Northgate is where the north-side trade belt starts. Around Northgate train station and along Sandgate Rd toward the Toombul border, the businesses are light-industrial operators, distribution firms, smaller wholesalers, and a handful of mixed-commercial operators that landed here because the property worked. Most carry a 6-to-30-seat front office and a yard or warehouse that runs on a different rhythm. The IT shape splits hard: a Microsoft 365 tenant doing the office work, and a back-office automation layer that has to talk to whatever the warehouse system happens to be.
What gets emphasised along Sandgate Rd
Mixed pillar, with a slight automation lean. Managed IT runs the office tenant — M365, Intune managing the laptop fleet, identity in Entra, Defender — and custom automation handles the integrations the off-the-shelf workshop or distribution software refuses to do. A representative engagement is a 22-seat distributor on Sandgate Rd with a Power Automate-driven order-to-invoice flow, an automated reconciliation between the warehouse system and Xero, and a Forms-driven returns intake that used to live in a paper folder. The office tenant gets administered alongside it, with a backup posture sized to the actual operational risk of an inventory system going dark.
What a Northgate engagement actually looks like
Senior-only means small-only. The practice is intentionally undersubscribed, so the same engineer who built your warehouse-to-Xero flow is the one who picks up when a forklift driver’s tablet stops scanning. There is no service desk between you and the work.
Remote-first, with the warehouse handled the same way the office is
Most of what runs a Northgate operator is software, and software is supported from the engineer’s desk via Microsoft Quick Assist and Intune Remote Help. Tablets and ruggedised devices in the yard are managed remotely the same way office laptops are. On-site visits earn their place when the work justifies them: a despatch-desk walkthrough, a tablet rollout to a new shift, a network change in a yard, a fit-out of a new tenancy. Some calls are van calls; most aren’t, and the schedule decides which is which.