Allen Pyke Associates Creates a Global Office Environment for Critical Content

“We were facing so many infrastructural constraints when working with the kinds of files that drive a design business forward. Egnyte takes away all those constraints.”

James Hyde

Director • Allen Pyke Associates

For the landscape architecture firm Allen Pyke Associates, cloud infrastructure alone is not enough. The firm takes on rural, suburban, urban, and mixed-use residential developments, and when the time came to switch from local servers to cloud software for content management, the team knew they would need a system that could handle the mission-critical content that this wide range of projects rely on every day.

The firm consulted the managed services provider Generation IT, who recommended Egnyte as the best system to meet this need. Since then, Allen Pyke has seen nothing but success – from file management to collaboration to talent acquisition and beyond.

Challenge: Find a Cloud Provider That Can Handle Critical Content

When director James Hyde started at Allen Pyke in 2003, the company was using three or four desktops for all of its content management. As the company grew, it opened new offices around the UK, eventually expanding from desktops to two on-premises servers.

For a time, this arrangement worked well. The team felt their most important content was in good hands. “Our servers were good at handling the CAD drawings and Photoshop files that are essential to the work we do as a landscape architecture company,” James recalls. “These are really RAM-hungry files, and having on-site storage made it easy to access them quickly.” 

Eventually, however, the company’s local infrastructure began to age. Then Covid abruptly shifted the company to a remote-work model. The confluence of these forces necessitated a switch from local infrastructure to cloud-based content management. But the company had reservations about diving head-first into the cloud.

“Several IT providers had warned us that cloud services might not work well with the specific kind of work we do,” explains James. “There could be issues with things like file sizes and referencing.” For Allen Pyke, the challenge was to find a cloud provider that could handle the kind of content specific to the firm’s landscape architecture projects – not just generic content, such as HR documents and Excel spreadsheets, that are standard across industries

Solution: Partner with Egnyte Through Generation IT

Around this time, the team connected with Generation IT, a managed services provider and Egnyte partner, to help Allen Pyke navigate this content management crossroads. GenIT assured the team that cloud-based content management could, in fact, serve Allen Pyke’s needs – given the right provider. On GenIT’s recommendation, the team trialed Egnyte, and was immediately impressed with its ability to handle the company’s valuable content.

“Every other cloud provider we tried really struggled with our content. For example, we work a lot with AutoCAD and Adobe InDesign, which rely on xrefs and asset links, and these providers couldn’t deal with that,” James explains. “But with Egnyte, there’s no issue. Files open up just like before, and with no lag.”

Collaboration is a major component of Allen Pyke’s content management workflows. The team shares business-critical content, much of which requires very large file sizes, with external stakeholders including clients, consultants, CGI artists, and more. Egnyte’s remote collaboration functionality makes this a breeze. The team can set granular permissions to folders and files so that the right stakeholders in any location have instant access to files of any size. As James explains: “Previously, for large file sizes, we’d use a system like WeTransfer, which is slow and difficult to navigate. Or our clients would be using half a dozen different systems that were hard to keep track of. But with Egnyte, we just give them access to a folder, or send them a link, and they immediately have access to the latest version of the file.”

James also speaks to the ways in which, by facilitating remote collaboration, Egnyte’s cloud system has strengthened Allen Pyke’s talent acquisition. “Today, salary and benefits aren’t the only things that attract workers. Work-life balance and the flexibility to work from outside the office are big drivers as well. I recently was able to plug in and get work done while I was at the shop waiting for my car to be serviced. That kind of flexibility is huge today, and if we don’t offer it, our competitors will.”

“We partner with organizations like Allen Pyke that are incredible at what they do but may lack some of the technical knowhow to achieve their IT goals.”

Alan McIntosh

CEO • Generation IT

Benefits: Single Global Office for Mission-Critical Content

By clearing a smooth path for remote collaboration on files in Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe InDesign, and other systems Allen Pyke depends on to conduct its business, Egnyte has turned the company’s constellation of offices and stakeholders into a single global office in the cloud. Critically, Egnyte has received nothing but glowing feedback from users across the company. “Egnyte has a folder structure that’s really similar to what we were used to,” James says. “People tell us that the only difference between Egnyte and what we had before is that Egnyte is actually faster.”

This is a testament not only to Egnyte’s intuitiveness, but also to the work that GenIT put in to get everything set up for the transition. As James says: “Since we brought GenIT in, they’ve been invaluable in helping us achieve what we needed to achieve. From helping us improve our infrastructure to our day-to-day operations, every time we need something, they make it happen.”

Alan McIntosh, CEO at Generation IT, adds: “Our differentiator as an MSP is that we see ourselves as a virtual CTO. We partner with organizations like Allen Pyke that are incredible at what they do but may lack some of the technical knowhow to achieve their IT goals. Our goal is to bridge that gap.”

Now that Allen Pyke’s critical project content is hosted on Egnyte, the company plans to transition its administrative content currently housed on SharePoint. “It’s become a bit problematic, because people are now used to sharing files on Egnyte, and in fact prefer that, but have to switch over to a different platform for administrative content,” James explains. “So one of our 2025 goals is to move the admin content to Egnyte as well. We want to have everything in one place, and that place should be Egnyte.”

In explaining that assessment, James returns to Egnyte’s prowess at handling the content that other on-prem and cloud platforms struggle with, but which are central to Allen Pyke’s business: “We were facing so many infrastructural constraints when working with the kinds of files that drive a design business forward. Egnyte takes away all those constraints.”