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Scaleflex: a customer-centric business driving innovations in digital asset management
Scaleflex was thrust into the spotlight in the UK after winning in the Tech Launch category at last year’s Franco-British Business Awards. Since then, the company’s fundamentally customer-centric approach has helped it to remain innovative
Launched in 2018 by Emil Novakov and Julian de Maestri, Scaleflex specialises in digital asset management (DAM) and media optimisation: giving companies a simple, clear, unified platform to store and manage their web content. Its flagship digital solutions are Cloudimage, which allows users to optimise and accelerate images and videos easily, and Filerobot DAM (Headless or Collaborative), which allows multiple users to collaborate seamlessly on digital content projects.
Where teams can get bogged down trying to stay on top of content production, Scaleflex aims to bring clarity and focus to the process.
“What we do allows people to access their content anywhere, become more agile and remove content silos,” says Tram Nguyen, Chief of Staff at Scaleflex’s Paris office.
Opportunities during the pandemic
As companies adapted to the new remote-working model brought about by the pandemic, Scaleflex saw an opportunity for growth.
“Until very recently, digital asset management was just seen as something nice to have”, says Jean-François Lecas, the company’s VP of Global Services and Operations. “When companies had to adapt suddenly to working in different places, they noticed disruption to their teams’ efficiency like lack of interaction and task duplication amongst other issues related to working in silo. After this, we saw an increase in people using collaborative tools.”
Despite the rise in use of these collaborative tools, managers found that they suffered from flaws.
“The problem with our competitors is that everyone can create something, but nobody controls the content,” says Lecas. As more and more versions of the same files are created and stored locally or on a shared drive, it becomes harder to keep track of which is the ‘correct’ one.
By contrast, Scaleflex’s Filerobot DAM acts as a ‘single place of truth’, allowing the owner of a piece of content to maintain control of it because edits are not created as new files, but rather as digital links or ‘variants’. The creator of the content can keep control over these different versions as they are stored in one single place.
“Covid has managed to change the view of digital asset management from a useful tool to an integral part of the day-to-day efficiency of the company,” says Lecas.
Scaleflex was better positioned than other companies to adapt to the new remote working pattern, having had a fully remote setup since its inception in 2018.
Keeping customers at the centre
What sets Scaleflex apart from the competition, say its staff, is its fundamentally customer-focused approach.
Strikingly, Scaleflex staff use Filerobot for internal company operations – making it easier to identify areas for improvement, as well as enabling the team to better anticipate and deal with any feedback from clients.
As Lecas says, “Whether developers, marketers, sales executives or the support team, we are the first critics of our products.”
Having already gained this knowledge of their products before launching them online, Scaleflex is in a much better position to tailor them to meet customers’ individual requirements.
“Most of the DAM companies tend to have built their software on-premise, and then start moving it to the web. Since Scaleflex has been on the web from day one, we've been able to follow consumer trends very quickly without compromising on our DNA offering which is the web performance, flexibility and scalability of our solutions,” says Lecas.
“From the beginning, around 80% of our product roadmap has been driven by our customers’ requests and requirements,” adds Nguyen.
This constant engagement has helped those customers to adapt Scaleflex’s solutions to suit their own individual requirements. Scaleflex’s clients range from small businesses to more high-profile companies like estate agents Knight Frank and larger philanthropic and non-governmental organisations.
Sustainability through efficiency
Scaleflex’s all-digital business setup and remote working model obviously mean fewer emissions in terms of travel, but the efficiency of its software also means less energy consumption in the long term.
Since the variants that customers create with Filerobot DAM are links rather than files, less energy has to be spent on producing and storing them.
“We have effectively introduced the concept of image cost-saving,” observes Lecas. “Bit by bit, the amounts of energy that customers save on creating content can really start to become noticeable.”
Driven by the mission to simplify the management, optimization and acceleration of any kind of digital content anywhere in the world, Scaleflex is a global leading B2B SaaS company developing powerful and scalable Digital Asset Management and Media Acceleration solutions