Breedon Group is a leading construction materials company with over 5,000 users across more than 420 sites in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States.
Legacy infrastructure can slow operations, increase costs, and limit growth, but modernization unlocks agility, efficiency, and resilience. We’ll share real-world insights on how automation, scalability, and future-proofing IT have empowered Breedon to drive smarter, data-driven decisions while ensuring high-performance, always-on operations.
How Breedon is Paving the Way for Scalable, Resilient IT with Scale Computing™
Faced with the IT complexity of rapid acquisitions and growing international operations, Breedon Group turned to Scale Computing to simplify and modernize its infrastructure. From quarries to boardrooms, the company now runs a resilient, hybrid IT environment that scales effortlessly with business needs.
IT Challenges
- Rapid growth through acquisitions brought disparate legacy systems
- Harsh environments and rural locations required resilient infrastructure
- Limited local IT support made remote manageability critical
- Hybrid infrastructure needed to support both on-prem and cloud workloads
Scale Computing Solution
- Deployed the scalable Scale Computing Platform™ edge computing solution clusters across data centers and remote sites
- Introduced lightweight HE151 nodes to enable edge computing at distributed quarry locations
- Standardized infrastructure across newly acquired sites
- Integrated snapshot, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities
Customer Results
- Simplified IT operations across hundreds of locations
- Enabled real-time data collection and analytics at the edge
- Improved disaster recovery readiness across key regions
- Reduced complexity and cost by consolidating private cloud workloads
The Challenge: Keeping Pace with Growth While Taming Infrastructure Complexity
Since its founding in 2008, Breedon Group has grown into one of the UK’s largest construction materials companies, with operations spanning the UK, Ireland, and recently, the U.S. That growth came largely through acquisition, adding not just new locations but a patchwork of IT systems and infrastructure challenges.
“Each acquisition brought its own legacy systems, its own way of doing things. And suddenly, our IT landscape looked a bit like a patchwork quilt—not exactly ideal when you're aiming for reliable, resilient long-term scalability,” said Michael Bell, Principal IT Infrastructure Architect at Breedon Group. “Our environment quickly became complex and inconsistent, which made it harder to support the business as we scaled.”
Many of Breedon's remote sites operate in rugged conditions and rural locations with minimal connectivity and little to no onsite IT staff. This made reliability and manageability key priorities. Infrastructure needed to be compact and durable, yet capable of supporting real-time operational systems such as weighbridge automation, emissions compliance, and safety barrier controls.
Meanwhile, legacy systems ranging from Hyper-V hosts to aging private cloud deployment, were creating cost and performance bottlenecks. Breedon needed an infrastructure strategy that could bridge the gap between local compute needs, enterprise applications, and cloud services, all while minimizing operational overhead.
At Breedon our core values are: ‘Make it Happen, Keep it Simple, and Strive to Improve.’ Our business has changed dramatically in the last decade. That’s why our partnership with Scale Computing has worked so well; we’ve been able to keep our infrastructure simple, flexible, and resilient enough to support that change every step of the way.— Michael Bell, Principal IT Infrastructure Architect, Breedon Group
The Scale Computing Solution: A Unified Hybrid Platform for Core, Edge, and Analytics
Breedon began working with Scale Computing in 2012, initially deploying SC//Platform™ edge computing solution to support core operations in England. Over time, that partnership expanded to include dozens of HCI clusters across the UK and Ireland, including at Hope Cement, the largest cement plant in the country.
“The simplicity of the Scale Computing solution allowed us to roll it out consistently, even in the most remote and challenging environments,” Bell said. From quarries in rural Scotland to cutting-edge cement facilities in Ireland, SC//Platform clusters became the foundation for Breedon’s modern IT architecture.
In 2021, Breedon replaced its entire infrastructure in Ireland with Scale Computing, replicating workloads between Kinnegad Cement and Mallusk to boost resiliency. In 2023, the team took edge computing a step further, rolling out HE151 NUC clusters at remote sites to support IoT, PowerBI integration, and real-time data collection through Azure IoT Hub.
Most recently, the company deployed an NVMe-powered SC//Platform cluster dedicated to data analytics workloads, running Kubernetes nodes and serving PowerBI users company-wide. This allowed Breedon to consolidate workloads previously hosted in the private cloud and bring them back on-prem, improving performance and control.
Whether it’s core infrastructure, remote edge compute, or integrating with cloud analytics platforms, Scale Computing gives us the building blocks and the flexibility to modernize how we deliver essential IT services to the business— Michael Bell, Principal IT Infrastructure Architect, Breedon Group
The Benefits: Resilience and Innovation from Core to Edge
Today, Breedon Group benefits from a consistent, scalable IT foundation that has kept pace with its aggressive expansion. “We’re no longer managing a patchwork of disconnected systems,” said Bell. “Scale Computing gives us a common platform for delivering infrastructure across a fleet of hundreds of sites with minimal overhead.”
With built-in snapshotting, replication, and remote support via the Scale Computing portal, the company has improved its disaster recovery posture significantly. Remote sites can be managed and monitored from a central location, and clusters can be restored quickly in the event of an issue.
Edge computing has opened up new possibilities for innovation. Breedon’s IoT and BI integrations are helping frontline teams make faster, data-driven decisions. “We’re able to bring intelligence to the edge, even in sites with limited connectivity,” said Bell. “That’s been a game-changer for operational visibility.”
Looking ahead, Breedon plans to expand its disaster recovery environment, continue migrating workloads from private cloud to on-prem Scale Computing infrastructure, and explore new remote application delivery models—all powered by SC//Platform.
“Breedon’s growth over the last decade has been nothing short of transformational. But none of it would have been possible, or sustainable, without a solid foundation in IT. And that’s where Scale Computing comes in. Our relationship with Scale Computing started back in 2012, and it’s scaled right alongside the business. The next phase of our journey is all about resilience, innovation, and making IT simpler,” said Bell. “Scale Computing has been a trusted partner in helping us get there.”