Here's how some organisations in Asia Pacific are using cloud and data to be future-ready:
Ninja Van goes the extra mile with Google Cloud
Logistics provider Ninja Van has extended its multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud to help businesses of all sizes capture digital growth opportunities and overcome supply chain disruptions.
By running its platform and applications on Google Cloud’s scalable, secure and open-source infrastructure, Ninja Van aims to strengthen its leadership in last-mile courier services and expand upstream into supply chain management solutions.
With Google Cloud’s dynamic auto-scaling capabilities, Ninja Van’s website and mobile applications can now handle 10 times the normal traffic with a smooth user experience, enabling operations to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can also be scaled down to reduce costs when additional computing resources are no longer needed.
Google’s open cloud approach also allows Ninja Van’s technical teams to choose the tools they need to accelerate software development and scale more efficiently while reducing technology risk. For instance, by using Google Cloud’s open-source data processing platform — which integrates seamlessly with its data scientists’ preferred external data visualisation tools — Ninja Van’s teams can comfortably process terabytes of data daily to support the company’s business needs.
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Ninja Van’s developers also turned to Google Cloud’s open-source and pre-built virtual agents to bring the NinjaChat chatbot to life to simulate the quality and immediacy of in-person interactions. It took them only a month to do so, instead of spending three months building a machine learning framework from scratch.
“We chose Google Cloud because of its proven ability to help us scale reliably and innovate at high velocity, as we address the region’s end-to-end logistics management needs,” says Ninja Van’s co-founder and chief technology officer Shaun Chong.
“From a chatbot that enhances customer experiences to algorithms for fuel-saving route optimisation — these are amongst the hundreds of new features released by Ninja Van each day. By automating application deployment and upgrades using Google Kubernetes Engine, our technical teams can avoid engaging in manual back-end configurations and stay laser-focused on innovation.”
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Alibaba Cloud helps deliver a more inclusive and sustainable 2022 Winter Olympics
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Beijing Organizing Committee for the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games have successfully migrated core games technology services to Alibaba Cloud.
The move aims at creating a safer, more efficient, sustainable, and inclusive experience for participants and audiences from around the world.
The services now running on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure include the games management systems, Olympics management systems and Olympics distribution systems.
Taking advantage of the cloud infrastructure’s scalability, reliability and security features, event organisers like the IOC can reduce the complexity of the game planning based on intelligence-driven decisions, striking the right balance between optimising existing resources and creating new ones. That way, hosting cities can also reduce the time and costs associated with the legacy physical infrastructure investment upfront.
The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics showcased a series of technological innovations developed to bring more inclusive experiences for fans in multiple locations. One of them is Cloud ME, which facilitates remote social interactions by enabling people to meet and converse with each other’s life-sized, true-to-life persona projections.
Alibaba also unveiled Dong Dong, a virtual influencer from Beijing who was designed to interact with fans globally, sharing fun and informative Olympics-related facts. From Feb 4 to 20, Dong Dong’s live streams have received more than two million views, and she has a fan base of more than 100,000.
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Additionally, the partnership with Alibaba saw the distribution of live signals of the Olympic Games over the cloud for the first time. Through the Olympic Winter Games, 6,000 hours of footage were produced by the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and broadcasted to more than 220 countries and territories.
The OBS Video Server, which was fully hosted in the cloud, provides rights holding broadcasters (RHBs) with an efficient and scalable system while reducing onsite hardware investment. It allows RHBs to access all content produced during the Olympic Winter Games, including the live coverage, remotely with ease. Since the Olympic Games-related contents can be transmitted over the public cloud, it also helps to reduce the carbon footprint of broadcasting-related operations.
Qlik helps Sephora to revolutionise its global HR strategy
Sephora, a multinational beauty retail chain, has turned to Qlik to transform its human resources (HR) management system.
In a rapidly changing consumer retail sector, Sephora has developed a global vision of its talent management, embodied by the deployment of a global employer brand strategy that values the richness of the career paths and unique opportunities offered by the brand.
It decided to rely on a unique technology to manage its HR data and exploit its full value through dynamic analysis to realise that vision.
Sephora deployed SAP’s SuccessFactors as its global Human Resources Information System (HRIS) and enriched it with solutions like Qlik to manage local employees’ needs, jobs and recruitment requirements. Qlik will help Sephora’s HR Management team and other managers navigate the analytics from this data-rich system.
Sephora’s People Trends app, which is powered by Qlik, is structured around four functional areas: Employee engagement, talent development, recruitment, and HR organisation and effectiveness. The intuitive, easy-to-use and robust app is not only dedicated to data visualisation, but is also a main driver in the overall HR digitalisation process.
Available on mobile devices via Qlik Sense, the People Trends app enables every manager within Sephora to have a single source of truth for all HR data. This empowers them to work with data more confidently as data is always updated in real-time, regardless of the country they are based in.
“HR data allows companies to better understand the expectations of their employees, to accompany them throughout their career, and to identify opportunities for them, ultimately allowing for more refined and higher value-added talent management. We are delighted to support Sephora in the deployment of its employee vision,” says Nicolas Hirsch, country leader for France at Qlik.
Photo: Danist Soh/Unsplash
