Scout24's Journey to Self-Service BI with AWS Cloud and MicroStrategy

Scout24 is a leading online marketplace for real estate and automobiles in Germany and other select European countries. In just 20 years, Scout24 has secured its position as one of the most successful European companies and as a household name in consumer applications. Scout 24 operates two well-known brands, ImmobilienScout24, a market leader for home sales in Germany, and AutoScout24, a market leader for automobile sales throughout Europe. Founded in 1998 by Beisheim Holding Schweiz AG, both online platforms were introduced as the first online marketplaces in Europe and have grown considerably since their inception. With five core geographies in more than 18 European countries and more than three million active monthly listings across both platforms, Scout24 is fully committed to understanding and serving their diverse consumer base as a data-driven organization.

Scout24 lacked a company-wide self-service BI tool, making it difficult to aggregate their data and make decisions based on accurate reports. They used a core database for data storage, but it soon became too costly to maintain, creating a bottleneck as their volume of data grew.

Scout24’s journey towards federated, autonomous, and scalable data architecture started in 2013. Hadoop was introduced to manage the organization’s expanding data repository, and data engineers and administrators realized that analytics couldn’t be driven centrally. This is how self-service reporting became actively promoted and supported within the organization. Krystyna Kurinna, Data Access and Services Team Lead at Scout24, describes the organization’s commitment towards accommodating self-service BI as the coalescing of three components: state-of-the-art technology, proper organizational structures, and culture. Their ultimate goal was to build a landscape of data producers and consumers with just enough organizational and cultural rules to ensure seamless cooperation without impeding autonomy. The data team needed to provide a solid data platform and clear guidelines and training on how to participate in the landscape. By making the data lake easier to interface with, they made it simpler to access and publish data. With their defined set of organizational and cultural parameters established, Scout24 carefully chose the technology for a massive shift towards full organizational enablement to foster growth at scale. MicroStrategy was chosen for its semantic metadata layer, ability to centralize and monitor company-wide KPIs, scalable architecture, and easy-to-use self-service capabilities. Within Scout24’s data landscape, MicroStrategy connects to the Amazon S3 data lake through the Presto query engine. Amazon S3 was chosen for its powerfully performant, secure, and expansive features. Alation was chosen for its seamless integration with MicroStrategy and its adaptable interface. As a data catalog and organizer, it forces collaboration and knowledge exchange, provides easy searches for data and defined tags, and provides curation for data quality maintenance.

• Scout24 has built an expansive data infrastructure that transformed the organization’s relationship with data and drastically minimized the time and effort required to find information throughout the enterprise.
• The governed and enterprise-ready architecture of MicroStrategy has been able to scale and complement this landscape made possible by Amazon AWS, including their data lake built on Amazon S3.
• The massive AWS ecosystem provides end users with information derived from a core database, big data sources like Hadoop, various APIs, and MicroStrategy.
• They’ve increased self-service analytics adoption throughout the organization, delivered a fully federated architecture to provide autonomy to users, pushed data to constituents where needed, and scaled with ease.
• Testaments to this massive undertaking can be seen at the user and analyst levels. One year ago, the organization’s segment analysts were answering basic questions like, “Are the number of projects in Hannover increasing?” Now they are answering more in-depth and actionable questions such as, “Is there a way to detect customers who will be unhappy with the service they get?”

• Fifty-five percent of employees at Scout24 are now data-driven BI users.