Penske Automotive Group Prepares Terabyte-Scale Reynolds & Reynolds Data Handoffs in Three Minutes with Files.com

Penske Automotive Group is one of the largest automotive retailers in the world. The NYSE-listed company operates more than 350 franchised dealerships across the United States, the United Kingdom, and other international markets, generated $26.2 billion in retail automotive dealership revenue in 2024, and runs one of North America's largest commercial truck dealership groups. Its portfolio is deliberately in motion: PAG grows by acquiring dealerships and consolidates by selling them.

Every one of those sales carries a data handoff inside it. A dealership's operating history lives in its dealership management system, run by Reynolds & Reynolds: years of transactions, deals, and records. When a store is sold, the buyer typically moves to a different DMS provider and needs a complete copy. PAG's own controllers and general managers need the same history to validate transactions after the sale closes. And the records must be retained for seven years. A company that buys and sells dealerships as a matter of strategy was always going to face this handoff, deal after deal, at whatever size the data turned out to be. With Files.com, PAG now prepares each handoff in about three minutes, without routing the archive through an internal server.

An 836 GB Zip File Stands Between the Seller and the Buyer

When PAG divests a dealership, Reynolds & Reynolds spends four to five weeks assembling a complete export of the store's data. It arrives as a single zip archive, routinely hundreds of gigabytes. The largest to date was 836 GB zipped. Another contained 1.6 million individual files.

For years, delivery was physical or manual. Reynolds could ship a hard drive, or send the export by FTP to an internal file server. From there, someone unzipped the archive locally with 7-Zip, browsed it on that server, and re-staged a copy for the buying party. Every sale put a piece of internal infrastructure in the critical path of the deal, and pulling archives that size through it meant, in the words of David Lewis, the architect who operates the workflow, "crushing the bandwidth of that server."

The cost was not only an IT cost. The handoff gates the transaction itself:

“If we can't present the stuff to the potential buyers, we can't sell.”

Too Big to Download, and SharePoint Chokes on It

The obvious alternatives had already been tried. SharePoint was trialled as a home for the archives and abandoned. As Tommy Rypina, PAG's Vice President of Technology Services, put it, SharePoint "kind of chokes on it." The deeper problem was that at this scale, any approach that requires the archive to move before anyone can open it fails on arrival:

“When we're talking about this being 836 gigabytes zipped, it's just not usable.”

PAG also controls neither end of the exchange. The export is produced by Reynolds & Reynolds on its own schedule, and part of the audience is an external buyer moving to a different vendor. Three constituencies need different access to one dataset: internal finance reviewers, the team managing DMS records, and the purchasing party.

So the fix had a clear specification. Take delivery directly from Reynolds over SFTP. Open the archive where it lands, with no download-extract-reupload cycle through an internal machine. Scope access for the internal reviewers. Give the external buyer the same location rather than another copy. Hold the records for seven years. Penske Automotive Group made Files.com that landing point.

Reynolds & Reynolds Delivers Straight Into Files.com

PAG stood up a dedicated Reynolds & Reynolds drop-off on its Files.com site and moved extraction into the platform itself. Reynolds now delivers each divestiture archive by SFTP directly into that repository. No hard drive ships, and no internal server receives it.

Files.com's native unzip then extracts the archive in place. Nothing has to be downloaded to be unpacked, so the terabyte-scale export never crosses PAG's internal bandwidth at all. The controllers and general managers who validate historical transactions reach the extracted records through permissioned, SSO-backed Files.com accounts. And the buyer collects from the same place:

“We can just give the third party access to this one location on Files.com.”

The data lands once and stays put for the whole life of the handoff: delivery, internal review, buyer collection, and the seven-year retention that follows.

The Handoff Now Takes About Three Minutes

With the Files.com data room in place, PAG replaced a per-deal staging exercise with a repeatable pattern.

• Preparing a full handoff by hand, from unzipping the archive to permissioning reviewers to standing up the buyer's share, takes about three minutes.
• The internal file server is out of the data path entirely. Nothing is downloaded, extracted locally, or re-uploaded, and no hard drives travel between companies.
• Roughly 2.5 terabytes of divested-dealership records sit in one permissioned repository, meeting the seven-year retention obligation from a single governed location instead of physical media and local servers.
• The next divestiture needs no new infrastructure. Reynolds & Reynolds already knows the route, and the same repository serves every deal that follows.

Selling a Store No Longer Includes an IT Project

PAG manages a portfolio of more than 350 dealerships, and selling one no longer carries a file-logistics project inside it.

The lesson runs against the usual assumption about M&A data rooms. PAG did not need a separate, single-purpose data room product, physical media, or its own servers in the path to hand a terabyte of history from one company to another. It needed a single governed landing point that the counterparty could deliver to and both sides of the deal could reach. Files.com became that point, and the person who runs the workflow now preps an entire divestiture handoff in about three minutes.