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Vietnamese e-commerce platform Tiki has migrated on-premises applications to Google Cloud as part of widespread modernisation efforts designed to enhance market competitiveness.
Headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, the platform houses over 10 million active products in its online catalog, recording annual triple-digit growth since launching in 2010. Such growth prompted an overhaul of infrastructure capabilities resulting in the migration of on-premises workloads to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) within 24 days.
Speaking as senior vice president of technology at Tiki, Tridiv Vasavada said Google Cloud and specialist partner Techolution were selected to allow the business to adopt an agile approach when creating value-added services, amid ahighly competitive local e-commerce market.
“Tiki is committed to providing our customers with authentic products and fast delivery service and we were the first in Southeast Asia to launch our two-hour delivery service TikiNOW,” Vasavada added. “As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we’re working with Google Cloud to modernise our technology infrastructure and set the business up for the next decade of growth.”
To cope with traffic and handle spikes in sales during peak shopping periods such as Tet - Vietnamese Lunar New Year - Tiki rolled out GCP for automatic scaling and cloud load balancing. The move has allowed the business to handle platform traffic capable of increasing by up to ten times with over 4,000 orders transacted per minute.
The technology giant also provides end-to-end delivery support through Google Compute Engine, enabling Tiki to streamline processes throughout the value chain, supporting inventory allocation, driver dispatching and routing platform. The result was 98 per cent on-time delivery of purchases despite a peak in customer demands.
“Consumers have heightened expectations when it comes to their shopping experiences,” said Richard Spence, regional sales leader of Southeast Asia at Google Cloud. “As a result, retailers are being challenged to become more data-driven in order to deliver rich, engaging experiences to customers and stay competitive.
Tiki is a great example of a forward-looking organization that has leveraged the power of the cloud to digitally transform their business to be more dynamic, secure, and dependable. Their migration to Google Cloud took just 24 days, and is one of the fastest migrations to date in Asia Pacific.”
In addition, Tiki is leveraging Google Cloud’s encrypted architecture which is paired with Cloud Security Scanner to scan platform traffic and improve user data visibility. This is alongside the adoption of BigQuery for data warehousing and TensorFlow to train and manage models for fraud detection.
With 70 per cent of systems already in the cloud, Vasavada said Tiki plans to move remaining back-end systems "fully" to GCP within the coming months. Other key focus areas include exploring ways to optimise containerisation VMs more efficiently, while building on the existing use of TensorFlow and machine learning to enhance forecast demand.
“We believe that privacy and security goes hand in hand, so by virtue of being in the cloud, you get a high level of encryption in traffic which protects us from misuse of the platform,” Vasavada said. “This is something that we did not have prior to moving to Google Cloud.”
For Vasavada, the shift to Google Cloud is timely due to the large influx of online orders placed during Covid-19. With an estimated 30 per cent increase in sales volume during this period, Vasavada said Tiki is now able to "easily scale" platform capabilities to adapt to spikes in web traffic and consumer activities.
