SharinPix is Picture Perfect With Cloudinary

With a five-star rating, SharinPix is one of the most popular third-party apps on the Salesforce business AppExchange marketplace today. Established in 2015 by renowned Salesforce experts in France, independent software vendor (ISV) SharinPix set out to solve a big problem: Make it possible for users to take pictures critical to their work and integrate them straight into Salesforce. This is particularly useful for people working in “field” jobs like construction, service, and engineering. It allows, for example, a worker tracking in-store sales to add in-store images to their reports.

All this is enabled by Cloudinary’s Programmable Media product, which SharinPix implemented as its media layer. Today, SharinPix relies on Cloudinary to manage no fewer than 130 million images for more than 500 delighted Salesforce customers, whose users plug them right into their workflows.

ABOUT

Reformation

Though Salesforce is revered as “The World’s #1 CRM,” it was originally conceived for office-based, rather than a mobile workforce. That’s why before SharinPix launched its app, it wasn’t possible for Salesforce users working in the field to upload illustrative, contextual photography from locations like building sites, shops, hospitals, and event venues.

SharinPix solves this by allowing Salesforce users to embed smartphone snaps right into their business process. Cloudinary is key to the software’s functionality, supporting a wide range of image formats from JPEG and TIFF to newer ones like SVG, ProRAW, and WebP. Cloudinary also automates many aspects of image management including content recognition, image resizing for different mobile devices, and syncing with Salesforce.

THE CHALLENGE

Extending Salesforce With On-the-Spot Business Pictures

SharinPix’s story began in 2015, when Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jean-Michel Mougeolle was working as the Chief Information Officer of a major French home builder. As he recounts, “Our people in the field told us they wanted to take pictures of construction site progress and show them to their customers through Salesforce.”

As such functionality was not available on the platform, Mougeolle investigated the image management market — and soon found the perfect solution for his needs: Cloudinary. It became clear to him and his small team that the application they had conceived could be very useful for many other industries besides construction. They soon evolved the concept into a cross-industry Salesforce imaging extension.

As Mougeolle says, “We had such a good experience with Cloudinary that we decided to keep going with it and broaden our scope. Today, we have 20+ components for many different Salesforce use cases. That meant that from the start we never had to deal with image complexity at all, and we could focus from day one on business delivery instead.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Salesforce Image Support — at Truly Industrial-Scale

Mougeolle’s colleague Luc Boissaye, SharinPix’s Chief Technology Officer, explains why Cloudinary has remained the perfect partner for the company ever since its inception: “Like Jean-Michel, I’d also used Cloudinary before so I was very happy to make it the basis of our stack. I knew it was easy to use and I wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

Also important for long-term collaboration was scalability as SharinPix began acquiring more and more customers. While obviously desirable, this also means that in busy times, demand could spike at crucial project times. There have been times when customers have uploaded multiple tens of millions of images in a weekend and need to have them immediately available. Fortunately, Cloudinary has always been able to support high-traffic volumes, even at SharinPix’s peak of 20 million images at once.

Another key benefit of staying with Cloudinary for the long term has been the company’s integration with other cloud technologies including cloud-based platform Heroku that offers platform as a service (PaaS).

Finally, Cloudinary’s openness to work with the SharinPix project team to handle specific needs for all the different customer needs that crop up has also been highly valued over the years: “Every week a customer comes up with something new for us to help with, like facial detection. And 99% of the time, Cloudinary is the start of the solution, and nearly every time, it’s the basis for what we eventually offer them,” continues Mougeolle.

THE RESULTS

‘With Cloudinary, We Can Guarantee It Will Work’

Now a key part of the Salesforce value chain, SharinPix is booming. Its 500 corporate customers use SharinPix to upload more than 5 million images per month, and the library manages more than 130 million original images.

What are the next steps for Cloudinary at SharinPix? For Mougeolle, the answer is simple: Any time something new comes along in Cloudinary, he knows he can monetize it: “We really know the Salesforce ecosystem, and we know how to integrate with it and so if there is a new feature coming to Cloudinary, we immediately ask ourselves, ‘Could that make sense in a Salesforce use case in Salesforce? And if yes, we don’t have to think more about it, and just do it!”