The AWS Summit brings together the cloud computing community to connect, collaborate and learn about AWS. Opening Keynote Customer Guest with Mark Rachelski, Chief Architect & Director of Platform Development of aCommerce as he shares its journey from startup to an enterprise technology company.
2. Market Leader in Ecommerce Solutions in ASEAN
Largest end-to-end e-commerce solutions
provider in ASEAN
End-to- end solutions with Online-to-
Offline (O2O) & Omni-channel capabilities
5 unique fulfillment models with fully
customized solutions
Leading Global Partners Across 8 Categories
Fashion Appliance Electronics Home
Consumer
Goods
Food Sports Telecom
Over 80 brands, 60 retailers and 12
marketplaces partners
Thailand Indonesia Philippines MalaysiaVietnam
Markets we operate in
and expanding to: Singapore
Market Share
#1
Key Facts
Employees
1,600+
Clients
200+
Warehouses
9
Offices
4
Introduction to aCommerce
3. 3
Business Overview
Key Services, Core Platforms, & Physical Infrastructure
DEMAND GENERATION DEMAND FULFILLMENT
TECHNOLOGYINFRASTRUCTURESERVICES
(9) Fulfillment Centers(3) Customer Centers (200) Delivery Fleet(4) Office Locations
Multi-Channel Retailing
& Store Management
Multi-Courier Shipping
& Fleet Management
Multi-Location Fulfilment
& Order Management
A C O M M E R C E M A N A G E M E N T P L A T F O R M ( A M P )
Marketing Store Development Brand Commerce Fulfillment Delivery Customer Care
4. 4
Introduction to aCommerce
Trusted by renowned clients to help grow business
Consumer Goods
Electronics & Telecom
Fashion & Apparel
Retailer, Distributor & Marketplace
Health & Beauty
I m pleased to welcome on Stage Mark Rachelski, aCommerce Chief Architect to tell you about the story from a startup becoming an Enterprise in just a couple of years. aCommerce is the leading ecommerce service provider in Southeast Asia bringing brands and retailers online.
Hello, My name is Mark Rachelski and I am the Chief Architect at aCommerce.
aCommerce is the market leader in ecommerce solutions throughout southeast Asia. And in four short years we have made the journey from a startup to the Enterprise sized company you see listed above me. We operate across four countries in the ASEAN region and have built up online sales expertise in diverse categories such as: fashion, electronics, consumer goods and food products.
We offer a complete end-to-end package allowing a brand to go online and reach out directly to consumers, the brand’s client retailers and employees using online shopping venues.
This includes on the Demand Generation side:
services in digital marketing
online store development and hosting
What we call Brand Commerce where we help a company manage the product positioning into both their own online store, but also into the major ecommerce marketplaces in the region
Demand Fulfillment Side
We can host a client's products in our own fulfillment centers or even B2C enable existing client’s B2B warehouses using our technology and people
We manage the delivery of those products back out to the consumer
And finally, we can help them with Customer Care services
As a result, these are a growing list of the clients that we have helped to navigate the tricky waters of a consumer base of 650 million people rapidly expanding into middle class economies.
Now that I have explained to you what aCommerce does, I want to share a few lessons for the technologists in the audience that are in startup stage as they grow into an enterprise capable of delivering for some of the biggest clients in the world.
When aCommerce started back in the beginning of 2013, 4 short years ago, we were born in the cloud with Amazon Web Services.
When I started in the beginning of 2015, 2 years later, there were 6 brand sites at that time and things were still being built somewhat manually with reusability focused on managing the AMIs. Since then, we have added another 21 e-commerce sites to the infrastructure and through the use of template-based automation, we can deploy a running site, fully secured and hardened in about 2 hours. This site is then ready for the Store Development teams to adapt it to that client's unique needs. So, while it is tempting the use the AWS Console to deploy resources, you really want to switch to automation as soon as possible. The engineering time you spend in the beginning using an AWS compatible provisioning tool will help you almost immediately in both speed and reliability.
Security is another key area where our clients have very stringent needs. Imagine the reputational damage that could be created if a hacker could compromise a client's e-commerce site. This compromise can take on a number of forms.
It could range from putting up content embarrassing to the brand,
to stealing consumer credit card information to
interrupting the supply chain and diverting inventory to an eager thief.
AWS does a great job providing the tools we need to effectively secure our ecommerce sites on behalf of our clients. The networking tools, including elastic load balancers, security groups, network subnets and others allow us to set up effective de-militarized zones so that none of our ecommerce servers are actually directly reachable from the internet. These same tools help us to locate the database layers even deeper into the network becoming multiple hops away from an attacker. Other tools that are baked in are encryption in motion and encryption at rest ensuring that not even AWS can see our client's data. However, what is really powerful is that the deployment all of these features can be templated and automated so that we get it right every time. Security practices we learn with one client’s site can be easily back-ported to others as long as you take the time to build the automation.
The first version of this supply chain was based around a monolithic architecture. These days, you hear a lot of hype about micro-services architectures. But I am here to tell you that monolithic architectures are a very powerful construct in a startup because it keeps things simple allowing you to adapt and pivot very quickly. Eventually, you may find the need to expand beyond the confines of a single set of machines or tightly coupled features.
And the aCommerce supply chain began that distributed systems journey in the middle of 2015 to a micro-services architecture.
I hope these real-world examples help you to better understand how AWS helps aCommerce and also stir a few ideas on how it might help you.
Khap Khun Krub