Retta and Huoneistokeskus

Quick facts

• Retta and Huoneistokeskus moved 100% to the cloud – Agilely with Sulava in four months.
• Entirely new IT infrastructure, including networks, workstation environments, and business systems was built in the project.
• Maintaining old systems was complex, expensive, and limited the development for the business to become more agile.
• The biggest lesson learnt was how important it is to keep end-users involved in the change.
• Retta Oy employs 700 experts.
• Huoneistokeskus employs 160 real estate experts.

Retta Oy is part of the Nordic Retta Group, specializing in the brokerage and management of apartments, properties, and commercial spaces. The company serves private individuals, businesses, and public entities in Finland and Sweden with 700 experts.

Huoneistokeskus, which employs 160 housing market experts across Finland, was part of the same group at the start of the project. In the fall of 2024, Retta and Huoneistokeskus embarked on a comprehensive renewal project when Retta Isännöinti, previously part of the group, was sold to a Swedish company. The remaining companies’ IT environments – both infrastructure and applications – had to be rebuilt from scratch.

After the project, Huoneistokeskus’s future took a new direction: at the beginning of 2025, the company moved under new ownership when the management and a domestic investor group bought the company. The modern cloud environment has since supported Huoneistokeskus’s journey as an independent entity.

The starting point was challenging, as the project schedule was very tight, and we wanted to complete the cloud leap we had been gradually advancing for years. We needed solutions that were both functional and supportive of future growth

says Ilkka Kemppainen, CIO of the Retta Group.

The transition project was a good opportunity to get rid of all remaining on-premise solutions, such as local Active Directory and related services, printing services, and all remaining business systems that had not yet been moved to SaaS services. Maintaining old systems was complex, expensive, and limited the development for the business to become more agile.

Modern IT Infrastructure Quickly Assembled

In the project, a completely new IT infrastructure was built for Retta and Huoneistokeskus, covering networks, workstation environments, and line of business systems. The schedule was tight, as the entire project had to be completed in four months due to business acquisitions.

The overall project was carried out in six different streams. Sulava was responsible for the design and development of Microsoft environments, and also migration from old systems. Several solutions were utilized, such as Microsoft OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.

“Sulava’s project manager Antti Kirmanen asked in the first meeting if we were finally moving 100% to the cloud. At the same time, he assured that Sulava had done several similar projects before, which was a relief considering the scope and complexity of the project,” Kemppainen explains.

Sulava’s team created a preliminary project plan for Retta based on Sulava’s experience from previous similar projects. Due to the schedule, existing data was transferred to the cloud as is, although the amount of data to be transferred surprised everyone.

The size of the task can be illustrated for example by the 32,000 Teams and SharePoint sites, 32 million documents, and 1,100 mailboxes migrated

summarizes Reetta Hamu, IT Director and Project Manager at Huoneistokeskus.

Less Bureaucracy, More Decisions

One of the biggest challenges was the scope and scheduling of the project – it involved about 175 people, including 20 from Sulava. Work was done in several parallel sub-projects and in close cooperation with different suppliers.

Since the project involved a wide range of users and different IT systems, identifying dependencies between tasks was a key. The introduction of new services and cloud migrations required precise coordination from Sulava to minimize disruption to end users. Surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges of the transition turned out to be legacy file and print services. For Huoneistokeskus, file services were replaced with Teams, but for Retta, these were built into the Azure Files cloud service.

We had the mandate from management to make decisions within the project – without it, staying on schedule would have been impossible. Quick and clear decision-making without too much bureaucracy was one of the key factors for success

Hamu explains.

“The biggest lesson was how important it is to keep end users involved in the change. When staff gets active communication, the adoption goes much smoother.”

Cloud Enables AI

With the project, Huoneistokeskus and Retta have moved entirely to a modern cloud environment, supporting more flexible and efficient work. Thanks to SharePoint and Teams, necessary files are found in a structured manner and can be securely shared within the organization. Together, the services enable seamless collaboration between different teams and employees.

The SaaS-based systems can flexibly adapt to business needs, whether it’s adding new users or expanding services. Naturally, the services work on both computers and mobile devices.

Now the IT infrastructure supports our business. Users have embraced the new tools well, and working is much smoother than before

Kemppainen says.

After the project, Sulava receives warm thanks from the client:

“Sulava took great responsibility for this project, and their attitude was positive and encouraging from the start – not to mention their high level of expertise. It was also really nice to work with Sulava! Their team pushed the project forward determinedly, and even though there were long days at times, they maintained humour and a relaxed attitude in their work. Without Sulava, the project would not have been completed,” Hamu praises.

With the foundation built in the cloud, both companies can continue to develop processes and better utilize tools from Microsoft’s ecosystem. In particular, the possibilities of using AI solutions, such as Copilot, are being explored.

“Moving to the cloud is not just an IT project – it is a business enabler. When everything operates in a modern cloud environment, systems are truly scalable, security is up-to-date, and adopting new innovations, such as AI, becomes much easier. This brings the company both cost efficiency and the ability to quickly adapt to market changes,” says Antti Kirmanen, project manager at the project from Sulava.

The cloud transition was not just a technical change, but it now enables completely new ways of working and utilizing AI in the future

Kemppainen concludes.

Writer: Mirka Kurkela
Published April 2025