iCar Asia today, is the largest network of online automotive sites across ASEAN countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. It did not get to be this, by chance. Its CIO, Joey Caisse shared, “In order to be the leading automotive web portals, iCar Asia needs to thoroughly understand our customer behaviour in order to enhance user experience.
Take into account that iCar Asia also have had to integrate Malaysian, Thailand and Indonesian acquisitions, which exacerbated the IT challenge even more.
Caisse said, “When iCar Asia bought over One2car in Thailand (the leading car sales site in the country), they experienced integration issues as One2car was hosting their own infrastructure with limited capacity for growth.
“iCar Asia needed to migrate the One2car system so that it runs on the same Response Management System (RMS) that allows car dealers to more effectively manage their online inventory, promote their cars, and respond to consumer queries.”
Malaysia’s Carlist.my and Indonesia’s Mobil123 on the other hand, were hosted on traditional infrastructure in co-located data centres within their respective countries.
“If the companies were using a physical infrastructure, as the business grew, an IT specialist in the infrastructure space would be needed to centralise development and operational teams. This would mean higher operating and maintenance costs for the company, along with difficulty in scaling and predicting hardware server or storage capacity.”
Caisse shares with Enterprise IT News, how cloud services provider Amazon Web Services, has helped them address these challenges.
EITN: How has Amazon Redshift helped address the above challenges?
Caisse: iCar Asia used ‘Yellowfin’ as their Business Intelligence tool to process data from Amazon Redshift for analytics and visualisation. Yellowfin analyses both our buyer and seller behavior so that iCar Asia can proactively manage our products and services. The data can suggest items of interest for their customers and show where dealers can improve their chances of selling a car by being aggressive in price or by improving the listing data quality.
With the help of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a relational database service in the cloud, as well as AWS Auto Scaling service, iCar Asia was able to resolve another challenge by consolidating the systems from One2car on the same RMS platform within three months.
Being on AWS gives iCar Asia the flexibility to develop new features and additional services on their existing platform while concurrently launching new sites. Development teams can choose to work in their own environments and then use the same platform for testing and pre-production, iterate quickly to enhance the features on the applications or systems, before rolling out in full production for the users. This flexibility and the development process allow different teams to collaborate continuously while dramatically reducing overall integration time.
Before using AWS, we used to have conversation such as ‘We can’t do that because there is not enough CPU” or “Our disks are out of space!”. However, after using AWS, such conversations don’t happen anymore. By using AWS, we don’t have to spend any capital on physical IT infrastructure as all infrastructure resources are now provisioned on-demand on a pay as we use basis. We now incur low operating cost with unlimited on-demand capacity at our fingertips. So we no longer spend time in maintaining or procuring hardware or negotiating with vendors, our team now focuses on our core business and more important tasks such as improving tools and applications for a better user experience.
EITN: What is the potential number of customers, this solution should actually help you snag? Who else does the solution address, and how does it do so ie. dealers?
Caisse: Currently there are 350 million people across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. These countries represent some of the fastest growing automotive markets. Additionally, in the coming years many people will be buying their first car.
Using AWS has enabled us to improve our service delivery so that both our dealers and consumers can transact with ease. This is especially crucial whenever we roll out new developments, patches or improvements to our iCar Asia web platform. Furthermore, our teams are able to actively add new features to improve our web platform without any downtime that would affect our dealers’ sales.
The on-demand AWS cloud services has freed us from worrying on capacity planning to support new dealers and periodic influx of heavy user traffic that are unpredictable. As the car sales sector is highly competitive, AWS is a key business differentiator to ensure that our customers enjoy the most consistent and best user experience possible.
EITN: What other solutions do you use in conjunction with Amazon Redshift?
Caisse: Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery service web service. We also use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a relational database service in the cloud.
EITN: Please give the top 3 examples of how these solutions have helped iCar Asia offer positive journey for buyers and sellers alike.
Caisse: Amazon CloudFront caches our content to the nearest edge locations of AWS global network of points-of-presence at a low latency so that our customers residing in any parts of Asia or the world get to enjoy a great user experience when accessing iCar Asia’s web platform. Also as Amazon Simple Queue Service transmits any volume of data at any level of throughput without losing messages, this offload our administrative burden of operating and scaling messaging cluster, while we pay a low price for only what we use. Hence, these useful cloud services have saved us so much time, allowing us to focus on using the service to create more ideas for our business and to enhance users’ experience.
Amazon Redshift, a fully managed data warehouse solution in the cloud, is used to mine our inventory data and the aggregated consumer behavior patterns so that we can better understand our customers and deliver relevant content at the right time.
The key here is to more accurately understand our customers and to gain insights on changes in the car market movements. For example, if a user is searching for various models in different categories of cars, they are likely to be undecided on what they want, but a person who searches one Honda Jazz after the next is unlikely swayed by providing additional options, it’s our job to find the right dealer and the best price for the car, and it’s those search behaviors that assist our team to recommend the relevant content for better usability and a more meaningful experience for buyers.
Importantly, a result of using cloud services such as AWS, the IT department in iCar Asia is now a strategic business enabler for iCar Asia as we grow rapidly to differentiate our customer services that help us create competitive edge.
EITN: What are the top 3 new features that iCar Asia is able to deploy on a weekly basis, and the business performance as result of it?
Caisse: Featured listing which have larger images. When activated, it performs 10 times better than an average free listing.
Response Management System (RMS) is a listings and leads management tool that ensures car sellers advertise, monitor and manage their ads better, faster, and smarter.
The advanced search engine on the website makes it easy to find everything they need to make the car buying experience easy and without anxiety. Buyers can find test drives, reviews, pricing information, and dealer information all with a few clicks. This enhances the relationship between our company, our dealers, and the buyers.
EITN: What’s next in the pipeline in terms of features and product roadmap for iCar Asia?
Caisse: The next step is to continue focusing on mobility in order to add value to our customer base. Everything we do is mobile first – literally everything. So we’ll continue that push so that buyers and sellers can find each other wherever they are, in any situation.
In the upcoming month, iCar Asia will be focusing on improving the car purchasing experience of people in Thailand. It aims to bring together the buyers and sellers to form a unified audience to enhance the car purchasing and selling experience unlike anything that has been released in the country before.
AWS is going to be a strategic enabler for us in our business growth.
