This leading private equity firm faced challenges integrating data from mergers and acquisitions — including multiple business systems, disparate data sources, and fluctuating portfolios. To gain a market edge, the customer wanted access to accurate and timely data from all of their businesses. Leveraging scaled data mesh technology, Hitachi Solutions and Microsoft ultimately enabled the customer to make more informed strategic business decisions, resulting in an ROI near nine figures. Learn how we transformed their existing Azure architecture and used the Hitachi Solutions Empower Data Platform to streamline, centralize, and modernize their data management foundation.
Challenge
In the competitive world of real estate services, efficiently navigating large and diverse portfolios — including hotels, offices, retail spaces, and industrial and residential properties — and executing the right transactions is critical for success. So, when this global services provider for a leading real estate private equity firm ran into challenges developing a timely portfolio-wide view across their operators and the litany of property management systems therein, they knew they needed help.
Like many large organizations with high deal activity, each portfolio company (or even partnership or operator) ran with its own processes and business systems, which lead to disparate data sources with varying definitions of metrics and poor data quality. This complexity hindered the firm’s ability to consolidate data from a technical and functional perspective.
Adding to the chaos was sprawl across geographies with unique compliance and data-sovereignty requirements. The firm needed a unified, governed, multi-national data platform to help give the
organization quick and simplified access to operational data as well as data-timeliness on broad market conditions to enable strategic dealmaking.
Solution
Although the firm was already using Microsoft Azure for data, their previous vendor had implemented an
architecture that did not scale to meet their business needs. After meeting one of Hitachi Solutions’
principal architects and having seen our deep digital transformation expertise and technical competency
around Azure, the company asked us to deliver a scaled Lakehouse design to their partners.
To do this, we leveraged the Empower Data Platform to establish data hubs for aggregation, which allowed the portfolios to gain operational insights while also prepping, mapping, and sharing data for the broader organization. The solution eliminates data silos through connectors to major property management and business systems, advanced orchestration to save operational costs, Azure Databricks Unity Catalog to manage the global estate, and a data quality system to ensure accuracy and consistency across the diverse organization. We also developed tailored Microsoft Power BI reports and an embedded reporting portal to drive even more value.
To ensure we could ride the tide of cloud progress, and to realize operational scale, we understood this distributed platform needed a robust DevOps ethos. With the infrastructure as code package around our
platform, the team has been able to achieve rollout of new capabilities and even net new divisional rollouts in hours, not weeks – greatly streamlining management. Through the Empower platform, data democratization became a reality, enabling stakeholders to access and analyze data with unprecedented ease and efficiency.
Benefits
Hitachi Solutions was able to help the customer deliver greatly enhanced shareholder returns by providing reliable data, at scale, far faster than the competition. Through the unified systematic approach, the firm is able to mine, enhance, and leverage data that not only provides direct strategic benefits to increase alpha, but also increases the value of the assets they hold on their books – increasing resale values of assets the firm doesn’t intend to hold long term.
This is an incredible capability that delivers on the promise the board intended:
- Strong EPS returns via nine-figure dealmaking based on data provided through the platform
- Success on quality with business data stewards established and programmatic data quality rules hitting above target — 98% completeness achieved in only 32 months
- A new strategic capability to build data environments on the balance sheets of new partnerships — boosting the value of acquired assets and generating direct returns while still capturing strategic data assets
- Reductions in OpEx associated with data engineering by over 60% through heavy automation and strong engineering practices
By maximizing the value of Microsoft Azure and Empower, the firm has revolutionized their approach to data management and overcome the data challenges that plagued them in the past. They plan to work with Hitachi Solutions to continue to transform their business to drive innovation and unlock opportunities and insights into the future.
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