Building a strong brand in today’s hyper-competitive business environment takes vision. It also requires a flexible, easily managed approach to digital asset management (DAM), so marketing professionals and other stakeholders can easily share, store, track, and manipulate assets to build the brand.

Many of today’s leading companies, including JetBlue, Slack, TripAdvisor, Lyft, and HealthONE, rely on Brandfolder to deliver consistent, organized, and efficient brand experiences. Brandfolder provides an easy-to-use platform that can scale across an entire company with little end-user training, empowering customers to distribute digital assets wherever they are needed. Customers also gain much greater insight into how those assets are used, and how to use them more effectively in marketing campaigns and brand messaging.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform.”

—Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science, Brandfolder

Brandfolder is constantly advancing its development efforts to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are key to meeting customers’ unique business needs, and essential for Brandfolder to compete in the fast-moving DAM industry. To enhance these capabilities, Brandfolder sought a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies.

After graduating from the Techstars startup accelerator program in 2013, Brandfolder tried two other cloud providers before standardizing on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We saw a difference with Google Cloud from the very beginning because the interactions felt like a strategic relationship,” says Jim Hanifen, Head of Product at Brandfolder. “Google gave us startup credits and a lot of face-to-face support, which we hadn’t experienced with other cloud providers. We decided to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.”

Building an ML platform for brand intelligence

After performing an initial lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) onto Compute Engine, Brandfolder built an ML platform using GCP managed services to seamlessly deliver its data products. The platform leverages Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage as the data lake, Cloud Dataproc for cloud-native Apache Spark computing clusters, Cloud Composer as the batch job scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub as the backbone data pipeline, Container Registry to store Docker images, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the application orchestrator. Cloud Dataflow brings data into the data lake and into BigQuery for analysis.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform,” says Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science at Brandfolder, who describes the architecture in a detailed blog. “We simply ingest raw application and event data on one end and output an ML service on the other.”

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost. We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

—Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering, Brandfolder

For many general use cases, Brandfolder does not need to build custom ML models, and instead relies on pre-trained API models from GCP. For example, it uses Vision API and Video Intelligence API to auto-tag creative assets on import to enable fast, intuitive searches across images and videos. When more product- and brand-specific modeling is required to address unique customer use cases, Brandfolder builds and trains custom ML models using its GCP pipeline or Cloud AutoML, a suite of products built on Google transfer learning and neural architecture search technology. For example, if a Brandfolder customer makes different types of grills, Brandfolder can use AutoML Vision to train a model to recognize the different grills.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost,” explains Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering at Brandfolder. “We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

Industry-leading security and performance

Google Cloud’s security model helps Brandfolder give existing and prospective customers peace of mind that their data will be protected. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides enterprise-grade access control, while Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) enables remote users to work more securely without the hassles of a VPN client. GCP also isolates cloud resources into projects, making it easy to assign permissions and keep data and VMs organized and segregated.

“With Google Cloud, everything begins and ends with security, which makes things very easy for us,” says Jim. “If we’re under a security review, we can submit a Google security white paper. If a potential customer has security concerns, we tell them we are hosted on GCP, and those concerns go away.”

To give customers even better application performance for accessing their brand assets, Brandfolder uses Cloud Memorystore, an in-memory data store service for Redis, to cache data and provide sub-millisecond data access for production applications.

“It was much easier for us to use Cloud Memorystore versus running Redis on our compute instances,” says Brett. “The high availability, replication across zones, and automatic failover with no data loss are big for us.”

Global private network interconnects between Google Cloud and the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) dramatically reduce latency, allowing Brandfolder’s customers to deliver and update even very large creative assets quickly around the world.

“What’s beautiful about the relationship between Google and Fastly is that if one of our customers uploads a new version of an asset, we can propagate that out to Fastly, and the new version will automatically show up in all the places where it’s referenced,” says Brett.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter. Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

—Jim Hanifen, Head of Product, Brandfolder

Improving employee and customer productivity

Brandfolder also uses Google solutions for real-time collaboration and productivity, using G Suite to connect employees with intuitive, cloud-based apps. Teams use Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet every day to move the business forward. Many of Brandfolder’s customers are also G Suite users, and Brandfolder offers a plug-in that allows them to view their creative assets inside of Docs and pull images in as needed. Customers can also log into Brandfolder with their G Suite credentials, making the solution even easier to use.

“We’ve been using G Suite since the beginning, and it’s helped us collaborate efficiently to build a successful, growing company,” says Jim. “Our teams expect to have that kind of close collaboration, and everyone here enjoys the G Suite experience.”

Driving 99 percent annual business growth

With automated tagging and other innovative AI-based features, Brandfolder is helping customers locate and distribute assets faster. As a result, Brandfolder is building customer loyalty and increasing sales, growing its business by 99 percent year-over-year. Since moving to GCP, Brandfolder has been able to scale its analytics and data pipeline 50x without a corresponding increase in costs and has not had to expand its development team.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter,” says Jim. “Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

Deliveroo is the fastest-growing technology company in the United Kingdom, and the first-ever to win Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 two years in a row. Founded in 2013, the food courier service achieved a three-year growth rate of over 15,000% to 2018, expanding beyond its London base to operate in 14 countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, from Spain to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve. As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

The company runs multiple offices in each of its 14 markets, manned by more than 2,500 full-time staff. “Around 2016, we made a clear decision,” says Asif Akmal, Director of IT at Deliveroo. “As the company was scaling, we needed a strategy for all our offices to scale with us, and we needed the right infrastructure to do that. We can’t afford to have downtime, or to have tools that confuse staff, rather than help them.”

Together with Google Cloud Premier Partner Netpremacy, Deliveroo created a strategy around G Suite that emphasizes the speed and efficiency the company needs to set up offices and train new staff.

“G Suite products work really well, with no steep learning curve,” says Asif. “As a fast-growing company, our strategy is to go to G Suite tools first to find immediate, effective answers within one integrated solution.”

Putting videoconferencing at the core of the business

Videoconferencing is central to the Deliveroo business model. “Many of our international offices rely on operational staff from headquarters, whether for daily one-to-ones or group meetings,” says Asif. “Some of our engineers are constantly present in remote offices on a permanent live video stream, with a screen at the desk where there would be a chair. That makes it mission critical for us to have the correct infrastructure in place in order to do videoconferencing.”

Because internet connectivity can be inconsistent at new offices, Deliveroo teams occasionally need to be able to dial into videoconferencing over the phone, as well as connect through the internet. Previously, Deliveroo used a separate videoconferencing solution in order to have this feature. Now, as G Suite Enterprise users, Deliveroo employees can use Hangouts Meet for the same dial-in functionality, higher quality reception, and up to 100 participants on each call.

“Videoconferencing is crucial. And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

“It was a simple decision to switch to Hangouts Meet,” says Asif. “It came with the enterprise package that we were already on, so we made a substantial cost savings by stopping the other solution, which cost almost £15 a month per user. Financially, that made it a no-brainer, but Hangouts also works better from a technical and integration perspective.”

“One of the first things that we address as a company moving into a new office is: Where do we get the videoconferencing system in place so we can start doing calls straight away?” says Elliott Shafii, Google Technology Engineer at Deliveroo. That’s why Deliveroo has a blueprint for video conferencing rooms, specifying the equipment required and the size and acoustics of the rooms where they’ll be installed. Once the necessary Hangouts Meet hardware has been delivered, the Deliveroo AV Manager flies out to the location, installs the equipment in two days, signs off on it, and flies back.

“Videoconferencing is crucial,” says Asif. “And with Hangouts Meet we can have just one AV person in the whole business setting up and overseeing the infrastructure in 14 countries.”

Issuing new devices in one-tenth of the time

Deliveroo facilitates its exceptional growth rate by minimizing the time teams need to spend getting to grips with new tools. “With G Suite, users don’t have much that they need to learn,” says Asif. “That means we can deploy the solution in any country and be comfortable that people can walk into a room and connect to a meeting without problems.”

Asif and his team worked closely with Netpremacy to make training in G Suite tools efficient and accessible, for new starters and anyone who wants to learn. “Collaborating on Docs and Sheets, and using Drive to share files instead of sending attachments allows us to move more rapidly than any other business,” says Asif. “That’s why we have permanent staff in the IT team who concentrate exclusively on the onboarding process, so anyone can learn to use one of the G Suite products in just one hour.”

Introducing Pixelbooks is the latest step in Deliveroo’s pursuit of speed and efficiency. “Previously, it took an average of 50 minutes to set someone up on a laptop,” says Asif. “With Chrome devices, that induction period is down to five minutes. We just open the box, enroll the device, and hand it over.”

Creating a cloud-based company

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them. Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

– Asif Akmal, Director of IT, Deliveroo

Using G Suite, Deliveroo is building its ideal workplace to support a more mobile, agile approach to work. “By the end of next year, we should have the vast majority of new starters using Pixelbooks,” says Asif. “We expect that to increase the use of Docs and Sheets and other G Suite tools, in place of other applications. We want to see ourselves as a cloud-based company, and G Suite is ideal for reaching that goal.”

As part of the further deployment of G Suite tools, Deliveroo plans to roll out more Jamboards, in addition to the 14 already in use across the business. “Previously, we would take photographs of whiteboards and share those,” says Elliott. “I remember seeing someone wheeling a whiteboard back to his desk from a meeting, and thinking ‘That poor guy is going to have to sit at his desk and copy everything down.'”

“At that point, before Jamboards, we actually made a significant financial investment in another interactive whiteboard solution,” adds Asif. “Now that solution is collecting dust, because we’ve got Jamboards, which are much more cost-effective and work brilliantly within the G Suite system.”

“Our strong relationships with Netpremacy and Google Cloud product managers mean we can align our internal strategies with them,” says Asif. “Working together, we can create the ideal environment for our culture of collaboration.”

Embracing the cloud helps Deliveroo both to enable rapid collaboration and to minimize the maintenance and management of infrastructure: an ideal combination for a fast-growing technology company.