Cloudinary, a leading cloud-based image management platform, was recently in the news when the company announced a new and fully integrated image processing add-on.  To find out more about the company and what they are doing, I spoke with the company's CEO, Itai Lahan. 

VMblog:  It's great to speak with you. As this is our first interview, can you tell readers a bit about Cloudinary?

Itai Lahan:  We founded Cloudinary in 2011 to offer developers a complete, end-to-end image management solution. Currently used by thousands of companies around the globe, ranging from small startups to large enterprises, Cloudinary covers the entire image management pipeline, from image uploads directly from a user's browser and online digital asset management to powerful on-the-fly image manipulation capabilities and highly optimized delivery to optimize customers' viewing experience.

Lahan:  Powered by third party image service partners, including Imagga, ReKognition, URL2PNG, Aspose and WebPurify, Cloudinary's new add-on offerings enable automatic image moderation, image categorization, smarter image cropping, improved image compression, advanced face attributes detection, website screenshot generation and more through a single click integration-building on the company's comprehensive online image management solution for one-stop shop image management.

VMblog:  And why are the add-ons an important feature for Cloudinary?

Lahan: When using Cloudinary, images are stored in the cloud for dynamic manipulation and fast delivery. The new add-ons allow developers to enjoy a wide variety of features from powerful solution providers, fully integrated into Cloudinary, by using simple parameters and API calls without requiring separate and manual integration with each external service. In addition, developers can combine third party features together with Cloudinary's standard pipeline that already supports powerful image manipulation, effects, and optimized delivery.

VMblog:  Can you explain what problems you are trying to solve?

Lahan: Modern websites and mobile applications are comprised of thousands of images, ranging from product images and user uploaded images to media photographs and more. These sites are built to be dynamic, offering a rich UI experience for a plethora of Web and mobile devices. Managing the image pipeline required to support this experience - from an image's initial upload to its final delivery and viewing - is challenging, time consuming and costly, both from a product, R&D, and IT perspective. Cloudinary's end-to-end image management solution saves organizations the hassle of building and supporting an image management solution in-house and as it grows.

VMblog:  And what is the cost for deploying this solution?

Lahan: Cloudinary offers customized plans for companies of all sizes, and currently works with a variety of companies across numerous verticals.  Depending on image management needs, Cloudinary offers several different price points, including: free registration and paid plans that start at $39/month and go up to enterprise plans that support terabytes of images.

VMblog:  What does Cloudinary mean for potential partners?

Lahan: In partnering with Cloudinary, partners are potentially reaching a wider audience of users who may have been hesitant to manually integrate a new image processing solution into their platform.  

VMblog:  Thank you for the information.  Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?

Lahan: This next year is going to be very exciting for us.  We spent much of the year listening to what our customers needed to be successful in managing their image pipeline, and we are working hard to develop rich features to meet their needs.  Additionally, we're going to spend time this year focusing on enhancing our image manipulation capabilities, extending our digital asset management offering, and identifying additional partners to join us in further building out our one-stop-shop for image management. 

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Once again, thanks to Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary, for speaking with VMblog and answering a few questions.