Introducing: A search & relevancy assessment from engineers, not theorists. Learn more
Success Stories
Widen trusts Bonsai to deliver performant search to hundreds of enterprises around the world.
For over 70 years, customers have trusted Widen with their creative and marketing materials to transform, convert, engrave, compose, modify, and manage how their brand is epresented.
Reduce headcount dedicated to Elasticsearch
Reduce AWS spend on Elasticsearch
Improve search performance and uptime
Search cluster sees 15,000/requests per minute
Person who set up Elasticsearch left company, causing outages
AWS spend on Elasticsearch was not trivial
Bonsai’s team supports the code, not just the servers.
25% cost savings on AWS servers
Downtime reduced from 52 hours to zero
Bonsai is now “their favorite vendor so far”
Bonsai helps you get the most out of Elasticsearch with a support team to keep you up-and-running.
ContactTeams in 175 countries rely on the search functionality in Widen’s digital asset management software. If Widen’s search is unreliable, their enterprise customers will not be able to find the images, videos, audio, and creative files to do their jobs.
Kevin Brinnehl, who is Widen’s Head of Site Reliability and Security, had his work cut out for him when he inherited another developer’s Elasticsearch implementation on AWS. When that developer left the company, the outages became Kevin’s problem. “Elasticsearch is great until its not, and then it’s horrid. There are no easy outages,” explains Kevin.
“Elastic was considerably more expensive than Bonsai, even after discounting.”
Widen also opted to deploy a Bonsai Vault, which allows Bonsai’s team to securely deploy and manage a search cluster that is hosted within Widen’s own AWS account. Using a Bonsai Vault allows Widen to pass internal compliance audits without the operational overhead of managing Elasticsearch. “Bonsai’s compliance story was ‘the dealmaker,’” says Kevin. The Widen team had their Bonsai contract signed within ten days.
Bonsai’s team worked with Widen to reduce the number of servers it took to run their Elasticsearch clusters.
“We saved 25% on AWS server costs by making the switch to Bonsai. Widen’s development teams have made significant productivity gains since switching.”
“We went from 58 hours of search downtime to zero hours of downtime. I’ve gained back an entire full-time employee by switching to Bonsai.” Kevin also noticed the level of support Widen received from the Bonsai staff. “Bonsai doesn’t just support the cluster, they support the code, which is almost unheard of,” expresses Kevin. As a Vault customer, Widen benefits by regular check-ins by Bonsai’s staff, as well as the use of their own private Slack channel to reach Bonsai team members. The channel is used not only by Operations staff, but by Widen’s software engineering team too. “All the Widen developers who work with Bonsai absolutely love them.”
Widen is evaluating Bonsai for other internal search use cases. To learn about switching your Elasticsearch clusters to Bonsai, contact our team.
Schedule a free consultation to see how we can create a customized plan to meet your search needs.
Schedule a consultation