Midnyte City Emphasizes Building Robust Foundations as Key to Organizational Success

Melbourne-headquartered technology consulting firm Midnyte City places a significant emphasis on enhancing foundational components critical to all organizations, teams, and systems, despite the allure of AI and big data. The company, founded by Managing Director Hannah Browne, positions itself as a "high-end boutique consultancy" specializing in cloud engineering, DevOps, software development, and delivery leadership. By prioritizing foundational elements, Midnyte City aims to bring substantial value to businesses, recognizing the importance of building a robust infrastructure before delving into advanced technologies like AI and big data.

Hannah Browne, Managing Director of Midnyte City, expresses the company's approach by stating, "We want to work with clients to improve those underpinning components 5%, 10%, or 15%. By bringing good delivery, hygiene, and practices and process improvements, and iterative ways of thinking and working, we realize the full value of knowledge workers and start to change the world." The emphasis is on incremental improvements in foundational elements, fostering efficiency and effectiveness.

Midnyte City adopts a "co-sourced" delivery model, where its consultants collaborate with client-side teams to expedite delivery, transfer skills, and enhance capability. Browne emphasizes the importance of teaching clients how to navigate and improve their processes independently, following the philosophy of "teaching people how to fish, rather than fish for them." This approach aims to empower clients and build lasting capabilities within their organizations.

Hannah Browne emphasizes that Midnyte City's "unique differentiator" lies in its approach of aiming to make itself redundant in engagements. Unlike many consultancies, Midnyte City starts projects with the objective of helping clients build the necessary skills and generate intellectual property (IP) aligned strategically with their organizational goals. Browne notes, "There aren’t a lot of consultancies that start an engagement with the view of making themselves redundant... Most large consultancies engage in rescue behaviors and in creating customer reliance on them so they can shore up their long-term revenue goals." This distinctive approach positions Midnyte City as a partner committed to empowering clients and fostering self-sufficiency rather than creating dependency.

Hannah Browne, aiming to maintain Midnyte City's boutique delivery and engagement model, has set a workforce cap of 50 employees. This strategy underscores the company's commitment to a focused and specialized approach, allowing for tailored solutions and close collaboration with clients.

Midnyte City's approach has proven successful with clients such as Pepperstone, an online foreign exchange and contract for difference (CFD) broker serving over 40,000 traders globally. Facing the need to enhance its technology capability and transition to an in-house trading platform, Pepperstone engaged Midnyte City on a co-sourced basis for the transformation. Throughout the engagement, Midnyte City not only facilitated the transformation but also strengthened the skills and capabilities of the Pepperstone technology team. The collaboration resulted in improvements in cloud engineering, the implementation of effective processes, and enhancements in areas such as incident management and data protection within Pepperstone's operations.

The engagement with Midnyte City brought about key outcomes for Pepperstone, including the establishment of global networking and environment segregation as the foundation of the trading platform. Additionally, there was an improvement in continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) maturity, enhanced incident management processes, and better data protection achieved through improved backup practices.

David Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer at Pepperstone, emphasized the success of the engagement, stating, "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." He noted that the Midnyte City team seamlessly integrated with the Pepperstone technology team, even leading functional areas in some cases while uplifting the team underneath.

The new trading platform is now live, contributing to Pepperstone's client acquisition efforts. Furthermore, the engagement with Midnyte City has enabled Pepperstone to reduce overall cloud spending through the use of the Cloud FinOps framework. This highlights the tangible and comprehensive impact of the collaboration on both technological capabilities and business outcomes.

For the 'hype commerce' platform provider EQL, Midnyte City executed an observability initiative aimed at implementing a monitoring and logging solution. The goal was to enhance engineer productivity, expedite incident resolution, and improve overall efficiency. The initiative resulted in increased platform visibility, the ability to review third-party integration performance, proactive identification of errors, faster root cause identification, and real-time performance data.

Midnyte City's premium and customer-centric approach extends to the quality of engineers and team members attracted to the business. According to Hannah Browne, the Managing Director, "We want to be the place where great engineers come to strap rockets to their careers." The company prioritizes creating positive experiences for its consulting team, offering diverse projects with different stakeholders and constraints.

Browne emphasizes the importance of maximizing contributions from team members, highlighting the significance of building alignment, effective communication, and techniques that foster a shared understanding. Establishing trust and creating a psychologically safe environment enable individuals to provide open feedback and actively contribute toward the organization's strategic goals.