INDUSTRY
Logistics
BENEFITS
- IT gained agility and flexibility to keep up with high growth
- Cut provisioning time from months to just 2 weeks enabling faster time to market
- Data replication across all sites providing ease of mind for business continuity
- Support volatile business volume by scaling up operating servers in just 15 minutes
- Modular scalability favours OPEX spending model allowing IT spend to align closely with revenue growth
- Free up resources to work on business-critical issues
- Reduce datacenter footprint size up to 50 percent
SOLUTION
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
- Acropolis OS, including built-in hypervisor, AHV
- Prism management
APPLICATIONS
- Microservices
- Application Sever
- Database
- Customer-service applications for ordering, booking, AI chatbot, e-payments
BUSINESS BENEFITS
As e-commerce in South East Asia is experiencing unprecedented boom and is predicted to reach $102 billion and CAGR growth of 34% by 20251, Kerry Express has been keeping up with the pace to maintain its competitive edge as an ‘express’ business.
When the behaviour is changing to e-commerce, we need to go along. As the market keeps changing, everything must be super-fast. By leveraging Nutanix enterprise solution, we can quickly and simply manage our system and workflows ‘all-in-one’ place. This helps the team eliminate time, cost, and complexity, while also achieving better agility and flexibility to support Kerry Express’ business growth.
Stephen Bao, IT Regional Manager, Head of IT, Kerry Express
CHALLENGES
Kerry Express is a subsidiary of Kerry Logistics Network Limited, which has operations in Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. Some of Kerry Express’s customers include international express firms, e-commerce companies and local retail chains. The organisation provides services to B2B, B2C and C2C segments, which are its key customers.
Today, Kerry Express is Thailand’s leading parcel delivery company. With ‘Kerry everywhere’ slogan, Kerry Express has been fostering relationships with partners which made its services available to all customers no matter where they are. This pole position only inspired the company to go further in providing the best experience and convenience for their customers – launching mobile order app, e-payment through LINE app/QR, and AI chatbot services.
With their customer-first philosophy, Kerry’s business quickly soared and they soon realised the limitations of the traditional legacy architecture. “Our company keeps growing every year – number of customers, delivery trucks and shops. We need our business to be agile and respond quickly to market conditions,” said Stephen Bao, IT regional manager and head of IT.
Working with traditional datacentre architecture means the team is tied down to a long purchasing life cycle with an average of waiting time of 3 months. “This is too slow to support the growth levels we are experiencing today. The laborious procurement cycle and the complexity of managing different physical components meant that our team’s resources are heavily bogged down by non-value-creating tasks,” said Bao.
The team also experienced difficulties in handling data protection efficiently. “It was very complicated and time-consuming to perform backup from one location to another using traditional setup.” Bao added. Without assurance in data protection, the company runs the risk of losing data on their services e.g. cash-on-delivery (COD) information, with repercussions that might affect both revenue, reputation and business continuity.
SOLUTIONS
Kerry Express’s team evaluated other products against Nutanix during the PoC. Bao found them to be more complex to setup, “you need to decide on the design layout, think about the disc storage and failure and handle the complexities of installations,” he said. “With Nutanix, we can plug in the nodes we need because storage, compute, and virtualisation are all rolled into one. No need to purchase separately as compared to the 3-tier method,” Bao said.
The Kerry team deployed Nutanix cluster at DC and DR sites in Bangkok and migrated their core business applications and services onto Nutanix. Kerry Express also chose the Nutanix AHV hypervisor to run virtualisation, thus saving a substantial amount in license fees if they were to go with other competitors.
CUSTOMER OUTCOME
Faster time to market with provisioning time reduced to weeks
The biggest advantage Kerry Express experienced was the ability to scale their business at top speed. “Our time to market is shortened from 3 months to 2 weeks. We just have to do simple network configuration when we receive new nodes. In fact, the procurement and delivery take up most of the waiting time,” Bao said. “Now we can immediately serve new customers or businesses by just doing simple software modifications, instead of facing long waiting time that will affect our business in this competitive market.”
And all the time saved from the laborious work contribute to increasing productivity for Bao’s team. “Our team can now focus on actual work to improve on the business, application, and system architecture,” he said.
Modular scalability allows IT spending to align with current business needs
Nutanix affords Kerry the ability to scale quickly in a simple modular fashion, while the infrastructure investment decisions can be reviewed on a 3-6-month basis. “Previously, we needed to prepare our capacity every year. However, with Nutanix, the lifetime has been shortened. We are now planning around three or six months,” said Bao.
This means that Kerry does not have to overload its balance sheet in the initial stage with a huge capital expenditure based on unpredictable long-term estimates. The company stays agile as it aligns IT spending to support immediate business revenue growth, while preventing scenarios of bottlenecks in the infrastructure or having substantial unutilised resources on standby.
Partnering with Nutanix also gave Kerry Express a bonus by reducing their datacentre footprint size up to 50 percent.
Readily support volatile fluctuations without downtime
“Nutanix allows us to react quickly when business transaction volume spikes up during online festive campaigns like Singles Day 11-11, 12-12 and Black Friday. The team can also provide support for high concurrent usage especially in the areas of checking parcel and delivery status. All these happen can by just scaling up number of servers, for example, from one to three in less than 15 minutes, all done without noticeable downtime.” Bao said.
Native data replication features provide ease of mind for business continuity
“One of the important reasons that we choose Nutanix is to help us with the back-up and data replication from the datacentre (DC) to our disaster recovery (DR) site. We can simply snapshot from DC to DR in around 20 minutes, a process which was previously tedious and fraught with errors with our old infrastructure,” Bao said.
One view holistic dashboard with Prism
The Nutanix Prism dashboard allows the team to view real-time health signals in one single dashboard view. This helps to shave considerable man-hours in troubleshooting and workflow management, allowing the team to focus more on customer-facing projects and other business-critical tasks.
NEXT STEPS
“Effective use of technology is the most important factor to our company. By leveraging with Nutanix enterprise solution, we can run our business with efficiency and flexibility,” said Bao. As we continue to grow further, Nutanix will always be a part in this successful journey of Kerry Express.
1Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/_qs/documents/6870/Report_e-Conomy_SEA_2018_by_Google_Temasek_121418_cpsLjlQ.pdf