The Network Factory
Infrastructure engineering for businesses that couldn't afford downtime.
Containers, pipelines and infrastructure as code, years before the rest of the industry caught up.
The Network Factory was where the engineering culture started. While most IT companies were still racking servers by hand, The Network Factory was building infrastructure as code, continuous delivery pipelines and containerised environments. Not as experiments. In production. For clients who needed their systems to stay up.
DevOps, cloud migration, security, compliance and platform design. But the capability list misses the point. What mattered was the philosophy underneath: that infrastructure should be repeatable, version-controlled and automated. That if you can't rebuild it from code, you don't really own it.
That philosophy became the engineering backbone of AxisOps. The below-the-waterline work that keeps everything above it running.
What they built
Infrastructure as Code
Environments you could version, review and rebuild from scratch. If you can't rebuild it from a repo, it doesn't count.
CI/CD Pipelines
Automated build-and-deploy that made deployments routine, not risky.
Cloud Migrations
Moving businesses off hardware they owned and onto infrastructure that scaled with them. No outage horror stories.
DevOps Culture
Not just new tools. Culture change: developers and operations as one team, owning outcomes together.
Security & Compliance
Built into the platform from day one, not retrofitted after an audit finding.
Platform Architecture
The below-the-waterline engineering that everything else stands on. Get this wrong and nothing above it scales.
Their DNA in AxisOps
When AxisOps was formed in 2013, The Network Factory's engineering discipline became the foundation everything else was built on. The containers, pipelines and platforms we run today trace directly back to Network Factory thinking, refined over a decade of production delivery.
The tools have changed several times over. The principles haven't.
AxisOps Timeline
2001. The companies that would become AxisOps start building. The Network Factory, Firestone IT and other specialist companies, each solving different parts of the same problem across software, networking, managed services, DevOps and cloud.
2001 to 2012. Over a decade of delivery. These companies grow by doing hard work well, picking up smaller specialists along the way.
2013. AxisOps is formed to unify these operations. One company, one team, combined expertise.
2014. Containers in production. We start migrating live client workloads into containerised environments early, before most of the industry catches up.
2016. We build our own infrastructure platform micro-glue that unifies and abstracts away the underlying cloud. Azure, AWS or on-prem, clients get the same tooling, the same deployments, the same reliability. Zero lock-in.
2018. The Coding Factory joins. Their software component architecture and engineering discipline strengthens our development capability.
2019. Full-stack observability. A monitoring and tracing platform, built in-house. Every request traced, every metric captured, every alert meaningful.
2020. We begin building our own software component framework codenamed Andromeda. The foundation for what will later become the building blocks of Microcelium.
Today. Agentic engineering and AI-assisted operations. Twenty-five years of production systems, now powered by Microcelium, our unifying platform. The tools change. The discipline doesn't.
See what we've become
The Network Factory's engineering DNA powers everything AxisOps builds today.