Atex was a global media publishing software company with a 100-strong workforce, headquartered in Texas, with a presence in five locations: Melbourne, Stockholm, the UK, Canada, and the US. Part of the Constellation Software group, Atex served as the central hub for media publishing requirements and had recently acquired a subscription management company, adding a new division to the business. Atex grew through acquisitions, and each acquired product brought its own databases and development work to converge.
Before Convox, Atex had little to no experience with cloud management. Most of its products and solutions were on-premise installations. They were functional, but they could not deliver cloud-based services to customers, and the company employed no cloud management tools, relying instead on hand-run processes. For a company that needed to deliver SaaS offerings to its customers, that combination of on-premise products and manual execution was the gap Convox would need to close.
Atex needed to deliver SaaS offerings to customers cost-effectively and efficiently. The first offering was web content management, which required a consistent, centralized platform to improve availability for customers. As Atex grew through acquisitions, the need widened. Each acquired product had to be readied for the cloud and deployed quickly. The team also had to streamline development across the portfolio and converge the acquired databases, work it knew could take a long time. With no cloud management tools in place and everything run by hand, Atex went looking for a cloud deployment platform that could carry that work.
Atex adopted Convox and automated its builds, with Convox delivering and managing the entire CI/CD pipeline. Each customer received a dedicated cluster, so low-traffic customers ran on separate clusters from high-traffic customers and Atex could manage its resources better. Convox also provided a simpler abstraction layer over cloud services such as ECS. Assembling a portfolio through acquisition, Atex finally had the centralized technology platform it had been looking for: one place to prepare products for the cloud and deploy them quickly.
With Convox in place, the team worked through Git-based workflows and automated CI/CD pipelines. Atex primarily ran on AWS infrastructure, but as interest grew in working with several different products and cloud vendors, the team found that Convox made it more convenient to use GCP as well. That flexibility came with a cost benefit: rather than hiring specialists for each cloud platform, Atex worked through one more straightforward, robust layer, which the team considered a valuable cost-saving addition to its processes. Atex could adapt to different cloud platforms quickly and, as a result, grow at a faster pace.
Atex's outcomes were structural rather than headline numbers: no cost or time figures were recorded, and what the team reported is qualitative. Automation replaced manual execution. A simpler abstraction layer over cloud services like ECS reduced the cost of hiring specialists for each cloud platform. AWS remained the primary infrastructure, and Convox made other clouds, including GCP, more convenient when the team had a reason to use them. Atex ended up with automated software delivery, one straightforward layer instead of per-platform specialists, and room to grow faster. The engagement dates to Convox's Amazon ECS generation; Convox has since moved to Kubernetes.
