Managing director Hannah Browne founded Midnyte City as a “high-end boutique consultancy” that specialises in cloud engineering, DevOps, software development and delivery leadership.
“We want to work with clients to improve those underpinning components 5%, 10% or 15%,” says Browne. “By bringing good delivery, hygiene, and practices and process improvements, and iterative ways of thinking and working, we realise the full value of knowledge workers and start to change the world.
The business applies what Browne describes as a “co-sourced” delivery model that sees Midnyte City consultants join with client-side teams to accelerate delivery, transfer skills and build capability. “We teach people how to fish, rather than fish for them.”
This, Browne says, is Midnyte City’s “unique differentiator”.
Making Midnyte City redundant
“There aren’t a lot of consultancies that start an engagement with the view of making themselves redundant by helping clients build the skills they need to generate IP that aligns strategically with their organisational goals,” she says.
“Most large consultancies engage in rescue behaviours and in creating customer reliance on them so they can shore up their long-term revenue goals.”
To maintain its boutique delivery and engagement model, Browne aims to cap Midnyte City’s workforce at 50.
Delivering uplift for clients
The consulting firm’s approach has borne fruit with clients such as Pepperstone, an online foreign exchange and contract for difference (CFD) broker that provides more than 40,000 traders worldwide with leading-edge technology to trade the world’s markets.
To improve service to traders and enhance its brand and reputation, Pepperstone elected to move from industry CFD order platforms to its own dedicated platform.
The project demanded a considerable uplift in the organisation’s technology capability, and Pepperstone opted to engage Midnyte City on a co-sourced basis on the transformation needed to operate critical trading infrastructure in-house.
Throughout the engagement, Midnyte City bolstered the skills and capability of the Pepperstone technology team while maintaining delivery momentum. This delivered improvements in cloud engineering and embedding effective processes into the online broker’s operations, environments, incident management and data protection.
Key outcomes included global networking and environment segregation to form the basis of the platform; improved CI/CD maturity; enhanced incident management processes and better data protection through enhanced backup.
“From the point of view of augmentation and enabling us to achieve self-sufficiency, the engagement was really successful and we are in a much better place as a result,” says David Jenkins, chief technology officer, Pepperstone.
“The Midnyte City team was indistinguishable from the Pepperstone technology team, and was in some cases leading functional areas while we uplifted the team underneath them.”
The new platform is now live and helping the Pepperstone acquire clients, with the Midnyte City engagement also enabling the business to reduce overall cloud spending through use of the Cloud FinOps framework.
For ‘hype commerce’ platform provider EQL, Midnyte City ran an observability initiative designed to implement a monitoring and logging solution, increase engineer productivity and improve the speed and efficiency of incident resolution.
The project yielded improvements in platform visibility, the ability to review the performance of third-party integrations, proactive spotting of errors, the speed of identifying root causes and real-time performance data.
Strapping rockets to careers
Midnyte City’s premium, customer-centric approach is also reflected in the quality of engineers and other team members attracted to the business.
“We want to be the place where great engineers come to strap rockets to their careers,” says Browne. “We create great experiences for our consulting team as they work on a range of projects with different stakeholders and different constraints.”
Maximising the contributions of their people is key to success for businesses, Browne says. This means doing the groundwork in terms of building alignment, using communication and applying techniques to bring people together and create that shared understanding.
“This builds trust and creates the psychological safety that allows people to be open in their feedback and contribute effectively towards the organisation’s strategic goals.”