Carsome Group teamed up with Google Cloud and Searce to fuel the Malaysia-based used car trading platform’s continued expansion and growth in the markets where it operates.
The collaboration will use Google Cloud’s platform services across modern infrastructure, cybersecurity, data analytics, and generative AI to further enhance the car transaction and ownership experience for consumers and used car dealers.
“With our business continuing to experience significant growth, we saw an opportunity to strengthen our digital foundation to better support our expanding operations and drive even greater efficiencies,” said Kjetil Rohde Jakobsen, group CTO at Carsome.
Jacobsen said shifting from a multi-cloud environment to Google Cloud not only helps them realise cost savings, it also enables them to access secure-by-design, full stack capabilities across data analytics and AI.
“This will enable our teams to deliver more dynamic and differentiated solutions and experiences for CARSOME customers and partners across the region, from car listings and discovery, to financing and transacting, to after-sales support,” said Jacobsen.
In 2024, Carsome surpassed 500,000 cars sold since its inception – of which, 150,000 were sold in 2023 alone.
To support its accelerated growth trajectory, Carsome will tap Searce’s technical consultancy and implementation expertise to make its strategic shift to a unified cloud operating model.
This involves migrating the applications and databases that underpin Carsome’s core operations and ancillary services to Google Cloud’s workload-optimised infrastructure for deeper integration and facilitating continuous software improvements using Google Cloud’s developer-friendly tools.
To strengthen its security posture, uphold compliance requirements, and reinforce customer trust, Carsome is leveraging Google Cloud’s built-in data access controls and Security Command Center for advanced threat detection and response across its consolidated cloud systems.
Yash Thakker, Searce director of solutions consulting in the Asia-Pacific region, said Carsome’s cloud consolidation will optimise its cloud spend by as much as 30%.
Thakker said such cost savings can then be redeployed toward other strategic innovation initiatives that deliver top-line growth for the business. These include the potential development of next-generation conversational AI agents that autonomously and effectively handle common customer queries for relevant information. In turn, these free up Carsome’s customer support staff to address more complex issues.
In addition to accelerated software development cycles and projected cost savings, Carsome’s move to Google Cloud will give its teams access to granular insights that enable improved business decision-making and hyper-personalised customer engagement.
Through native integrations between BigQuery and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, Carsome can centrally process and stream data in all formats to enhance the performance of its existing AI applications.
Carsome is also taking advantage of BigQuery and Vertex AI Agent Builder to embed semantic search capabilities into its internal tools. This will enable employees across departments and functions to intuitively extract relevant information from Carsome’s vast and continuously expanding enterprise knowledge base.
With generative AI turning information retrieval tasks that take hours into quick searches or conversational exploration, marketing and product teams, for instance, can more easily create educational content and enhanced solutions to address the evolving needs of car buyers and sellers.
Serene Sia, Google Cloud country director for Malaysia and Singapore, said that by running its business on fully managed Google Cloud infrastructure that scales reliably to handle the increasing performance needs of any application, Carsome can expand its operations with confidence.
This may be so along the chain, from increasing its penetration in existing markets, to expanding its inventory of pre-owned vehicles, to streamlining the movement of vehicles between inspection centers, refurbishment facilities, and customers.
