With the help of AWS, Bynder has been able to grow 200 percent year-over-year, scaling into new regions and working with several multinational organizations. The company’s digital asset management (DAM) platform offers brands a smarter way to find, share, and use digital files at any time, and from anywhere. The company has also maintained an innovative culture amid rapid international growth, using Amazon Rekognition and AWS Lambda to improve customer experience and speed innovation.
Bynder understands the pressure on organizations to tell a consistent brand story despite managing a growing amount of content conveyed through an increasing number of channels. To help, the Amsterdam-based company enables marketers to create, find, and use their brand’s content on a single platform.
Its digital file-management platform has attracted more than 450 clients worldwide, including international businesses such as PUMA, KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, Spotify, and Innocent Drinks.
Bynder spun out of software agency Label A in 2013, and it received the “Technology Fast 50“ award by Deloitte in 2017 for being the second-fastest-growing company in the Netherlands. In addition to its Dutch headquarters, Bynder has offices in Barcelona, Boston, Dubai, and London.
International expansion has always been a top priority for Bynder. To support growing business, it required a scalable infrastructure that could handle traffic across multiple regions. Roland Keijzer, chief technology officer at Bynder, says, “Our main differentiator is our design.
Our product is extremely user-friendly and intuitive. We want all aspects of our customers’ experience to be as seamless as possible, and that means providing a consistent service wherever our clients may be.” Bynder also wanted to cultivate an environment that made it easy for developers to innovate in order to ensure its file-management technology can give customers the best functionality on the market.
“At Bynder, we believe experimentation enables growth,’’ Keijzer says. “That’s why we’ve always worked in the cloud and looked for the best technology to support our developers.”
After initially running its own virtual private server, Bynder moved its infrastructure to AWS. At that point, it used core AWS technologies including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Keijzer says, “We used Amazon RDS to run and scale our databases in the cloud, freeing us to focus on our applications.”
Moving to the AWS Cloud triggered a period of rapid growth at Bynder. To maintain high availability while expanding its customer base, the company implemented a multi-Availability Zone configuration in the US East (N. Virginia) region.
It now uses seven AWS regions across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Having created a scalable infrastructure, Keijzer and his team turned their attention to innovation. Bynder was an early adopter of Amazon Rekognition, a service that makes it easy to analyze images within applications, using it to automate the sorting and detecting of its digital image and video content. It also takes advantage of Amazon Elastic Transcoder to convert media files into playback formats. AWS Lambda, which it uses to run code with minimal effort, is the company’s biggest focus at the moment.
“Every AWS solution we’ve implemented has added value to our business,” Keijzer says.
“For example, through automation, deployments of new updates and features have skyrocketed from one per month to more than 170 per month. It’s a fantastic example of how we’re able to do more, and do it faster.”
Bynder also benefits from AWS Enterprise Support. “Urgent queries are responded to within the hour,” says Keijzer. “Our AWS Technical Account Manager is on our company Slack channel, and we have monthly face-to-face meetings with our AWS Account Team.”
Since moving its infrastructure to AWS, Bynder has grown 200 percent year-over-year. It has achieved this by taking advantage of AWS regions to expand its platform, allowing it to reach customers worldwide. Bynder’s rapid success has attracted the attention of top investors and helped it secure $20 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners in 2016. On the company’s growth, Keijzer says, “Our aim is to be a truly international player with global coverage to serve our customers. We are well on the way to achieving that with AWS.”
Keijzer believes using AWS supports the company’s ethos of innovation at speed.
He says, “AWS released Rekognition as we were looking at developing something similar in-house. Using Amazon Rekognition, we were able to implement this new AI feature in under a month, much faster than the 12 months it would previously have taken us.”
This has enabled the startup to focus on designing and developing new features, such as Bynder Orbit, a product that helps smaller clients manage compact sets of digital files that they can set up instantly. “With Bynder Orbit, we’re appealing to smaller businesses that are looking for a more professional, digital file-management solution that can be set up and learned within minutes,” says Keijzer.
“We’re big fans of AWS because it gives our developers time to create great new services such as Orbit, helping us expand our customer base even further.”
Having access to AWS Enterprise Support has proved an advantage for the firm beyond the day-to-day technical advice it receives. “We get beta access to AWS products and services that are not yet on general release,” says Keijzer. “The team feels involved with the AWS roadmap and loves the opportunity to experiment with new services before our competitors do.”
