Makino Turns a 100 GB Marketing Problem Into Shared File Infrastructure With Files.com

Makino builds metal-cutting machine tools: CNC machining centers and EDM equipment for manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, medical, semiconductor, and die/mold work, trusted in over 40 countries. Its sophisticated portfolio includes 5-axis horizontal machines that handle aluminum aircraft structural parts up to 4 metres long, while its North American operations in the Cincinnati area house the company’s Global Titanium Research and Development Center.

Machines like these are sold in person and on screen. Makino’s Regional Tech Centers run live demonstrations, and its marketing and media department produces the video, brochure artwork, and trade-show material that carry the product line to buyers. Nearly all of that creative work happens with outside vendors, and the files are enormous. That left Makino with multi-gigabyte assets that had to move to and from external companies, and no approved way to move them.

No Sanctioned Path for the Files Marketing Runs On

Every brochure, booth design, and video edit meant sending large source files out to a vendor and receiving edited versions back. Single files ran from 50 MB to 2.25 GB. Complete project folders ran to 100 GB. The counterparties were outside creative firms who would never be Makino employees or hold internal accounts, and the files sat far beyond anything email carries. Andrew Chambers, Makino’s Manager of IT Infrastructure, described what marketing needed plainly: a sanctioned way to upload, download, share, and receive files from vendors for editing. Until one existed, the demand landed on his team.

“My marketing/media department is eating me alive on this.”

IT could not simply wave marketing toward a consumer sharing tool. The requirements were encryption at rest and in transit, SSO and MFA for internal users, and a compliance posture covering HIPAA and GDPR. That is the structural bind: a security-minded infrastructure team on one end of every exchange, non-technical creative vendors on the other, and file sizes that ruled out the easy answers on both sides.

So the fix had to do several things at once. It had to let marketing send and receive at 100 GB scale without a ticket to IT. It had to take files in from outsiders without creating an account for every vendor. And it had to meet the encryption, identity, and compliance bar IT set. Makino selected Files.com as that sanctioned exchange platform. What began as a marketing solution would become shared infrastructure for partner traffic, on-premise connectivity, and an internal application.

Inboxes for Vendors, Shared Folders for Partners

Marketing works through the Files.com web interface and desktop application, so the people moving the files are the people who own the work. For inbound collection, Makino stood up Files.com Inboxes: standing upload pages where outside vendors deliver brochure artwork and trade-show booth files. A vendor uploads with no account to create, sees only their own submission, and the files land in a folder IT controls rather than in someone’s mailbox.

For ongoing partners, Makino built shared working folders that engineers at an outside engineering partner and staff at a consumables partner read and write directly. A recurring relationship gets a standing workspace instead of a stream of one-off transfers, under the same permissions and logging as everything else on the site.

Before widening the rollout, marketing validated the platform itself. A market segment manager on the business side drove file-size testing against real workloads, and by the department’s own production testing, single files up to 2.25 GB and complete folder sets up to 100 GB moved through. The deployment started with marketing and media alone, then widened across departments and out to external partners over the following two years.

The Same Account Became Integration Infrastructure

Because a governed platform was already standing, the workloads that came next landed on it instead of forcing new decisions. By 2024, AS2 outbound connections carried Makino’s trading-partner traffic, on-premise agents bridged its own infrastructure, and the REST API ran high-volume traffic. A developer building on Makino’s behalf embedded Files.com file operations directly into an internal application without adding another platform. The developer reported that the APIs “work easily and without issue.”

The Loudest Problem Was the Right Entry Point

Today, when someone in Makino’s marketing department needs a 100 GB trade-show folder in a vendor’s hands, they send it themselves. There is no escalation to IT, no unsanctioned workaround, and a record of the exchange either way. The demand that was eating IT alive became a self-serve path IT rarely has to touch. Solving the department with the loudest file problem gave the whole company its file infrastructure.