Marque Group Solutions

Marque Group Solutions (MGS) provides the automotive sector with SaaS-based CRM sales, after-sales, and software services. Its international customer base includes over 1,500 UK car dealerships. MGS has grown through a mix of private equity investment and mergers and acquisitions, with Vital Software, Aura Corporation, and Three60CRM now operating under the MGS umbrella.  

Growing this way through mergers and acquisitions meant MGS lacked a unified approach to its IT infrastructure and hosted environments. One business relied on an expensive and inflexible hosted on-premises solution, whilst a second operated in an AWS public cloud environment. Meanwhile, Node4 hosted a significant part of MGS’ infrastructure, including around 20 large VMs, in its own managed cloud environment. 

“We had a basic understanding of Azure, and our software solutions are built on Microsoft’s tech stack, so there was a strong argument to migrate our other hosted environments to Azure,” Nathan Eavy, Director of Technology at Marque Group Solutions, explains. “We decided early on to partner with an MSP for the project. This would remove some of the migration burden from our IT team, and the MSP could guide us through Azure best-practice. If all went well, we would be able to perform future migrations ourselves.”  

Nathan continues: “We already had a good relationship with Node4, so we engaged them for the project and for ongoing support and maintenance. We also had an added incentive, as Node4 was able to access Microsoft funding to support the project. It didn’t alter our approach or sway our strategic thinking, but it was definitely a welcome contribution.”  

Planning, consultation and collaboration  

As a first step, one of Node4’s consultants produced detailed technical reports outlining proposed Azure environments for the two relevant MGS businesses. Node4’s team then hosted a series of workshops with key MGS stakeholders to explore public cloud migration strategies for both companies.  

“We didn’t want to create an Azure environment that just duplicated what we had in AWS, and we didn’t want to simply lift and shift everything from our on-premises environment into the cloud,” Nathan emphasises. “The idea was to be pragmatic about our cloud consumption and ensure each application was in its optimal location. The industry is full of stories about businesses having to repatriate applications from their public cloud environments, and we were determined it would not happen to us. If an application didn’t belong in the cloud, and there wasn’t a compelling case for moving it, we wouldn’t put it there just for the sake of it.”  

Migrating MGS Core Products to Azure 

 “Although we had some Azure-based knowledge, it was siloed within our three companies, so we needed Node4’s expertise to bring that unifying influence,” Nathan explains. “This was apparent when it came to following best practice for setting landing zones and configuring key pieces of infrastructure. We couldn’t have done that ourselves, and it would have ultimately impacted the user experience of our platform.”  

He continues: “It wasn’t just a case of Node4 setting up the environments and leaving us to it. Their team also played a vital role in guiding our infrastructure team. They explained all the processes and procedures, helping develop in-house skills to run smaller-scale migrations in the future. They pointed out simple, easily overlooked things, like not leaving applications to run unnecessarily and rack up excessive monthly bills.”  

Nathan recalls, however, that there were a few challenges along the way: “This wasn’t down to Node4 or us. We had issues with our incumbent on-premises infrastructure supplier, who didn’t make things easy. We ended up with a very tight timeframe for the core migration project and had to delay the secondary one. But Node4 was with us every step of the way, and their team kept level heads throughout.”  

Nathan and his team will run the rescheduled Azure migration themselves. “We’ll draw on Node4’s consultation document and workshop sessions alongside all we’ve learned from the core migration. It’s a smaller project and more manageable with our current in-house resources,” he admits, “So it’s a good place to test our skills with Node4 support still available if we need it.”  

Short-term and long-term cost savings 

“You don’t go into a cloud migration project expecting immediate cost savings. Even with all the planning, it takes a long time to see them,” Nathan concedes. “That said, Node4 has been transparent with costings throughout this migration project, right from the initial assessments. That’s been a huge benefit as unknown costs are one of the biggest public cloud migration and consumption challenges, but we’ve kept these to an absolute minimum.” 

He continues: “For the average lift and shift migration, depending on how your systems are architected, I think you need to add at least another 20-30% to your original budget to cover unexpected costs, but we haven’t needed those contingency funds. That’s down to all the meticulous planning and workshopping we did with Node4 right at the start. But it’s not just the cost savings; we’re also benefiting from huge improvements in speed and efficiency. Some of our overnight processes that used to take eight hours can now be done in two.” 

With MGS’ core Azure migration now completed, Nathan is seeing much greater visibility on his monthly hosting and management costs. Thanks, in part, to Node4’s billing analytics tool: “There can be so many unknowns and variables in cloud environments, but Node4 has given us visibility at a granular level. This enables us to scale our cloud consumption so we’re only paying for what we need and can be far more agile. That makes me very happy indeed.”  

Nathan concludes: “We’re only really scratching the surface of what this new scalability means for us. We have plenty of projects in the pipeline that will definitely make use of it. But it’s about having the expertise to manage that scaling, and Node4 will help us there too. Some of these projects deal with a lot of data; we’re considering data warehouse and data lake projects. We’re also contemplating re-architecting significant parts of our systems to be more cloud-based. But I can also see all sorts of other projects coming down the line because of ongoing conversations with Node4 and their consultative approach with us. It’s a relationship that’s only going to grow as MGS continues to evolve.”