Implementing Embedded Analytics within Bynder’s Digital Asset Management

Bynder, Industry-Leading DAM (digital asset management) software

Bynder is an industry-leading DAM (digital asset management) software. It’s used by organisations who want to manage digital content in a cloud-based solution. With a global presence, Bynder serves a diverse clientele, including renowned brands like Alpro and Puma. The company prioritises design, security, and seamless customer experiences in its solutions.

The Challenge

Bynder faced challenges with its BI tool, which lacked scalability and seamless integration capabilities. The custom-developed solution required extensive development time for new features and did not align with modern data stack requirements. Bynder needed a solution that ensured data security, reduced development efforts and enabled self-service analytics for their customers.

The Goal

Bynder’s primary goal was to enhance its analytics capabilities by embedding analytics into the Bynder Platform, providing a user-friendly experience for customers. Additionally, they pursued these objectives:

• Reduce Development Time: Develop and release new analytics features faster with minimal development effort.
• Ensure Data Security: Implement strict data security measures and adhere to authentication protocols, data access rules, and regional deployment requirements.
• Self-Service Analytics: Enable customers to build dashboards and analyse data without technical expertise.
• Cost Optimisation: Minimise additional costs associated with scaling the embedded analytics solution.

The Solution

Devoteam and Google proposed the integration of Looker, a robust analytics platform from the Google Cloud stack, into Bynder’s Platform. Bynder embedded Looker Analytics in its Asset Management Platform, enabling customers to access Looker dashboards from within the platform. 

Looker seamlessly integrated with Bynder’s existing data warehouse infrastructure, including Snowflake on AWS. Furthermore, the key reasons for choosing Looker were its robust security features and technical capabilities.

Key aspects of the solution included:

• Security and Scalability: Looker’s advanced security features and technical capabilities allowed Bynder to set up CI/CD pipelines, control versioning, and deploy data models securely. With Looker, they can scale to an infinite number of customers while maintaining a closed system. This means that the data remains private and isolated at all times. Despite using the same data model and security rules. 
• Unified Data Modeling: By defining data security rules and data models in LookML, Bynder established a unified system that scaled effortlessly across multiple clients and regions.
• Flexible Infrastructure: Devoteam G Cloud used Terraform’s infrastructure as code capabilities to create a flexible infrastructure, allowing effortless destruction and recreation of BI resources.
• Front-end adaptation: Bynder is leveraging advanced theme features of Looker to meet their product design requirements.
• Empowering Customers: Bynder customers gained self-service analytics capabilities, enabling them to create dashboards, transform data, and gain valuable insights without technical support. 
• Featurisation for different customer tiers: Additionally, Bynder could provide different features of Looker to different customer tiers, creating a tailored embedded BI experience.

Devoteam G Cloud and Google Cloud followed a structured methodology that prioritised security, scalability, and ease of integration. It also included: 

• Workshops and Training: Devoteam G Cloud conducted workshops and training sessions for Bynder’s technical team, covering Looker basics, intermediate concepts, and advanced analytics techniques. Enhancing their data governance and modelling skills.
• Co-development sessions: Devoteam G Cloud and Bynder conducted multiple co-development sessions per week, tackling Bynder’s most complex challenges in the rollout of their embedded analytics platform. Those challenges covered multiple aspects such as deploying the infrastructure, automating the CI/CD pipelines, modelling the data, securing the data & embedding the analytics into the application.
• Continuous support.

The Results

Devoteam G Cloud’s experts helped Bynder successfully integrate Looker’s embedded analytics into their platform. This transformation brought about significant benefits:

• Global Scalability: Bynder successfully deployed Looker instances in Europe and the US, accommodating diverse client needs and regional requirements.
• Automated Onboarding: Customers are automatically onboarded without the need for manual intervention from the Bynder team, streamlining the user experience.

In Short

Devoteam G Cloud’s partnership empowered Bynder to revolutionise its analytics capabilities, ensuring data security, reducing costs and enhancing customer experiences. The collaboration addressed immediate challenges and positioned Bynder for future growth and innovation in the data analytics landscape.