Shutterstock—a creative platform that enables thousands of enterprise customers to access robust libraries of images, music, and video assets—was looking for new ways to ensure quality relationships with these large-scale customers. This included providing friction-free access to their platform across the rest of their clients’ tech stacks.
Kevin Davis, the Director of Innovation and Enterprise Enablement for Shutterstock, provided more context on why they needed to address this area and how Workato’s Embedded Platform allowed them to do so during his Q&A session at Automate.
You can read on to see what he shared.
Resource constraints and delayed time to market
Shutterstock’s enterprise customers wanted to access content libraries across their existing tools and systems. Davis explained further: “We were tasked with getting Shutterstock anywhere that there is a search or upload button within the tools that [our enterprise customers] already use.”
Integrating Shutterstock with these varied work environments, however, proved to be challenging.
Roughly half of their enterprise customers didn’t have the resources to build in-house integrations or felt it could take longer than six months to build. And if Shutterstock were to build the integrations, they’d face similar resource restraints and timelines.
Davis shared that building integrations required many steps and processes. His team found themselves in an endless cycle of building a business case, meeting with the technology teams, coaching product teams on how this might be built, etc.
Making it all the more challenging, about one third of their enterprise customers had homegrown proprietary solutions. These required more work and resources from engineering teams and requests would inevitably get stuck in IT queues.
With requests piling up, Kevin needed to take action: “From a scalability perspective, we wanted to move fast across hundreds, if not thousands of our enterprise customers—we needed a more turn-key solution, a low-code solution that didn’t require engineering involvement.”
The Workato Embedded Platform lets Shutterstock build 100+ integrations within a couple years
In order to offer a scalable approach to integration requests, Kevin’s team decided to invest in Workato’s embedded iPaaS solution.
With Workato’s Embedded Platform, Kevin’s team has been able to drive amazing time savings for their customers—enabling teams to focus on other creative projects:
Davis’ team has also seen benefits to their business. They’ve been able to increase loyalty, attract more business, offer competitive differentiation, and ensure smooth working relationships with customers. In addition, they’ve greatly reduced the strain on engineering resources and successfully eliminated customer churn.
Related: How product managers can get internal buy-in for an embedded integration platform
Ambitious plans ahead
Currently, Davis’ team has hundreds of additional integrations in the pipeline. Moreover, they’re focused on educating customers about the solution and creating awareness. In doing so, they hope to expand integrations into the thousands over the next year.
Learn more about Shutterstock’s approach to using the Workato Embedded Platform by watching the full Automate session on-demand.
