Test sharing debug
Test sharing debug
HDANYWHERE | Retail | Founded in 2006 I 15 employees I Global retail platform
The Customer
HDANYWHERE (HDA) is a manufacturer and retailer of entertainment systems, which enable people to centralise video sources and declutter living spaces.
Its systems distribute content and allow control across multiple rooms, so that entertainment becomes a unified experience throughout a property. Its customer base ranges from homeowners, to small retail and commercial businesses often in the hospitality sectors. As a vertically integrated business, HDA is in charge of the manufacturing, software development and retail operation for their software and products.
“The company has transformed since Node4 has been on the scene. Node4 started out providing the infrastructure for our e-commerce applications, but it’s now looking after more of our data and IoT operations.”
The Challenge
In the company’s early years, HDANYWHERE jumped from hosting provider to hosting provider. As the complexity of the service offering grew, so did the requirements from an infrastructure perspective. The team were running business-critical applications on their servers, and experienced various problems with performance and stability as operating environments were not optimised for the applications that they were built to support. When HDA turned to their service provider for support, they didn’t get what they needed.
“We’d get annoyed by poor service and leave,” explains Dillan Pattni, Head of Design at HDANYWHERE. “When you’re with a solutions provider that doesn’t really care whether your applications are running properly or if they’re even running, it stifles you. You can’t focus on growth as a company because you’re always distracted by problems your infrastructure is causing.”
The Solution
A conversation between one of HDANYWHERE’s technicians and Node4’s CEO Andy Gilbert suddenly put Node4 on HDANYWHERE’s radar. HDANYWHERE’s team did some research into Node4 and discovered that the provider could offer a more tailored solution for their growing business, with the expert support that they needed.
Node4 provided a scalable cloud hosting solution, protected by an N4 Firewall. As part of the onboarding service, one of Node4’s cloud and DevOps experts designed HDANYWHERE’s solution from scratch, ensuring the hardware was the right spec and optimised to run its applications.
HDANYWHERE started out with one virtual machine. Over the course of six years, the business grew and Node4 increased provision to support its growth – up to today’s nine virtual machines running everything from ecommerce to storage, data and IoT operations.
Node4’s solution provides the infrastructure for HDANYWHERE’s global retail platform, as well as hosting a product application from which staff can access logs, data and control systems (in tens of thousands) out in the field. It also provides the central node for HDANYWHERE’s IoT server, operating in three continents. Alongside all this, Node4 hosts and manages software updates and offers essential storage.
The Result
HDANYWHERE has experienced three major benefits from working with Node4: business growth, a resilient infrastructure and expert support.
Dillan insists that Node4 hasn’t just supported business growth, it’s enabled it by providing a resilient infrastructure. “Node4’s experts took so much care over the design of the initial solution that the server just didn’t go down. It ran perfectly, from the day it was commissioned to the day we shut it down for an upgrade,” he says. “When your platform is stable like that, it allows you to focus on other areas of growth.”
Another benefit that HDANYWHERE struggled to find elsewhere, is the expert support. “Node4 consistently impresses me with their customer service,” Dillan says. “They are behind much of HDANYWHERE’s system infrastructure and I would be a hairless, stressed out husk of a person without them.”
More than expertise though, Dillian stresses that it’s about the great working relationship he has with Node4. “Earlier in the year, we came a really close second in a Node4 social media competition,” he says. “I was disappointed because we came so close, but Node4 were really understanding and sent a bunch of pizzas to the office. It’s just little gestures like that that which make all the difference.”
Key Outcomes:
• Tailored solution
• Scalable cloud hosting
• Increased virtual machines
“The company has transformed since Node4 has been on the scene. Node4 started out providing the infrastructure for our e-commerce applications, but it’s now looking after more of our data and IoT operations.”
Dillan Pattni, Head of Design at HDANYWHERE
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