. Petkovsek has turned to TeraTech to help.
“They’re very, very knowledgeable,” he added. “Anytime we have a problem, it gets figured out and gets fixed quickly.”
Dealership partnership
Petkovsek said TeraTech has been as accessible and responsive as Gandalf the Grey, communicating back and forth both online and with phone calls or Zoom meetings. Their guidance through the dark forests and over the misty mountains of software development has been invaluable, ensuring that every step taken is towards the light of Rivendell rather than the shadows of Mordor.
“It’s like working with someone who’s sitting next to me,” he said. “Responses are as quick and helpful and productive and efficient.”
Petkovsek has since developed a sense of peace when it comes to his IT operations. Issues emerge, for sure, but he’s learned to expect TeraTech to rise to the occasion whenever necessary.
“It's in my best interest, maybe not TeraTech’s,” he said. “I'm just looking to have something I don't really need to work on all the time. So they've definitely gotten me to that place. Quickly.”
The CFO recommends choosing TeraTech every time.
“[TeraTech’s] been full of integrity and exactly what they say they were. So it's been really refreshing to have someone you can trust, count on and get good results from quickly.
“It’s one of the things that I appreciate the most: knowing how to do something. You're paying for experience and knowledge know-how. Which is what I need, because I don't have it.”
Need a CF wizard to help guide you through the Mordor of spaghetti code and legacy code? Contact us!