Bitly to migrate its 25bn links to IBM's cloud

growth strategy

Bitly plans to move all its infrastructure and workloads to IBM's cloud in a bid to boost performance and reduce latency.

As part of the deal, the link shortening platform will migrate all of its 25 billion links, in addition to moving its APIs and empowering marketers through the Universal Behaviour Exchange, which will help firms better understand and engage with customers.

Bitly links generate more than 12 billion clicks a month and the firm wants to make the experience even better, especially for users in areas with less widespread network connectivity - more than 70 per cent of links are delivered internationally.

"We're going to be moving all our infrastructure over to IBM Cloud. Bitly sees about five billion unique browsers a month, from every country, from every platform and channel. So we're very excited to be able to leverage the IBM Cloud," said Rob Platzer, Bitly's CTO.

"The high-speed network is going to give us performance across the globe and we're going to be able to leverage the 46 datacentres internationally to push our edge closer to our customers, especially in hard to reach places."

On a monthly basis, more than 11,000 developers use Bitly's APIs to create 300 million links that get embedded in a range of places. The IBM migration will speed up this process and enable links to load even more quickly.

"The Bitly platform has always been massively integrated by developers. Our partnership with IBM is going to increase the performance and lower latency and bring all of those APIs to a better platform for our customers," Platzer added.

Bitly has grown since its arrival on the scene back in 2007 and its offerings continue to diversify for organisations, developers and marketers alike. Moving to the IBM Cloud will therefore help support both current and future growth.

"We were founded to solve a problem as the world needed shorter links. But today we do a lot more than that. Our customers get insight from our links so they can understand their customers better as they journey through their interactions with brands," Platzer added.

"Links are everywhere. We think of our product as connecting users to information."

Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.

Latest in Cloud
AI chatbot text dialogue boxes in difference colours above a digital circuit board with lines of light emanating from it
Enterprise AI is surging, but is security keeping up?
Oracle logo pictured in red lettering against a black background at the company's stall at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
Say goodbye to walled gardens, Oracle is doubling down on multi-cloud
A glowing blue CGI representation of a network solution provided via the IT channel.
Why understanding the customer’s network unlocks its value and your success
Cloud storage concept image showing digitized cloud symbol with data flows.
AI is putting your cloud workloads at risk
A CGI visualization of cloud computing, with an isometric view of a purple and blue cloud linked to seven glowing cube nodes, to represent devirtualization and revirtualization.
Navigating devirtualization as businesses move away from the cloud
Logo of Google Cloud, which recently announced the Wiz acquisition, pictured at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
The Wiz acquisition stakes Google's claim as the go-to hyperscaler for cloud security – now it’s up to AWS and industry vendors to react
Latest in Feature
A photo of UNSW's Sunswift 7 car pictured in front of Uluru in Australia's Northern Territory.
How UNSW’s Sunswift Racing and Ericsson achieved cross-country connectivity in Australia’s outback
Matt Clifford speaking at Treasury Connect conference in 2023
Who is Matt Clifford?
Open source vulnerabilities concept image showing HTML code on a computer screen.
Open source risks threaten all business users – it’s clear we must get a better understanding of open source software
An abstract CGI image of a large green cuboid being broken in half with yellow, orange, and red cubes to represent ransomware resilience and data encryption.
Building ransomware resilience to avoid paying out
The words "How effective are AI agents?" set against a dark blue background bearing the silhouettes of flowchart rectangles and diamonds to represent the computation and decisions made by AI agents. The words "AI agents" are yellow, while the others are white. The ITPro Podcast logo is in the bottom right-hand corner.
How effective are AI agents?
An illustration showing a mouth with speech bubbles and question marks and a stylized robot alien representing an AI assistant chirping away with symbols and ticks, to represent user annoyance with AI assistants.
On-device AI assistants are meant to be helpful – why do I find them so annoying?