Technology newsmaker Q&A: Tony Alderdice

Based on our metrics, the answer has to be yes, we've seen explosive growth over last five years. I remember sitting on an industry panel trying to just get people to believe in e-commerce as a play in the aftermarket. There were five years where we just spent our time convincing people that there was a strong return on investment. That took a bit of time, but when it did hit we had some major success stories and that helped.

What really helped was when companies like Epicor and others turned over the keys to the hen house and said we'd connect everybody. That's what opened the floodgates. One of the reasons adoption was so slow was that the providers all had proprietary systems. There was a major cultural shift once you could access that content without buying a specific system. All of a sudden, adoption picked up.

What technology trends do you see as being the most important for the aftermarket in the next few years?

Telematics keeps coming up and over and over again. We're also really moving toward more cloud-based initiatives, even on the catalog side.

We feel strongly about that play in the market. Adoption of it will be slower than we would like, but we are testing these things out now. I see us moving more in that direction because of the cost of ownership of hardware side. Eliminating some of those on-premise costs will help encourage faster adoption.

Take software upgrades, for example. Those updates take time and resources when you have to do them at the customer site. I think moving to these types of cloud-based architectural changes will allow us to deploy new features by just pushing them out to customers.

There are going to be other investments around mobility, too. We believe that is going to be a big play in the marketplace, right through to ordering parts online using a hand-held device at the service provider level. Large entities have spent a lot of money to make that consumer experience better, and we're going to continue to push that type of information right down to the service provider.

Those technologies are going to impact everyone up and downstream. With data warehousing and analytics tools, you can get the right part, see the real return rate, and you can give those tools to the aftermarket, right down to the customer. There's all this content and information that can be pushed down the chain from top to bottom. That's where we want to head, and cloud solutions and these other technologies allow us to do those types of things.

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