Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante caught up with Bruce Schinelli, the chief information officer of railcar giant TTX, at EMC’s recent SAP Week conference in Hopkinton, MA. The executive shared a few details about his company, its IT infrastructure, and the technologies it is leveraging to streamline operations.

Schinelli starts the interview by going over the reasons he’s attending the event: TTX is a joint customer of SAP and EMC, he explains, and SAP Week is an opportunity to observe the synergy between the two vendors and see where this relationship is headed.

TTX is among the largest providers of railcars in North America. The CIO says that the privately-owned firm has assets all over the country, and adds that those assets are generating data his company is exploiting to realize efficiencies across the board.

TTX’s Big Data environment is the product of a 6-year-long IT transformation project that was completed fairly recently. Schinelli says his firm has integrated IBM’s Tivoli Maximo Asset Management solution with SAP software to produce a supply chain management solution that is helping lower inventory costs. The company is also leveraging a number of ‘large applications’ to identify the status, location, cargo and user of each individual railcar; aggregate this info, and process it into insights about current market dynamics.

Schinelli tells Vellante that TTX was one of the first organizations that adopted VMware’s virtualization software in their production environments. This head-first approach paid off big time: TCO went down by a 1000 percent, power consumption dropped, and adding new servers became much easier.

The executive notes that his firm’s private cloud deployment is supplemented by Software-as-a-Service solutions and a number of ‘business elements’ that have been trusted with a given provider.  A larger public cloud footprint is a “definite maybe”.
For the full interview, check out the video below.