Rebel Technologies

A Case for the Cloud

Sam Agie, Chief Technology Officer

What was the business problem?

The relationship between vehicle owners, automotive service shops, and parts suppliers often suffers from a lack of trust and transparency. Unpredictable costs and service wait times often result in less-than-positive relationships between the three parties, and shop operators face costly delays and inefficiencies researching part prices, availability, and lead times from their suppliers. Suppliers in turn lack the real-time analytics from their channels to help inform their production schedules and supply chain management strategies. Additionally, most service shops use legacy, in-house software programs for their operations that are not integrated with suppliers’ ordering systems and do not produce consumer-friendly reports and invoices.

Cloud Clip: 87% of small businesses said the cloud provided them with a competitive advantage.1

How does your product solve this problem?

Rebel Technologies’ platform combines the ecosystems of the vehicle owners, the service shop, and the suppliers to improve operational efficiencies and customer loyalty:

  • 1. Vehicle owners receive transparent, easy to understand estimates, pricing, and real-time progress updates from service shops, to help make more informed purchase decisions
  • 2. Automotive service shops build customer loyalty by increasing trust and accountability, while significantly improving inventory management and workflow efficiency
  • 3. Automotive part suppliers benefit from actionable, real-time analytics from service shops, enabling them to improve production and delivery schedules and benefit from the service shops’ increased sales to their loyal clientele

Rebel Technologies integrates with part suppliers’ online ordering systems and service shops’ point-of-sale software to provide a cohesive, unified experience – prioritizing the vehicle owner’s experience above all others.

What technical resources did you need?

We needed low-cost cloud resources that would allow us to test and prototype more than one instance of our platform, and needed the flexibility of being able to move to other clouds. This proved to be a challenge because most low-cost commercial cloud offerings allow only one instance at a time, and make it nearly impossible to migrate to other clouds.

Why did you choose the DAIR Cloud?

Having access to this free resource meant that we could make our VC funding go further toward development resources and expertise.

How did the DAIR Cloud help you business?

In addition to the cost savings we’ve realized with the DAIR Cloud, we have the confidence that we’ll be able to easily move to a production cloud environment once we’re ready to commercialize. The DAIR Cloud is designed to allow for flexible movement of data into and out of it, which simplifies our development and roadmap.

We were also able to build up to 4 concurrent instances on the DAIR Cloud, compared to 1 instance that most commercial clouds offer in their “free trial” periods. This meant we were able to test multiple scenarios to refine our design.

What was the result?

Development and testing of Rebel Technologies’ platform on the DAIR Cloud are nearly complete, and demonstrations for investors and potential customers will soon be underway.

1 http://www.dailyinfographic.com/the-cloud-is-your-friend