New year, new budget. One way to cut costs and streamline operations is to consolidate your tech stack. And the general rule of thumb is out with the inefficient tech and in with the savings.
But not everyone thinks of consolidating the many platforms that house and host their images and videos. Consolidating your images and videos can:
- Save money by reducing subscription costs.
- Improve asset performance online by centralizing asset management.
- Reduce the number of platforms to pull from.
- Simplify the creation and publication of future assets.
To learn more, read on!
There are two reasons to create a more efficient, streamlined tech stack for your images and videos — and they’re both tied to finances:
- Addressing budget cuts. In one common scenario, a head of IT might have a corporate-wide cost-cutting directive, requiring consolidation and budget reduction.
- Creating room for innovation. Another scenario could be an IT leader’s budget remaining flat, which would limit the digital team’s financial ability to allocate resources towards new projects or innovations.
Beyond budget pressures, companies should routinely evaluate their tech stack to identify where functionality overlaps to remove redundancies, navigate budget restrictions, and ultimately deliver a better digital experience for customers.
For instance, while not part of a direct consolidation initiative, Canadian travel company Sunwing saw tremendous improvements in asset performance such as a 60% increase in speed to market when it developed a more efficient tech stack around content management, images, videos, and more.
Understandably, consolidation will look different for every company. No two tech stacks are the same because each brand relies on unique, varying solution partners for their content, images, and videos. That said, every company can use these three strategies to assess what consolidation means for them:
- Streamline editorial and product catalog content. An e-commerce company often hosts items’ images, videos, and product information in a separate environment from where it stores assets used for editorial content. Each environment has its own digital asset management (DAM) and workflows. That e-commerce brand can look at consolidating assets into one platform like Cloudinary, reducing the number of platforms and subscriptions while driving workflow efficiencies through Cloudinary’s automation tools for e-commerce.
- Identify underutilized platforms. Some companies don’t take full advantage of what their content management system (CMS) offers. A financial institution may only use its CMS to manage one website’s blog page, site headers, and a navigation menu, instead of the platform’s full suite of content capabilities. Meaning that the company is likely paying for more CMS functionality than they actually need. Instead, the financial institution should consolidate parts of its CMS into a larger enterprise platform’s basic content service, like using Page Designer inside Salesforce.
- Eliminate niche platforms. A fashion brand might have a division of its company where it customizes clothing, such as embroidering a company logo onto shirts. Digging into the tech stack might reveal a platform that is solely used to manage the custom embroidery function. The fashion brand should take a closer look into other platforms within the tech stack to see if any existing tools offer a comparable embroidery function. Alternatively, the brand can start clean and integrate a platform like Cloudinary that offers customization capabilities alongside other image and video APIservices.
IT organizations that take the time to comb through image and video tech stacks to eliminate inefficiencies will improve overall business goals in a few ways, including:
- Financial gains. Companies can reduce their annual spend on IT infrastructure or get more results out of the same budget.
- Operational enhancements. Companies can streamline workflows into fewer platforms to reduce tasks and save time on manual workloads. In the Sunwing case study, the company discovered that it saved 1,000 hours on design by consolidating functions with Cloudinary’s transformation tools.
- Structural transformation. Companies currently working from a monolithic architecture but considering a move to a headless framework will be in a better position to make the transition after consolidating the tech stack.
Just as every tech stack is different, companies will discover unique ways to improve their businesses through a careful consolidation effort.
Brands don’t need to parse through the tech stack alone. Cloudinary can help any company pore through its tech stack, review how images and videos get stored, rendered, and optimized, clarify the relationship to content, and identify new ways to work smarter.
Contact us today and we can review the tech stack together, saving you money and streamlining workflows.
