Cox Automotive, a global leader in the automotive software industry, is transforming how the world buys, sells, owns, and uses vehicles. Fueled by the largest breadth of first-party data fed by 2.3 billion online interactions a year, Cox Automotive tailors leading solutions for car shoppers, auto manufacturers, dealers, lenders and fleets. Its Data Services division (CADS) functions as a center of excellence, managing hundreds of APIs delivering critical vehicle information to both internal teams and their portfolio of industry-leading brands like Autotrader®, Kelley Blue Book®, Manheim®, vAuto®, Dealertrack®, NextGear Capital™, CentralDispatch® and FleetNet America®.
The challenge: Maximizing API investment returns
Like many enterprises growing through acquisitions, CADS faced increasing API complexity integrating 15 companies over the last 15-year period. While GraphQL had emerged as the clear and declarative choice for standardizing their approach to APIs and they had adopted Apollo GraphQL’s GraphOS platform and federated approach, their critical VIN decoder REST API – containing millions of dollars worth in complex business logic – remained isolated from their graph. The cost and complexity of rewriting this service had made integration seem impossible.
“Each API does a little tiny thing,” explains Mark Meiller, Principal Engineer of Data Services at Cox Automotive. “We have lots of product team customers on these APIs that trust and gain significant value from them, which then helps them support end-customers. Enabling teams to compose these proven services in new ways to meet evolving needs – with speed and flexibility – felt impossible.”
The solution: API Orchestration with Apollo
Apollo Connectors for REST APIs transformed CADS approach to API orchestration, enabling them to contribute proven services to their federated graph in days rather than months. Converting their existing VIN decoder – a business-critical REST API containing years of complex logic – into a composable building block in only two days and preserved millions of dollars in existing investment. This unlocked new possibilities for composing vehicle data services while maintaining the reliability their customers depend on.
“It was a turnkey moment,” says Meiller. “Now teams can start with a VIN, decode it to get the vehicle ID, connect to valuations, and get everything they need in one query. We can compose these proven services in ways we never could before. And considering the process would have typically required months or even a year of work from multiple engineers, Apollo Connectors saved us millions. This was monumental.”
Key Results
- Significant Cost Savings and Speed: Connectors avoided one year of engineering costs (equivalent to 6 full-time engineers) by transforming their VIN Decoder in just two days, while preserving millions invested in existing REST API development.
- Operational Excellence: With 99.95% uptime, rapid issue resolution, and enterprise-grade security, CADS delivers trusted vehicle data services at scale across North America. Their team spends 80% less time troubleshooting and more time innovating, while simplified authentication and multi-region architecture reduce operational complexity.
- Enhanced Developer Experience: By standardizing vehicle data definitions while preserving critical business logic, CADS can now empower Cox Automotive teams to deliver new features faster and ensure consistent, accurate vehicle information across Kelly Blue Book and other customer-facing platforms. Developers now focus on innovation and new integrations rather than managing complex data transformations.
Looking ahead
“Successfully integrating our VIN decoder through Apollo Connectors has laid the foundation for our entire Federation journey. It’s the cornerstone that will enable us to expand Federation across our enterprise.”
For CADS, API orchestration previously meant dedicating significant engineering resources to hand-coding complex sequences of API calls, managing retry logic, and implementing data transformations. This slowed innovation and made it difficult to respond quickly to market needs.
CADS’s success with Apollo Connectors eliminated this burden, preserving API fidelity while establishing a foundation for modernizing their entire API ecosystem. The team plans to extend Apollo Connectors across their REST API portfolio, enabling them to deliver new vehicle data services faster and strengthen their position as an industry leader in automotive software.
“There’s going to be a push for more REST APIs to use Connectors,” notes Meiller. “It lets teams keep working with what they know, while enabling completely new capabilities through composition. Overall, Apollo’s platform’s speed, flexibility, and resilience, combined with its comprehensive tooling, have proven invaluable to our operations and helped Cox Automotive achieve significant success.
The success of their initial implementation has only strengthened Cox Automotive’s partnership with Apollo. “Apollo stood out by checking every single one of our boxes. Not just from a technical standpoint, but as an enterprise partner. The accessibility and expertise of their support team were crucial factors in our decision,” says Meiller.
By adopting Apollo’s API Orchestration platform, CADS can ensure Cox Automotive can quickly adapt to changing market needs while maintaining the trusted data services that power platforms like Kelly Blue Book.
You can learn more about Cox Automotive’s success with Apollo by watching Meiller’s talk at GraphQL Summit 2024. Plus, explore other customer stories to discover how Apollo can help you simplify your API orchestration today.
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