Marque Group Solutions

Delivering planned, costed and targeted Azure migration

The Client

Marque Group Solutions (MGS) delivers SaaS-based CRM, sales, after-sales, and software services to the automotive sector.

With over 1,500 UK car dealerships in its international customer base, MGS has grown rapidly through private equity investment and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Vital Software, Aura Corporation, and Three60CRM now operate under the MGS umbrella.

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 Eavy

Director of Technology at Marque Group Solutions

The Challenge

Growth through acquisition brought complexity. MGS found itself with fragmented IT infrastructure and hosted environments. One business relied on a costly, rigid on-premises solution. Another operated in AWS public cloud. Meanwhile, we at Node4 hosted around 20 large virtual machines for MGS in our managed cloud.

Nathan Eavy, Director of Technology at MGS, explained that “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. 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.”

The Solution

MGS chose to work with us at Node4, building on an existing relationship and taking advantage of Microsoft funding we could access to support the project. As Nathan puts it, “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.”

We began with detailed technical reports and hosted workshops with MGS stakeholders to explore public cloud migration strategies. The goal wasn’t to replicate existing environments or lift and shift everything into Azure. It was about placing each application where it would perform best.

Nathan emphasises, “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. The idea was to be pragmatic about our cloud consumption and ensure each application was in its optimal location.”

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The Results

The core Azure migration is complete, and MGS is already seeing the benefits. “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.”

Our team didn’t just set up the environmentswe guided MGS’ infrastructure team, explained processes, and helped build in-house skills for future migrations. “It wasn’t just a case of Node4 setting up the environments and leaving us to it,” Nathan says. “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.”

There were challenges, particularly with the incumbent on-premises supplier, but we stayed calm and collaborative throughout. “This wasn’t down to Node4 or us,” Nathan recalls. “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.”

MGS will handle the next migration themselves, using our documentation and workshop insights. “We’ll draw on Node4’s consultation document and workshop sessions alongside all we’ve learned from the core migration,” Nathan says. “It’s a smaller project and more manageable with our current in-house resources.”

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The Node4 Difference

We’ve helped MGS achieve both short-term and long-term cost savings, with transparency and precision. “You don’t go into a cloud migration project expecting immediate cost savings,” Nathan concedes. “Even with all the planning, it takes a long time to see them. That said, Node4 has been transparent with costings throughout this migration project, right from the initial assessments.”

Thanks to our meticulous planning, MGS avoided the typical 20–30% budget overrun seen in cloud migrations. “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,” Nathan says. “That’s down to all the meticulous planning and workshopping we did with Node4 right at the start.”

Performance has improved dramatically.
“Some of our overnight processes that used to take eight hours can now be done in two,” Nathan notes.

Our billing analytics tool has given MGS granular visibility into cloud costs, enabling agile scaling. “There can be so many unknowns and variables in cloud environments, but Node4 has given us visibility at a granular level,” Nathan says. “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.”

Looking ahead, MGS is planning data warehouse and data lake projects, and considering re-architecting parts of its systems to be more cloud-native. 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. It’s a relationship that’s only going to grow as MGS continues to evolve.”