Arc XP Accelerates Growth, Serves Customers around the Globe alongside AWS Partner Wizeline

Arc XP hosts an average of 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly on its digital experience solution by working alongside AWS Partner Wizeline. Arc XP helps companies create branded content and expand their channels of commerce using its proprietary software. Growing out of a division of the Washington Post in 2014, the company faced challenges keeping up with demand as it expanded into new countries. In 2019, Arc XP partnered with Wizeline to gain support and achieve scalability. Since then, Arc XP has used Wizeline to build its serverless architecture on AWS, which has facilitated a greater focus on product innovation, enhanced the user experience, and accelerated its global growth.

Cloud-based digital experience company Arc XP needed to accelerate its software development as demand for its services grew across the Americas and into Asia and Europe. The company, which developed out of a division of the Washington Post in 2014 and was built entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), wanted to expand without compromising the quality of its technical support and service to customers.

To facilitate its growth, Arc XP started working alongside AWS Partner Wizeline in 2019. By working with Wizeline’s engineers, who were already familiar with building applications on AWS, Arc XP increased its productivity and freed resources so that it could focus more on product innovation and development, creating an enhanced user experience and attracting more business.

Arc XP is an AWS Partner offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that helps companies create and distribute content, engage in ecommerce, and deliver multichannel experiences. Its AWS-native proprietary software was originally built to service the Washington Post newsroom. Now it serves clients in more than 25 countries and hosts an average of 1.5 billion unique visitors every month.

In 2018, Arc XP extended its regions of service to include Europe and Asia, creating a need to scale its customer service and engineering teams. “With demand on the solution growing, we were continuously expanding our professional services team,” says Zach Perry, Vice President of Engineering at Arc XP. “We wanted to provide a support and services arm that would help customers use our solution, but we wanted to do it in a way that would be as scalable as possible while staying true to our roots of being a software company.”

Wanting to avoid training new team members on cloud computing, the company sought out Wizeline in 2019 for support and to keep up with demand. Top leadership at Arc XP was already familiar with Wizeline and its AWS expertise, having previously worked with the company. “We have training on AWS, and we encourage team members to get AWS Certifications,” says Carlos Cajina, Portfolio Delivery Director at Wizeline. “Our common ground on AWS is an advantage for Arc XP.”

The collaboration between the two companies deepened when Wizeline began to assist Arc XP with product development. “The inflection point was when Arc XP needed additional resources to accelerate its product build on AWS,” says Chris Jenkins, Senior Client Manager at Wizeline. “We grew the relationship from there.”

Arc XP used Wizeline’s serverless expertise to build its computing infrastructure on AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that makes it simple for users to run code without provisioning or managing servers. Wizeline is an AWS Lambda Partner validated for AWS Lambda Delivery. “Anything serverless is very impactful,” says Perry. “Using AWS Lambda as the foundation of our web hosting solution has been a real game changer.” Now Arc XP is running nearly 70 percent of its applications on AWS Lambda.

Since working alongside Wizeline, Arc XP has heavily adopted other serverless solutions on AWS within its architectures. For example, it uses Amazon DynamoDB, a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, and Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Arc XP also uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (Amazon KDS)—a massively scalable and durable near-real-time data streaming service—as a message-streaming interface to its customers, which provides stable and scalable customer-managed integrations on its software.

Using a serverless architecture also helps Arc XP to scale globally by lessening the operational overhead to run its solutions across several AWS regions. Additionally, the company finds it simpler to accelerate projects and innovate because many of its engineers are already familiar with cloud-based solutions. Further, Arc XP can quickly train engineers who are not experienced with serverless technologies using the training and documentation that is readily available on AWS and with additional support from Wizeline. “Our company differentiator is ease of use and speed of implementation combined with flexibility,” says Perry. “The agility of AWS serverless solutions is key to customer growth.”

To further enhance the user experience, Arc XP has adopted various AWS Elemental solutions for its video management product, which lets the company deliver over 10 PB of video content every month. One of the solutions Arc XP uses to generate thumbnails and encode its videos is AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. Arc XP also uses AWS Elemental MediaPackage to process live and on-demand videos and to store and package the streams into different distribution formats. Using MediaPackage, Arc XP’s users have the ability to create on-demand videos from a live stream, for instance.

Arc XP continues to expand its product offering and engineering staff. In April, it launched the Arc Commerce Suite, which—along with Arc XP’s other products—brings brand storytelling, product discovery, and ecommerce together in one cloud-native solution. To support its customer growth and product expansion, Arc XP plans to onboard 150 new team members over the next 2 years. “It’s about the growth we need to keep up with our company and our customers,” says Perry.

Arc XP is also exploring the benefits of using Amazon Personalize, which makes it simple for developers to build applications with machine learning technology for near-real-time personalized recommendations. Providing a more customized digital experience, Arc XP is planning on growing its customer base—but not without the help of Wizeline. “Wizeline excels in its responsibility on the support side of our business and has highlighted its ability to take on more responsibility by understanding our technology,” says Perry. “The company understands what we’re doing on AWS.”