Southeast Asian logistics provider Ninja Van is extending its multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud to help businesses of all sizes seize 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 position in last-mile courier services and expand upstream into supply chain management solutions.
Ninja Van does business in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. To facilitate onshore or nearshore production and distribution for businesses in the region, Ninja Van recently launched Ninja Direct, a procurement concierge that offers services like supplier sourcing and management, customs clearance, financing, and shipments tracking.
Shaun Chong, co-founder and CTO of Ninja Van, observed that retailers have shifted toward e-commerce strategies as opposed to selling through physical stores, especially with the pandemic forcing consumers to shop online more than ever before.
“With disruptions to the traditional flow of raw materials and finished goods, there’s also an urgent need for adaptive micro supply chains that allow businesses to ‘make where they sell’ and fulfill orders quicker,” said Chong. “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.”
With Google’s open cloud approach, Ninja Van’s technical teams are free to choose the tools they need to accelerate software development and scale more efficiently – while also 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.
To create its NinjaChat chatbot and simulate the quality and immediacy of in-person interactions, Ninja Van’s developers turned to Google Cloud’s open-source and pre-built virtual agents to bring the feature to life in a month, rather than spend three months building a machine learning framework from scratch.
“By automating application deployment and upgrades using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), our technical teams can avoid engaging in manual backend configurations and stay laser-focused on innovation,” said Chong.
The demand for Ninja Van’s services have grown by three times during the pandemic. Google Cloud’s dynamic autoscaling capabilities enable Ninja Van’s website and mobile applications to handle 10 times the normal traffic with a smooth user experience, before scaling down to reduce costs when additional computing resources are no longer needed.
“Having benefited from security solutions that are designed by default into Google Cloud’s infrastructure, such as end-to-end encryption and automated patching against vulnerabilities like Apache Log4j 2, we will now work with Google Cloud’s security specialists on additional ways to reinforce our zero trust security model,” said Chong.
