Immedia: a growth-led cloud solution

Immedia is the award-winning audio engagement group, working with big name retailers and financial brands to help enhance customer experience by streaming live and pre-recorded DJs into stores. Clients include JD Sports, Topshop, HSBC and Nationwide. The business is based in Newbury with studios in Aberdeen and more recently, Houston, Texas.

Creating a cloud-led growth strategy
As part of its growth business, Immedia needed to upscale its IT infrastructure to support expansion into new markets, as well as deepening its existing customer base. Streaming live into stores nationally means that any unexpected downtime can immediately impact on their customers’ brands.  For Immedia, this meant a constant pressure to deliver a consistent, reliable service.  At the time, streaming was delivered from on premise servers, which was exposed to risks such as fire and theft.

For Chris Kinch, Immedia’s Head of IT, any hardware failures with the service would inevitably derail his strategy, alongside ongoing maintenance requirements.

He explains, “We knew our business was constrained by the legacy servers we were operating from, and needed new services in place so that we could move forward. Scalability was a real priority for us as was ensuring software compatibility with a number of our virtual clients. This all pointed towards us transitioning to the cloud completely.”

A cloud collaboration

Headed up by Paul Tacey-Green, Amito offered a solution as a dedicated hosting provider, able to manage Immedia’s complete infrastructure requirements, minimising the risk and providing trusted support.  The team transitioned Immedia to the Amito public cloud to reduce the risk of a single point of failure.  The team manages and monitors Immedia’s full platform, meaning Chris and his team have 24/7 proactive support.  This next level in maturity for the organisation’s infrastructure has supported their continual growth as Immedia business evolves into the enterprise market.

Chris adds,” Paul got our vision straight away and came up with solutions that we didn’t know were possible. At the same time, he was respectful of the spec, and understood the sensitivities around this move. To ensure a seamless deployment, Paul and his team tested of the environment which really boosted our confidence. Amito were also closer to our UK HQs so this made it feel more personal for us.”

Integrated into Immedia’s solution is Amito’s unique Vision customer portal. This hub centralises client account data, details performance and ensures a collaborative approach with customers and the Amito team. Chris is able to control and fine-tune access rights to the service, while supported by a proactive monitoring service. With any problems resolved before they become critical, Chris is no longer firefighting, instead focusing on his proactive tech strategy.

Chris comments, “Amito were efficient, collaborative and supportive and have really minimised our downtime. With Vision, we have that support on a portal and a quick response, rather than phone call after phone call.”

Building flexibility into Immedia’s cloud platform has also driven the project’s success, with the ability to add new servers, as the business requires. It has also meant that new clients are efficiently on-boarded, and as the business grows, it will be easier to roll out services across new servers.

Making cloud part of the future

“For any business looking to undertake a cloud project, my advice is don’t be afraid to do it,” Chris adds. “We’re a small company and for us it was a big step but we really established real trust with our cloud partners and built that rapport. From a tech perspective, cloud based products are the future, so just go for it.”

Paul says: “We are really proud of the uplift and improvement we made for Immedia; they are still in the process of migrating to Amito but I’m confident that it will significantly improve their ease of growth and removes a number of pain points, simplifying the way that they run their business.  Fundamentally this transition is essential for their business, if their infrastructure were to fail it would be critical for their service and of course their customers.”