awoo Intelligence: Offering highly automated marketing technology services with a cloud infrastructure
About awoo
Founded in 2015, awoo Intelligence provides AI-driven marketing technology services, notably a product discovery platform, a one-stop AI marketing platform, and AI-powered SEO solutions. Through its software offering more than 20 features and services, including traffic acquisition, conversion optimization, remarketing, and user retention, retailers and e-commerce merchants can create personalized user experiences across platforms. awoo Intelligence currently has served more than 16,000 enterprise customers and offices in Taiwan and Japan.
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About iKala
iKala is a Taiwanese digitalization and AI commerce solution provider founded in 2011. Its subsidiary iKala Cloud is a Google Cloud partner offering consultation services for cloud infrastructure, hybrid cloud solutions, machine learning, and marketing applications to help enterprises overcome challenges brought by digital transformation. The company has served more than 400 enterprise customers in Asia Pacific for their use of Google Cloud.
awoo Intelligence incorporates the highly scalable infrastructure and extensive global network of Google Cloud into its hybrid cloud architecture to provide stable and smooth marketing automation services to customers in various countries while reducing operational workloads and costs.
Google Cloud results
- Supports smooth real-time AI-powered product recommendation services under high website traffic with GKE
- Helps reduce 30% of operational workloads by simplifying database management through Cloud SQL
- Enables cloud security check to comply with the ISO 27001 requirements with Security Command Center
Reduces operational costs by 20%
In Taiwan, more and more organizations have started using marketing technology (MarTech) to enhance their marketing efficiency and effectiveness. MarTech tools can not only help simplify and automate marketing processes, but also enable marketing teams to review the results of their marketing campaigns and adjust their strategies more effectively through data analytics.
Founded in 2015 in Taiwan, awoo Intelligence is a leading MarTech service provider. The company started from offering SEO solutions to help brands improve the search engine rankings of their websites. Since 2017, awoo Intelligence has been focusing on developing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered marketing solutions, including awoo PDP, a product discovery platform, awoo AMP, a one-stop marketing automation platform, and AI-based SEO solutions. With these MarTech solutions, awoo Intelligence's enterprise customers can easily improve user experiences and boost sales. For example, the awoo AMP system can analyze relations between products in real time through AI and identify users' needs based on the products they have viewed. This way, enterprises can offer AI-powered product recommendations to e-commerce website visitors through awoo AMP without acquiring user login data or third-party cookies.
"The high flexibility of the computing resources of Google Cloud can help us ensure service quality while reducing costs. Besides, its widely distributed data centers around the world can enable us to provide low network latency to users across regions. All these advantages prompted us to incorporate Google Cloud into our hybrid cloud architecture."
—Angelline Chen, Marketing Vice President, awoo Intelligenceawoo Intelligence's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions cover more than 20 features, including traffic acquisition, conversion optimization, remarketing, and user retention. Its wide range of services has met with popularity among enterprises' marketing teams. Currently, awoo Intelligence provides MarTech services to more than 16,000 enterprise customers and has expanded to overseas markets since 2018. Besides having more than 100 customers in Japan, awoo Intelligence is planning to grow its business in other Asian countries like South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In 2021, awoo Intelligence realized significant revenue growth.
"By providing SEO solutions, we've accumulated rich experiences in collecting and analyzing keywords and built a database containing a large number of keywords. After adopting the AI technology, we're able to provide more diverse MarTech services and help retailers and e-commerce merchants create personalized user experiences across platforms," says Angelline Chen, Marketing Vice President at awoo Intelligence.
At first, awoo Intelligence deployed its services on on-prem servers. As the number and diversity of its products and customers grew, awoo Intelligence team started considering moving its IT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud environment for higher infrastructure flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Since network latency is key to the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns and user experience, awoo Intelligence needed a global cloud platform that has data centers in Taiwan and its target markets to ensure service quality. After comparing different offerings, awoo Intelligence adopted Google Cloud, which operates a data center in Taiwan.
"Our MarTech services are very diverse, so using a hybrid cloud architecture can meet the technical needs of our different services more easily. The high flexibility of the computing resources of Google Cloud can help us ensure service quality while reducing costs," explains Chen. "Besides, its widely distributed data centers around the world can enable us to provide low network latency to users across regions. All these advantages prompted us to incorporate Google Cloud into our hybrid cloud architecture."
Supporting low latency for MarTech services with local data centers
For migration, awoo Intelligence chose to adopt the lift and shift method, which requires a shorter period of time by first moving the IT architecture to cloud and optimizing products afterwards. To do so, awoo Intelligence's IT team needed to get the hang of cloud tools as quickly as possible. With the technical support of the Google Cloud team and its partner iKala, awoo Intelligence smoothly moved the infrastructure of its marketing services to Google Cloud.
"To smoothly complete cloud migration, our DevOps team has gone through a series of training sessions. The cloud native architects of Google Cloud have provided comprehensive guidance, while iKala has given technical advice on product optimization and emergency management," notes Alex Hsieh, R&D Assistant Manager at awoo Intelligence.
awoo Intelligence's MarTech services, such as AI-powered product recommendation and traffic analytics, require speedy networks to support quality user experiences. After moving to Google Cloud, awoo Intelligence is able to provide services to its customers in Taiwan from the local data center of Google Cloud, which offers 200 milliseconds less latency compared to data centers abroad. This way, awoo Intelligence's customers can conduct marketing work more efficiently. On top of that, awoo Intelligence uses Cloud CDN to further shorten the system response time of its product recommendation services and APIs for its customers in Taiwan and Japan, which has helped improve the quality of its real-time marketing services.
Enabling smooth marketing email delivery and real-time AI data analytics with GKE
The awoo PDP and awoo AMP platforms use the natural language processing technology to tag and mark products on e-commerce websites. Compared to visual recognition, natural language processing can generate more accurate product recommendations by relating products via text analyses. For example, when users search "quickly dry and breathe," awoo Intelligence's system would automatically recommend products that can quickly absorb liquid and reduce sweating. Since there are many words with similar writings but different meanings in Asian languages like Mandarin and Japanese, awoo Intelligence used to rely on many employees to tag and mark products manually. To enhance productivity, the company later started using AI models to automate the process.
Now, awoo Intelligence leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to deploy its AI models supporting product tagging. As the awoo Intelligence team has to collect data from its customers' e-commerce websites in real time to train and test its AI models, it requires more computing resources when the websites' traffic increases to ensure that the product recommendation feature functions normally. Hsieh points out that the autoscaling feature of GKE supports swift scale-up of computing resources, which helps awoo Intelligence's team provide quick and accurate AI-powered product recommendations under high website traffic.
"Before and during big shopping seasons like Singles' Day, our customers often need to send out hundreds of thousands of marketing emails, which used to result in delivery delays of our email marketing system. The autoscaling feature of GKE has helped us improve the availability and reliability of our service."
—Alex Hsieh, R&D Assistant Manager, awoo IntelligenceThe company also uses GKE to run "awoo mail," its email remarketing service. For awoo Intelligence's customers, the stability of the email remarketing service is crucial, because the result of a marketing campaign might be undermined if the delivery of the emails is delayed. Before the adoption of Google Cloud, "awoo mail" was deployed in on-prem servers. Due to the limited scalability of the on-prem hardware and its frequent need of on-site maintenance, awoo Intelligence's operations team was sometimes unable to meet its customers' growing demand for the email service during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Now, GKE can automatically scale up resources to process large numbers of messages, enabling awoo Intelligence to swiftly support its customers' various email marketing campaigns.
"Before and during big shopping seasons like Singles' Day, our customers often need to send out hundreds of thousands of marketing emails, which used to result in delivery delays of our email marketing system," says Hsieh. "The autoscaling feature of GKE has helped us improve the availability and reliability of our service. No matter how much usage is required, we can now ensure that our customers' marketing emails are delivered smoothly."
Reducing operational workloads and costs with fully managed cloud services
awoo Intelligence employs Memorystore to cache and query awoo AMP's user data, which requires less operational workloads compared to a self-built data query engine. The company also deploys the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases of its marketing SaaS products in Cloud SQL. By enabling the High Availability configuration of Cloud SQL, awoo Intelligence has not only enhanced the reliability of its system, but also reduced 30% of workloads of maintaining and managing its customers' databases. Besides, as Cloud SQL supports automatic backups, awoo Intelligence is able to prevent data loss for its customers.
Hsieh notes the fact that Google Cloud supports flexible use and provides diverse infrastructure tools has also helped awoo Intelligence significantly lower the operational costs of its infrastructure. Apart from adjusting the instance numbers in Cloud SQL according to the actual usage, awoo Intelligence also leverages Spot VMs in Compute Engine, which are more cost-effective than regular virtual machines (VMs), to run the development and testing environments of its SEO analytics, product recommendation, and email remarketing services, as well as the deployment environments of some of its products. On top of that, the company uses Cloud Scheduler to automatically shut down unused cloud services in non-working hours. Overall, the adoption of the infrastructure of Google Cloud has helped awoo Intelligence save around 20% of operational costs.
"When deploying our infrastructure in an on-prem environment, we could only purchase certain amounts of hardware, which prevented us from reaching higher cost-effectiveness. The infrastructure of Google Cloud and its diverse cloud products have helped us realize cost optimization," he adds.
awoo Intelligence's SEO Automation solution needs to accurately retrieve information from numerous web pages and transform it into analyzable data to help its customers optimize their website content and search engine rankings. To that end, awoo Intelligence uses BigQuery to conduct data analytics and smoothly generate various types of business intelligence insights, such as product recommendation ranking analyses and retailers' API delay data analyses.
Strengthening information security in cloud and expanding to foreign markets
awoo Intelligence's customers value information security highly, which is why the company needs to implement strict security measures in all aspects from data protection, backups to the cloud migration process to earn its customers' trust. Since the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enterprises have been demanding higher requirements for data privacy. To meet its customers' needs, awoo Intelligence adopts Security Command Center (SCC) to run comprehensive security checks on its services deployed in Google Cloud. Based on the screening results provided by SCC, awoo Intelligence team can better identify potential security threats and respond in time. Now, the team is getting ready to acquire the ISO 27001 certification in the near future and offer higher cloud information security to its customers.
"With the data centers of Google Cloud around the world, we're able to launch our MarTech services in a new market in a short time. This way, our customers outside Taiwan can also leverage our highly reliable and low-latency services to optimize their marketing performance."
—Angelline Chen, Marketing Vice President, awoo IntelligenceMoving forward, awoo Intelligence will continue introducing new services to meet its customers' ever-evolving marketing needs. For example, it plans to leverage the generative AI technology to develop new features and enhance its service quality and innovation capabilities. The company will also leverage the widely distributed data centers around the world to enter new markets quickly and offer aligned high-quality services to customers across regions.
"With the data centers of Google Cloud around the world, we're able to launch our MarTech services in a new market in a short time. This way, our customers outside Taiwan can also leverage our highly reliable and low-latency services to optimize their marketing performance. In Japan, we've reached excellent business results by using Google Cloud," Chen says.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About awoo
Founded in 2015, awoo Intelligence provides AI-driven marketing technology services, notably a product discovery platform, a one-stop AI marketing platform, and AI-powered SEO solutions. Through its software offering more than 20 features and services, including traffic acquisition, conversion optimization, remarketing, and user retention, retailers and e-commerce merchants can create personalized user experiences across platforms. awoo Intelligence currently has served more than 16,000 enterprise customers and offices in Taiwan and Japan.
About iKala
iKala is a Taiwanese digitalization and AI commerce solution provider founded in 2011. Its subsidiary iKala Cloud is a Google Cloud partner offering consultation services for cloud infrastructure, hybrid cloud solutions, machine learning, and marketing applications to help enterprises overcome challenges brought by digital transformation. The company has served more than 400 enterprise customers in Asia Pacific for their use of Google Cloud.