Node4 has helped drive a modernised, hybrid infrastructure strategy at Atria and the Agena Group, a UK-based company specialising in parking and software solutions.
Formed in 2019, Atria is part of the Agena Group, a multi-disciplinary business providing car parking and related software solutions to customers across the UK. Positioned as a flexible, pioneering and forward-thinking company, its mission is to change the parking industry with customer-focused software backed by years of industry experience in design, software development and business management.
The challenge
As well as its role as a leading software developer for the parking industry, Atria also provides solutions to the three other organisations in the 300-employee Agena Group – Premier Park, Park Watch and UK Car Park Management. As a growing and acquisitive business, Atria needed to update its legacy data centre and hardware infrastructure strategy and processes to deliver the agility and performance required in a competitive sector.
As Stuart MacLaren, Group CTO explained, “Historically, our technology stack was built and supported by Atria’s original founder, but following its acquisition and my arrival as CTO, we focused on modernising both our infrastructure and operational IT processes. This is an important part of our growth strategy and our objective is to deliver a range of benefits for our teams and customers alike.”
The solution
In looking for a technology partner to help design and deliver on their requirements, Atria evaluated several options before engaging Node4. The initial requirement was to implement a managed service solution to outsource their database administration function. In particular, Node4’s ability to deliver 24/7 monitoring and alerts, while also addressing some key legacy database technology challenges, enabled them to focus on both performance and reliability.
Building on this initial success, Atria has since widened its relationship with Node4 as part of a strategy to progressively migrate some of its IT services into the AWS public cloud as part of a hybrid infrastructure strategy.
“Our leadership team has a strong corporate enterprise background, and we wanted to bring that mindset to Atria and the wider group across our technology strategy,” said MacLaren. “As a result, our investment in AWS provides us with the foundation we need to deliver software innovation and performance for our customers, and Node4 play a crucial role in making that happen.”
As Atria moves workloads into AWS, Node4 continues to deliver a managed service wrap, backed by support geared to the importance of each system. While mission-critical services receive tier 1 support, others operate at different levels, allowing Atria to focus its technology budget exactly where it is needed.
The benefits
Working with Node4 has enabled Atria to focus on modernising its infrastructure strategy by building new services on the AWS platform, while also addressing database performance issues with managed service capabilities that support their daily operations.
“In addition, the Node4 Linux team has helped us to update and develop our Linux-based technologies,” said MacLaren. “This forms part of an overall package where, from account management to support, they have become an important technology partner across Atria and the wider group.”
Looking ahead, MacLaren and his team are working with Node4 to further accelerate their move to AWS as part of their hybrid strategy: “Our current and future development ethos is to be cloud-native from the ground up, and with the ongoing support of the Node4 team, I’m confident that we’re building a technology stack that will pit the business and its customers in an ideal place to continue innovating in the years to come.”
