About Node Digital
We are a niche UK firm that hosts other people's open source software on hardware we own, then makes it useful: custom integrations, automation, the awkward wiring between the catalogue app and the thing you already run. CRM to finance. Files to e-signing. A workflow that has to touch six systems and still be someone else's problem at 2am.
That is the offer. Not a transformation programme. Not a two-person shop either.
Chris Evans and Matt Collier lead the company. Both have more than 25 years in UK hosting and managed services, and they are the names people in this trade already know. They still design the platform and they still get the difficult tickets. Behind them sits a core in-house team of five engineers and developers, the people who build and operate the estate day to day. Around that is a standing roster of freelancers and partner development houses we have worked with for years, which is how a specialist firm takes on a fat migration, a custom integration, or a burst of product work without pretending we are a 200-person consultancy.
What we do
Three jobs, usually sold as three contracts.
We host the software. Monitor, patch, back up, support. Nextcloud, EspoCRM, Ghost, Kafka, the rest of the catalogue. You use it. We keep the box running. Your data stays in a tenant you can point to, in the UK by default.
We integrate and automate. The catalogue is the start. Most businesses need the apps talking to each other, and to the systems we do not host: a ledger, a warehouse, a website, a homegrown tool. We write that glue. Evented automation, APIs, identity, the unglamorous mapping work. If it has an interface, we can usually put a workflow on it. See automation and custom apps for the shapes that already exist.
We help you choose, and we say when not to. The right open source app, the right model, the job that should stay on the SaaS you already pay for. Niche means we have done this enough times to have an opinion.
Who we are
A specialist firm, not a generalist agency and not a hyperscale reseller.
Chris and Matt head engineering and the company. The other three of the five are in-house developers and engineers on the same stack: platform, apps, integrations. Support is not a separate department. When you email us, an engineer with access to the systems answers, usually someone who has already touched your tenant.
We stay niche on purpose. Depth on a defined estate beats a logo wall of technologies nobody here has run. The people who sell you the work are the people who can still read the logs.
Meet Chris, Matt and how the team works.
How we scale
Five people run the platform. They do not have to be the only five people on your job.
For a standard tenant, the core team is enough: deploy, integrate with your login, keep it patched. When a piece of work is bigger than that (a CRM and ERP cutover, a custom integration that has to be right first time, a burst of frontend or mobile around a platform app, a programme with a deadline), we bring in named freelancers and partner houses from a roster we already know. They work to our stack, our tenancy model and our documentation. They do not become a mystery third party you have never heard of.
That is how we have always taken on large work. The heritage names (Google, Disney, the BBC and the rest) were never a 200-person Node. They were a specialist core, plus the extra hands the job needed, still led by the same people. We can scale a project up. We do not scale the firm into something that stops answering the phone.
How we deploy
By default we run your platforms on our own UK infrastructure. If you prefer, we deploy into a cloud tenancy you own on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, or onto hardware you already have.
Whichever route you choose, we look after it, we write down how it is built, and you can take it with you if you leave.
Our experience
The directors have spent their careers on mission-critical hosting and managed services: the class of system that cannot be "we'll look at it on Monday". That is still the standard. We plan for failure, we automate the routine, and we run our own company on the same platform, so we feel the rough edges first.
Our heritage
Node Digital acquired Tokyo Digital in 2023. That studio's work is why the past portfolio includes household names such as Google, Disney, the BBC, Harrods, Cisco, adidas and Emirates. The original site lives on in our archive.
Today the focus is the Node Platform, not agency retainers. The same specialist model applies: a tight core, extra capacity when the work needs it. The story of what we run now is how we run our own company on the platform.