Data center Digital Realty data virtualization
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Mergers and acquisitions are a fact of life, and they often take a toll on everyday business; people, real estate, processes, and systems need to be properly integrated before the acquiring company and the acquired company can act as one. The trick, therefore, is to make the transition go as quickly as possible.

Digital Realty, the world’s largest full-scale data center solution provider, with about 150 properties across the globe, was facing a particularly strategic acquisition. “We needed to not only create a cohesive view of our customer base across the two companies,” says Paul Balas, Digital Realty’s vice president of business intelligence, “but we also needed to go to market with new combined products and services.”

A Seamless Transition

To accelerate the transition, Digital Realty implemented a layer of data virtualization via the Denodo Platform. “We used data virtualization to bring the data together quickly across both companies, and then we put the combined data into an MDM solution, which allowed us to create golden masters of our customers across both lines of business,” Balas explains. “We then enriched it further, by using data virtualization to bring in data from other sources, which helped us determine which segments to target in our go-to-market strategy.”

By serving as a unified layer for accessing all of the data across both companies, the Denodo Platform also provides a single place for all business rules and policies that are being defined through IT and business stakeholder collaboration. Data governance is also an integral part of the Denodo Platform.

In addition to the capabilities of the Denodo Platform, Digital Realty also appreciated its value. “I knew that it would take a long time to achieve the results we wanted using ETL or ELT,” says Balas. “But the Denodo Platform really accelerates the speed with which you can accomplish these integrations, at a much lower cost, because you’re not copying the data.”

Moving Forward

Digital Realty has expanded its use of data virtualization to build out a broad logical data warehouse architecture, capable of connecting to myriad dispersed data sources in real time, as if they were part of the same physical repository. From here, the company hopes to create systems for capturing transactional data. “We plan on leveraging the Denodo Platform to move transactions to systems through the abstraction layer,” says Balas. “This would help us to keep the data synchronized across customer-facing systems, and systems to manage internal operations.”

Balas has no regrets about Digital Realty’s decision to work with Denodo. “Denodo was a proven quantity for us. We knew that Denodo would give us the time-to-value we needed to meet our business needs.”

Watch as Paul Balas tells the story of Digital Realty’s transformation:

For more information about Digital Realty’s use of data virtualization, see Digital Realty’s case study. To learn more about how forward-thinking companies are leveraging data virtualization across numerous industries, see the collection of Denodo case studies.

Saptarshi Sengupta
Latest posts by Saptarshi Sengupta (see all)