Mamee: Creating delightful snack experiences for consumers with Google Cloud and MatrixC
About Mamee
Mamee is one of Malaysia's most beloved brands, delivering unique and exciting snack experiences to fans across ASEAN and beyond since 1971. With iconic brands such as Mamee Monster, Double Decker and Mister Potato, Mamee offers a broad range of delicious snacks, noodles and beverages that accompany the rhythm of daily life for millions of people. Mamee is the recipient of the Frost & Sullivan Award for Best Home-Grown Packages Food Company and Putra Brand Award in the Foodstuff Category. It has also won the Deloitte’s Best Managed Companies award in 2021 and 2022.
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About MatrixC
MatrixC is a Google Cloud partner specializing in solutions for workplace transformation, Cloud IT infrastructure and security solutions, support and training services for businesses. Based in Malaysia and Thailand, MatrixC aims to help businesses to build a productivity and collaborative workplace to achieve new capabilities, increase revenue and save costs by adopting and migrating to Cloud IT Platforms that run on a pay-per-use or subscription model.
Mamee achieved near 100% platform stability through Google Cloud infrastructure modernization, gained world-class security for its critical server network, and developed an AI strategy for product monitoring with Google Cloud and partner MatrixC.
Google Cloud results
- Enables critical product promotion strategy with 99.7% platform uptime
- Prevents cyber attacks before they happen with BigQuery data analytics of platform server logs
- Enables seamless collaboration with third-party software vendor through advanced Cloud Identity IAM
Zero crashes at peak monthly platform surge
Malaysia's Mamee prides itself on a half-century history of being a companion to the rhythm of daily life across ASEAN. Mamee strives to be the region's most exciting snack company by offering a bounty of products for people to enjoy from morning to night, from breakfast rolls to lunchtime noodles, afternoon snacks and midnight munchies.
A major driver of Mamee's value proposition is a digital platform that enables it to sell delicious products at an attractive price, offering regular promotions to stores in its sales network. Mamee's Trade Promotion Management Platform (TPM) analyzes what promotion mechanics shall be used for different product categories and distribution channels, simulates its return on investment, and obtains budgetary approval before an actual promotion is carried out.
Originally, deals were calculated on spreadsheets, and distributed via manual copies to Mamee's customers. It was a cumbersome process that led to budgeting control issues, in which the sales team may have executed poor promotions with unhealthy return on investments, which may only be discovered at a later stage through manual post mortem exercises. These issues came to a head just as Mamee's leadership needed to contemplate a hardware refresh for aging servers, amid system stability issues and security breaches.
Facing such a confluence of challenges, Mamee turned to Google partner MatrixC to build a comprehensive Google Cloud strategy for infrastructure modernization and platform security.
"We reached a point where we were struggling to manage our promotions and keep systems secure," says Jit Wei Tan, CTO, Mamee. "By working with MatrixC on creative Google Cloud strategy, we did more than achieve system agility, resilience and security. We opened up a world of business opportunity to win over a new generation of customers."
"We reached a point where we were struggling to optimize promotions and keep systems secure. By working with MatrixC on creative Google Cloud strategy, we did more than achieve system agility, resilience and security. We opened up a world of business opportunity to win over a new generation of customers."
—Jit Wei Tan, CTO, MameeNear 100% platform uptime for delicious value in a region on the move
When the leadership of Mamee greenlighted a cloud-based infrastructure overhaul, Tan and his team decided the first order of business was a rigorous comparison of major providers. One reason, he says, was that the engineering team had no cloud experience, being "born-and-bred in on-premise environments."
The evaluation, which included numerous proof-of-concept demonstrations, led Mamee to choose Google Cloud thanks to what it considered superior ease-of-use and a more dynamic stream of new product offerings, something it felt would enhance the company's ability to expand and innovate.
The other deciding factor, says Tan, was meeting MatrixC. Discovering a unique level of support and engagement, Mamee gave MatrixC a blank slate for a greenfield transition to Google Cloud. Concretely, this consisted of a computing and security strategy centered around Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs), BigQuery data analytics and Cloud Identity and access management (IAM). Mamee was surprised to find the partnership also brought with it proactive training for Mamee's Business Technology team in Google Cloud best practices and optimization. It's an upskilling journey that continues today.
The results have been substantial. By switching the TPM platform to Compute Engine, Mamee achieved 99.7% uptime for the platform. Crucially, system stability remained constant even at the end of each month, when the sales team would send a lot more promotions into the system to meet their deadlines.
"In the past, such a flood of requests would sometimes crash our servers," says Tan. "With Compute Engine, the issue disappeared overnight. We enjoy unlimited auto-scaling and system stability even at the busiest times."
"In the past, such a flood of requests would sometimes crash our servers. With Compute Engine, the issue disappeared overnight. We enjoy unlimited auto-scaling and system stability even at the busiest times."
—Jit Wei Tan, CTO, MameeProtection against cyberattacks with BigQuery and Google Cloud security tools
Mamee sees its foreseeable future in a hybrid environment. That means maintaining its server farm at headquarters in Malacca, while progressively increasing its workload to Google Cloud. Tan explains that this will require robust, real-time monitoring of the physical environment. To drive the goal, MatrixC designed a strategy of moving all Mamee on-premise server logs (raw unfiltered views of platform traffic) to BigQuery for real-time analytics, to root out abnormalities in server access or performance.
By deploying BigQuery to crunch the server log data stream, Mamee is able to catch any potential cyberattacks before they happen. It's a proactive approach that has significantly enhanced Mamee's ability to stamp out cyber risk. For example, if the system receives many password change requests within a short period of time, BigQuery will carry out analysis of the instances in real-time, and alert the Mamee Business Technology team to any threat before it happens.
MatrixC also bolsters Mamee security protocols through an IAM system for the external vendor that created the software of the TPM platform. Cloud Identity gives Mamee a unified identity, access, and endpoint management platform for the vendor to access Mamee workloads, for system support and upgrades, without the risks associated with traditional remote desktop protocol (RDP) methods.
"One area where we worked closely with MatrixC was to use Cloud Identity to enable our independent software vendor to access sensitive workloads," says Tan. "It enabled a seamless and secure way to collaborate, even though the vendor's employee turnover can be frequent."
These security protocols received a boost when MatrixC proposed adoption of Crowdstrike, a specialist cloud-delivered endpoint and workload protection. Through Crowdstrike's Falcon for Google Cloud solution, key to a strategic integration with Google Cloud, Mamee has dramatically increased its resilience against phishing attacks, says Tan.
"On the very first day we installed Crowdstrike, we received more than 20 security alerts that otherwise would have gone unnoticed with the legacy RDP and anti-virus software," says Tan. "What's also great about Crowdstrike is that it allows our team to troubleshoot with basic cybersecurity know-how."
Optimizing supermarket product placement with cloud AI solutions
Looking into the future, one of Mamee's most exciting projects is designing an AI solution to monitor supermarket racks it has paid for to stock its products. Currently Mamee sends dozens of representatives across the region to make eyeball estimates of whether stores are honoring rack commitments, sending photos of suspect sites to Mamee supervisors. But Mamee is considering the deployment of cloud based AI solutions such as Google Vision AI, as a possibility to help analyze submitted images, for granular precision insight into how supermarkets are placing Mamee products.
"By exploring advanced Google Cloud solutions to check supermarket racks across our region, we'll eliminate human error altogether, so we know down to the package whether a store is giving us our money's worth or not," says Tan. "It's one example of how we feel our journey of empowerment with Google Cloud is truly unlimited."
"By working with MatrixC on creative Google Cloud strategy, we did more than achieve system agility, resilience and security. We opened up a world of business opportunity to win over a new generation of customers."
—Jit Wei Tan, CTO, MameeTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Mamee
Mamee is one of Malaysia's most beloved brands, delivering unique and exciting snack experiences to fans across ASEAN and beyond since 1971. With iconic brands such as Mamee Monster, Double Decker and Mister Potato, Mamee offers a broad range of delicious snacks, noodles and beverages that accompany the rhythm of daily life for millions of people. Mamee is the recipient of the Frost & Sullivan Award for Best Home-Grown Packages Food Company and Putra Brand Award in the Foodstuff Category. It has also won the Deloitte’s Best Managed Companies award in 2021 and 2022.
About MatrixC
MatrixC is a Google Cloud partner specializing in solutions for workplace transformation, Cloud IT infrastructure and security solutions, support and training services for businesses. Based in Malaysia and Thailand, MatrixC aims to help businesses to build a productivity and collaborative workplace to achieve new capabilities, increase revenue and save costs by adopting and migrating to Cloud IT Platforms that run on a pay-per-use or subscription model.