Xome increases productivity by 20% with migration to the Microsoft Cloud

As a leading online real estate marketplace, Xome wanted to democratize the residential real estate market with an easy-to-use listing search engine and data-driven analysis tools. Xome is eagerly expanding its business and found that operating multiple on-premises datacenters and cloud providers limited its ability to scale and meet customer expectations. Maintaining the hardware was expensive and time consuming, and executives understood that shifting to cloud services could solve these problems.

Xome evaluated several cloud platforms and determined that Microsoft offered the best fit in terms of cost, architecture, and innovation. With its migration to the Microsoft Cloud, Xome saved money and enhanced security, positioning itself for future growth.

Modernizing for growth and agility

Xome’s aim was to simplify real estate transactions with an online platform that connects buyers and sellers via property auctions and traditional house listings. The company strives to help more people become confident real estate investors through data-driven insights and helpful customer service. 

In 2022, Xome sought to consolidate its IT infrastructure to help the company scale, provide best-in-class security, and offer the AI-driven features and insights customers need to make smart real estate decisions. “We needed an application architecture that would allow us to create a consistent and coherent user experience that we could modernize and update as we evolved,” says Leonard Posos, Vice President of Infrastructure at Xome.

To grow the business and be more nimble with its technology development, the company decided to consolidate onto a single cloud platform. “Being able to use data and consistent tools, AI being one of those, has been a goal of ours,” says Eric Atchley, Chief Financial Officer at Xome. Xome began analyzing various cloud services, including the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, to find a single provider that could meet all its business needs. Azure Cloud Services emerged as the provider that ticked all the boxes: cost-efficient, easy to use, and with AI capabilities Xome could use to stay ahead of the competition.

Migrating in phases to Azure Cloud Services

Xome took a phased approach to migrate its datacenters to Azure Cloud Services. “Our strategy was to migrate and modernize—lift and shift where we could, keep the business impact minimal, and then incrementally start modernizing,” says Ramya Prasad, Vice President of Information Systems at Xome.

In the first phase, Xome packaged applications into containers to run through Azure Kubernetes Service and scaled its database environment into Azure SQL Database. From there, Xome surrounded the core platform with monitoring via Azure App Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, and load balancing via Azure API Management to enhance its application framework. In the next phase, Xome consolidated multiple source-control tools into Azure DevOps, which created a more cohesive workspace.

Testing and deploying features up to 30% faster with Azure Cloud Services

Xome experienced immediate time savings after migrating from on-premises datacenters to the Microsoft Cloud. For example, by moving to managed services, the time spent on infrastructure maintenance was cut by 20%. With Azure DevOps for code repository management, engineers can test and deploy features 20% to 30% faster than they could in the datacenter, boosting productivity. “The time freed up has allowed the engineers to integrate more with other teams,” says Posos. “There’s definitely been more time for collaboration and discussion.”

The company also realized significant cost savings by moving to a single platform. Previously, Xome was paying for several cloud services from different vendors, which needed to be linked together. By migrating to Azure Cloud Services, Xome removed the fees associated with connecting these clouds. The company’s IT team achieved additional cost savings with auto-scaling on an important application programming interface, which wasn’t possible with on-premises data management. Without the constraints of physical hardware, the team could instantly scale up and automatically adjust to fluctuating demand. “From an infrastructure engineering perspective, it was a night and day difference. Microsoft just seemed to work better,” says Kass Eisenmenger, Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Xome.

Xome also enhanced its security posture by migrating to the cloud. Furthermore, with custom policies, Xome can now add restrictions to certain areas and resources. Finally, Azure Backup and Disaster Recovery has increased redundancy, preventing data loss and maintaining system availability.

Moving toward a bright future with Azure

Migrating to the Microsoft Cloud increased Xome’s productivity, enhanced its security, and cut costs. The company plans to continue this migration until all assets are moved to the cloud. Xome is excited about the next steps for the company: exploring the opportunities offered by AI with Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service.

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