Discover how Bynder uses Snowflake’s Data Cloud to provide faster insights, support rapid growth, and unlock a new world of opportunities.
Founded in 2013, Bynder is a global leader in the digital asset management (DAM) industry. The company provides a full, cloud-based software suite for marketers, helping them to upload, create, and source digital assets, apply guidelines that allow for consistent campaigns, and gain insights into their effectiveness.
With major clients including Spotify, Puma, Five Guys, and Icelandair, Bynder uses large amounts of data to provide dashboards and open APIs to its customers, as well as vital operational insights to internal users. But when the company started to experience rapid growth, it noticed performance issues with its data architecture.
“We had a very big data lake consisting of hundreds of different data sources, and the performance wasn’t good,” said Harm Bodewes, Head of Analytics at Bynder. “We needed to add structure to this data, and develop an architecture that could keep up with our growth and ambitions as a business.”
The company wanted a data platform that could scale seamlessly, simplify and accelerate data access for a wider set of users, and allow it to use a range of BI tools without restriction. Today, Bynder uses Snowflake’s Data Cloud to get all these benefits and more.
From proof of concept to full implementation in just three months
After meeting Snowflake representatives at an event and being impressed by the platform’s capabilities, Bynder decided to run a proof of concept. The POC compared the performance of Snowflake’s data warehouse workload against a competitor’s solution across 11 key criteria, including cost, performance, and security capabilities.
“Snowflake clearly came out on top,” said Erkan Lanpir, Data Engineer at Bynder. “It was easy to use, easy to integrate with our third-party solutions like Terraform, completely BI agnostic, and allowed us to democratize data access across the organization.”
With the POC complete, Bynder migrated its entire data lake to Snowflake on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in just three months, thanks partly to the platform’s seamless integration with Bynder’s existing AWS environment.
“I would have said it’s possible to do something like this in three months if you don’t do everything by the book,” said Lanpir. “With Snowflake, we were able to do this while maintaining all the best practices for migration. The simplicity of the platform and support from Snowflake was really appreciated across the company.”
This data is used to power operational insights that guide vital business decisions, as well as the customer dashboards that help Bynder users deliver more efficient and effective marketing campaigns.
Bynder improves insight, availability, and cost control
With Snowflake, Bynder has given its data processes a new breath of life, improving speed and availability while simplifying management and gaining complete visibility of costs.
“The time it takes us to gain insight has improved significantly,” said Bodewes. “And the availability of the platform is superb. In the past, our BI environment would sometimes be unavailable because of certain hiccups, but with Snowflake everything is stable and powerful.”
This level of availability, along with Snowflake’s ease of use, means more business users can access data more easily, and without specialist knowledge—which has had a dramatic effect on the company’s internal users.
“The happiness of the team working with Snowflake is a huge step forward,” said Peter-Paul Houtman, Chief Technology Officer at Bynder. “The solution is state of the art and engineer friendly, which boosts morale and makes it a lot easier for us to attract and retain talent.”
Ultimately, this creates an environment where future innovation is not only possible but can be encouraged; something that could have a profound effect on Bynder’s future.
“Previously, the answer to a lot of internal requests had to be a no,” added Houtman. “We were always balancing internal and customer needs, but with the ability to seamlessly scale resources and separate compute and storage, we can cater to both. We have the ideal foundation to innovate, and explore new features and business opportunities—which will have a direct impact on the value we can deliver to our clients.”
Even though Bynder is early in its Snowflake journey, that value is already apparent to the company’s end users, with customer dashboards that once took minutes to load now typically appearing in a matter of seconds.
“It’s early days, but we already have far more trust in our data platform than we did before,” said Bodewes. “Going forward, we know that our growth ambitions can be catered for—the possibilities are endless.”
A bright future for Bynder supported by a future-facing data platform
With Snowflake at the heart of its strategy and architecture, Bynder has a solution that can both support and contribute toward its rapid growth, opening the door to new and exciting opportunities.
“Technology is no longer the bottleneck for our data and analytics ambitions,” said Houtman. “It used to be a limiter, but with Snowflake we have a true enabler that we can use to proactively optimize the business.”
Going forward, the company plans to use Snowflake’s data lineage and integration features to move toward a data mesh architecture—making data even more accessible, discoverable, and interoperable.
Bynder also plans to explore additional Snowflake features, such as Snowpark, Secure Data Sharing, and Time Travel that will allow it to test different scenarios to optimize revenue.
“With Snowflake we bought an incredibly powerful platform, and are still yet to test the full extent of its capabilities,” said Bodewes. “We can’t wait to explore more features and get even more value from our platform—it’s a really exciting time for our company.”