In August this year, Thailand’s e-commerce enterprise Ascend Group has finished migrating its existing businesses as well as new ventures to the cloud, a move that is expected to support its ambitious regional expansion plans.
The Ascend Group owns and operates business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces WeMall and iTrueMart, and the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform WeLoveShopping. It also operates TrueMoney, a wallet solution for digital payments, among other allied businesses.
Chaiwat Ratanaprateepporn, Chief Technology Officer of Ascend Group, said the company is looking beyond the country’s borders to expand its e-commerce business in the ASEAN region.
“Most of the operations we have now in ASEAN are under the TrueMoney business. We have Myanmar and Thailand as headquarters, then we have businesses in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines,” he said. Services currently consist of mobile wallet, remittance, top up services, bill payments and the e-commerce payment gateway.
With a combined population of approximately 600 million, the ASEAN region has a booming e-commerce landscape, which is only logical for the Thai group to target.
The Ascend Group’s cloud journey started in November 2014 when the company adopted a “cloud first” policy. This has allowed the company to reduce infrastructure build time, improve flexibility and accelerate speed-to-market.
Chaiwat said the cloud journey is among the preparations it is doing for the expansion move.
“Why we are moving to the cloud? Our TrueMoney business in Thailand has been around for more than 10 years, while our e-commerce business has been around for just over three years. But we want our start-up companies (though they are no longer startups) to have the same capabilities. They were born in the cloud and are using cloud technologies to move fast and offer customers better services,” he explained.
In the first quarter of 2015, iTrueMart, an e-commerce retail destination for home appliances and electronic products, hit critical mass.
“We looked for alternative solutions on how we can manage the traffic and cost and using the technology so we decided to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Later that year, we also moved some of the services of TrueMoney to AWS as well,” Chaiwat recounted.
In the second quarter this year, Ascend also moved the services of WeLoveShopping.com completely to AWS. Thus, its three flagship e-commerce websites are already 100 percent in the cloud. For TrueMoney, however, the company is opting for a hybrid cloud strategy because of the different banking regulations in each of the six ASEAN countries, which make it difficult to operate purely on the cloud.
Chaiwat, who oversees the digital transformation of the company’s IT infrastructure, shared that when the company launched the WeMall in Thailand, they did so without adding new technical staff to implement, operate and support in addition to iTrueMart.
“And that is because we leveraged the innovative tools and technology of AWS,” he said. “Ultimately all of this innovation will allow us to better serve our customers and create efficiency that will result in better value for people who shop on Ascend Group’s e-commerce properties.
The company’s goal is to become the leading e-commerce business in the ASEAN region and leverage the digital technology to expand business opportunities for merchants in Thailand and the region.
Next steps in the cloud
What is next for Ascend Group’s cloud journey?
Chaiwat disclosed that the company’s cloud strategy comprised of three steps. The first step or Version 1.0 is moving the services to the cloud, which they accomplished in the past two years. The second step or Version 2.0, which is being implemented now is using the technology the technology to do more optimizations for cost savings, more automation so they can gain better productivity in the workforce.
The next step or Version 3.0, which will be implemented starting next year, is really moving to more high-end technology as the data and analytics, machine learning and other capabilities that will help us serve the customers better.
“What we are aiming ahead are data and analytics. Right now, we are data-driven, meaning we use analytics to do reports on how the transactions are growing. But this is business intelligence, not yet analytics. We are aiming to move there using the capabilities of AWS,” he said.
For companies starting on their own cloud journey, Chaiwat said it is important to identify or define the benefits that they would want to derive from the cloud. It should help in creating guidelines and the roadmap.
He stressed, however, that going to the cloud is not all about the benefits. “The company has to transform the workforce, upskill them, and adopt a different mindset and way of working,” he said.
Nick Walton, Head of ASEAN at AWS, affirmed that e-commerce in Southeast Asia is booming, especially e-commerce on mobile devices.
“AWS has analytics for mobile, which I think will be relevant for Southeast Asia,” he said. “There are two types of e-commerce – the new e-commerce providers (online only) and the bricks and mortar retailers that are adding the e-commerce experience to the mix. We look at the ability to quickly scale up, get promotions to market quickly, make the needs very successful sales. The last thing you want is a very successful marketing campaign that is let down by the website not performing.”
The other place for e-commerce is analytics. “This is where we see a good application of the AI technologies like Amazon Polly, a service that turns text into lifelike speech,” Walton noted.