 from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2015. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Hi, welcome back to SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage of AWS re-invent 2015. We go out to all the shows, find the best guys we can, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host of this segment is Brian Graceley. And from the Wikibon team, we're always excited, we have practitioners talking about what they do, what their journey has been, and really excited to have Roland Oberdhofer, who's chief architect of SingPost e-commerce on the program. Roland, first time on the program, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so I guess first question, you can tell us, chief architect, tell us a little bit about your role, and tell us about your organization. Yeah, okay, let me actually give you a little history of Singapore Post e-commerce, because Singapore Post is really the postal service of Singapore. And in 2003, it became a public company, before that it was a government organization. And the CEO of Singapore Post decided that the postal business is going down, and they need to do something to bring it back up and have a future. So Singapore Post came up with a strategy to provide full-fledged e-commerce services, since Singapore Post already was the fulfillment engine, or fulfillment arm of a lot of e-commerce companies based in Asia. So instead of just doing the delivery of the goods for the e-commerce companies, it made sense to add to the stack of services that Singapore Post provides to its customers. That's when SBE e-commerce was founded, which is essentially a subsidiary of Singapore Post, and is chartered to deliver e-commerce services to customers. So back then, we launched the first platform where we did a mono brand, which was back then, was a customer called Adidas, and they wanted to launch a store. And Singapore Post did that, and we did the entire architecture for that platform, and we had to find a solution where we actually host that platform, right? Singapore Post has its own data center, but we needed something that can help us scale internationally. So we looked at cloud providers, and the obvious choice back then was Amazon. Since Amazon had a global footprint, right? They have data centers all around the world, and they have methods in their data center of how you can start small, you can try things out, you can explore, and then grow. So with that, we basically launched the first store, and we can now offer services from website development, hosting to customer service, logistics, warehousing, and returns, and logistics actually fulfillment. So it's the entire end-to-end where we can get customers up and running fairly quickly. It took us, Andy mentioned it this morning in the keynote, it took us three months to launch that first store, and since then, we've launched additional ones like, why am I blind? It's black. Like Toshiba, Levias, and so forth. All right, so Roland, do you still have your own data center? We still have our own data center. However, Singapore Post is also moving now parts of the data center over to the cloud. There's actually three different initiatives happening within Singapore Post, where cloud work is done. So the e-commerce part pretty much started in the cloud and never had to its own data center. So there was no kind of cultural change or whatever needs to happen within what I'm seeing here at the AWS event when there are some companies who have like a big data center and they want to move things over into the clouds. That's a completely different process than if you start a new business and you started right in the cloud. Okay, can you walk us through a little bit? What services of Amazon you're using and anything about to kind of the scope of how much you're using the various AWS services? Yeah, absolutely. So we use the database RDS. We use EC2, we use auto scaling, we use elastic load balancers. And all of these services together help us build the different environments. One big thing that I saw here again at the conferences and which I think comes apparent when you do cloud computing is that the infrastructure kind of becomes secondary. What becomes really important is that you have the definition of your environment in recipes and with that you can simply create those environments that I mentioned so you can spin up RDS instances, you can spin up new EC2 instances and then have your load balancers on top of that and that whole method allows you to do then auto scaling. When we started back then auto scaling wasn't available and I think that only actually became available later which is super important for our business since our business is very seasonal, right? So all the e-commerce websites, they get a lot of traffic starting November until the 24th of December and if you have your own data center, you have to plan for that, you have to buy infrastructure upfront and once the 24th comes, you cannot just go and sell it but within AWS and through auto scaling you can actually just get the bandwidth when you need it and then get rid of it after automatically, right? So it's a very cost effective way to scale and to survive holidays. So going from just doing postal services to, I mean you're talking about supply chain, you're talking about e-commerce, like that's a radical amount of business change. You talked a little bit about, you know, you've leveraged AWS to help you do experimentation. Give people a sense of what types of business experimentation you needed to do to kind of move from one type of business to this very radical different kind of business or more complete kind of business. Okay, now there wasn't really like a big change from something existing to something new, right? Because Singapore said we're going to go into this business and we built out the first environment. There was nothing existing yet, right? So it was basically like a little startup within a safe, you know, bigger environment. So we basically could just take the Amazon platform and start developing the first store. We could do that in a small, you know, environment with a handful of servers. And then once that platform was available and we launched it, at that point in time, we could adjust the capacity, right? What I like about developing in that environment is you can develop things and then release them to a new environment and then decommission your old environments, right? So you're constantly kind of replacing your environment because you're just adding new services, new functionality to a new environment and you flip over. One important service for that is the Route 53 from Amazon where you can just simply point for your load balancers, you know, from one environment to the next one. Yeah, so one of the things we hear a lot of is that cloud's going to give you agility. But one of the big differences also from an infrastructure standpoint is if I'm buying the gear and building it up, I need to know what's going to work, how it's going to work, and I'm really committed because I bought it and I'm going to own it. I'm curious if you've had any times where you get to try things out and actually fail and be able to fail fast and learn from that and therefore not have wasted massive amounts of time, energy, and resources. Yeah, yeah, of course. So when you build your environment up and you, let's say, you build your database architecture and then on top of that, your computer architecture and you try to start it and it doesn't run, you can quickly figure out why it's not working because you don't have to go through any kind of processes that you usually have in a normal data center where you have to go to one team that's responsible for network security, right? And then to another team that's responsible for storage. You have all the different components or building blocks within your environment, right? And an engineer that's on an AWS environment versus in a data center environment has to be familiar with all the different building blocks so you can quickly see if something works end to end. And if not, then you can just delete that environment and then create a new or adjusted, yeah. We're a little bit spoiled in the States. Every time Amazon announces a service it's always available in US East and US West. How much up to date, so in the Asia regions, do you feel like what you see announced this week is available to you immediately? Do you feel like there's a little bit of a lag? I mean, do you ever feel like the rest of the world kind of isn't moving as fast as Amazon United States or is that not important, not a big deal to you guys? That's a good question because I'm based actually here in the US, right? Singapore Post is headquartered in Singapore but I'm actually helping customers who want to move their e-commerce business from the US to Asia which is not an easy thing to do, right? So international companies move or companies wanting to move international? Right, so their service is like for example we have a cross-border shipment service which is called B-Post where customers in Asia can actually buy things on American websites. Gotcha. And they get shipped to our distribution center here in the United States which then packs them all together and sends them over to Asia, right? That's kind of the first indicator for brands that people actually want the products there, right? So there's a lot of products that are available here but you can't really get them. So those customers use that service to actually get their products in. But if you reach a certain threshold then that service is not really viable anymore especially in the closing industry, right? If you get shoes from the US and then they don't fit then you have to ship them back. It kind of becomes very timely and expensive, right? At that point in time we help customers understand what it would actually take to open their own store in a country and that's not easy, not only from a technology perspective but also from a logistics perspective, right? Because you have to have a physical presence in that country in order to actually get your domain name and to do business, right? And Singapore Post has a version of record capabilities where actually a company based here in the US can start doing business on our accounts in Singapore and in Asia in general, fairly quickly, right? And then they have time to mature and maybe if it becomes big enough they can get their own company established there and then change it out but for that time they can use what we have to offer as a bridge, right? And then the branding itself when you have a website or a store in a country with a local domain name, with a local customer service then the trust of customers goes up significantly and your conversion rates increase significantly. Your customer satisfaction increases significantly because you actually get your goods right over, right? If you have to ship them over from the US it takes time, right? But what we usually do then is we tell our brands, hey, let's ship everything over in bulk to Asia then we store it in our warehouses and then when customers buy it it gets just delivered by us fairly quickly, right? And returns and so forth is all done locally so you see a pretty big difference in having that kind of business model versus shopping in the US and having shipped there or even just participating in like a marketplace, right? Where you are not in control of your own merchandising people think it might not be authentic products, right? But if you actually have your own website, your own company there or a presence then when people buy from your site they trust you and they trust that they get the right product. So you're really using the technology to create a global business that looks very localized and very personalized for each individual business. That's powerful, that's really powerful. So last question I have for you is what advice do you have for your peers? When they're looking at, okay, solution like yours as you grow out, your infrastructure costs are going to go up, your usage of AWS services are going to go up, how do you track and manage kind of the growth of that versus the growth of your business and what advice would you give to your peers on that? Yeah, so it's important, analytics are super important, when you get, it's like a funnel, right? You get traffic and then when people come to your website you want to convert them so they actually buy something from your website and so you want to track the right traffic and it's important to keep a close eye on your end-to-end analytics, right? And we are experimenting also there's something which is interesting which is called real-time marketing where you can actually customize the content of a website to what you think that person is interested in, right? Because you get traffic from different sources, right? Maybe you get somebody from Google or Baidu who is Googling or searching for something but you might also get traffic from like a block that talks about running shoes, let's say, for Adidas, right? If somebody comes from a block about running shoes you could memorize that even if you don't know that person that this session came through somebody who is interested in running shoes and you can optimize your content for them. And so it's important to kind of look at the whole end-to-end how much traffic you get, how many of them do you convert and then you have to really see how can you increase your traffic and how can you increase your conversion rate and the whole IT aspect is a big factor of that, right? If you have a website that's low you lose a lot of customers every second you use a certain percentage of potential customers because they just get frustrated, right? And with AWS you can scale but you have to keep an eye on it and also, I mean, you have auto scaling which works really well from an easy to perspective but from a database perspective you still need to keep a close eye on that because there's no concept of auto scaling in that section. All right. Roland, thank you so much for sharing your experience with our audience here and we'll be right back with lots more coverage here from AWS right after this quick break. Thanks for watching.