 "Snapdeal")
Trying to create an app-based ecosystem, which would be a mix of e-commerce marketplace, mobile payments and gateway to services, online marketplace Snapdeal inched a step closer to achieving the goal, after it announced the launch of its own private cloud platform, Snapdeal Cirrus.
The company that has, in the past few months, lost ground to Amazon - steadily rising in almost all business metrics e-commerce companies follow - is trying to set itself apart from the other two players.
In a major rebranding exercise, the Gurgaon-based online marketplace giant, on Monday, launched its premium service Snapdeal Gold. However, unlike Amazon Prime and Flipkart First, Snapdeal is not charging for this service.
Snapdeal cloud is built entirely on open source with OpenStack at the centre, making it not just an industry-first in India, but also one of the largest OpenStack deployments of a hybrid cloud anywhere in the world.
“Snapdeal Cirrus spans across three data centre regions, with highly dense server architecture of 1,000 billion, 16 petabyte of storage and a robust 100G SDN infrastructure - an investment made by very few companies globally,” the company said.
According to analysts, this cloud-based system would help Snapdeal handle multiple functions around FreeCharge’s payment business, Snapdeal’s marketplace, services tie-ups with ease. “The plan is to drift into making a complete solutions app and not just stick to being a marketplace anymore. This is an industry first; we have to see how it pans out for them from hereon,” said analyst from an international consultancy firm.
Snapdeal Cirrus is a true hybrid cloud, which expands seamlessly to public and allows various applications to be dynamically assigned to run in different parts of the cloud.
Earlier this year, Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal had said he wanted to make the app a complete solution provider for all sorts of services. He also added that in the year 2016-17, the company would be working on making e-commerce a habit.
“We would be building a frictionless and reliable commerce ecosystem. We want to make e-commerce a daily habit and, for that, the experience has to be seamless. We would focusing on removing all the unreliability from e-commerce.”
Also Read: Snapdeal's Gold Answer To Amazon, Flipkart Premium Membership
Also Read: Snapdeal's Gold Answer To Amazon, Flipkart Premium Membership
The company added new services to its app, which includes travel booking and food delivery. “We have launched flights, buses and food delivery on Snapdeal app. We have over six million customers visiting us every day and there are partners in the country who provide services which people need,” he had said. Bansal said the company is working on personalising user experience and ‘Uberising’ technology.
The private cloud solution has been built and operationalised in under a year and is timed to handle long-term growth in traffic.
The company believes the addition of Snapdeal Cirrus to its technology platform, is expected to cut operational costs. “Snapdeal was born in the cloud, but public clouds stop being cost-efficient after a scale, which became the case for Snapdeal sometime last year. In a short span of 10 months, we have succeeded in building an extremely resilient, scalable and secure solution,” said Rajiv Mangla, chief technology officer, Snapdeal.
SNAPDEAL CIRRUS
- Is a true hybrid cloud, which expands seamlessly to public and abstracts the underlying infrastructure away from the applications, so they can be dynamically assigned to run in different parts of the cloud
- Is a fully automated software-defined data centre and cloud platform, where infrastructure is built and managed as code
FAST FACTS ABOUT SNAPDEAL
- Has an assortment of 50 million-plus products across 800-plus diverse categories from over 125,000 regional, national, and international brands and retailers
- With millions of users and more than 300,000 sellers
- Snapdeal delivers across 6,000-plus cities
