Advance Intelligence Group (ADVANCE) is an Al-driven technology company in Asia-Pacific, one of the top players in the Southeast Asian (SEA) market, especially in Indonesia. The Group has over 1500+ employees serving 1,000+ enterprise clients, 75,000+ merchants and 20 million+ consumers across 12 markets across South and Southeast Asia, Greater China and Latin America.

With the vision of helping companies with digital transformation, fraud prevention, and process automation, ADVANCE has built an ecosystem of AI-powered, credit-enabled products and services, covering the industries of banking, fintech, retail, and e-commerce. Since 2016, ADVANCE has expanded its business into several core business lines in Asia: Asia’s leading BNPL platform Atome, SaaS big data analytics and enterprise solutions provider ADVANCE.AI, omnichannel ecommerce merchant services platform Ginee, as well as digital lending platform Kredit Pintar.

ADVANCE’s comprehensive product offering shows strong presence in the Indonesian market; Kredit Pintar is one of Indonesia's top digital lending apps, and Genie has also grown to support more than 30,000 SMEs and processed nearly 30 million e-commerce orders in less than a year, integrating with all major e-commerce platforms in Indonesia.

Due to the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of the outbreak in Asia and beyond, the way we live our lives and carry out our daily activities has profoundly changed. ADVANCE saw the great potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help traditional and offline businesses to transit to digital and online channels, improving efficiency, growth and productivity.

However, complex AI algorithm means increased requirements on processing power and larger data sets to be used for data analytics and machine learning. ADVANCE needed a reliable and capable partner to build a massive scale computing cluster and data warehouse platform, with high performance, high availability, high scalability and high cost efficiency.

As the number one cloud provider in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud is also well-known worldwide for its technological innovation, especially in the domains of data storage middleware, big data processing and AI. Alibaba Cloud offers one of the most extensive portfolios of cloud-native database solutions to our customers, supporting all the mainstream open-source and commercial database solutions, including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Redis. Database solutions like RDS and PolarDB supported Alibaba's systems behind the annual Double 11 Shopping Festival, China's Black Friday, the world's largest online shopping event.

In terms of the product type and quantity, Alibaba Cloud offers more than 200+ cloud services that help to optimize costs, scale efficiently, and maintain robust data security.

Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud has proven to be able to provide dedicated 24/7 support to partners, helping technical teams deploy systems and expand businesses on Alibaba Cloud quickly and smoothly. It also provides high availability of 99.95% uptime guarantee backed with industry-leading service-level agreements (SLA).

ADVANCE deployed its core application using a Kubernetes containerization framework, and together with Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service, such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) clusters and Server Load Balancer (SLB), to build systems with better scalability and cost-effectiveness. It also leveraged Alibaba Cloud CDN, Anti-DDoS service and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to accelerate application frontend access and protect the system from malicious end-user requests and mitigate possible threats.

As part of its core business, ADVANCE utilizes various cloud-native data storage and management solutions on Alibaba Cloud to manage its data warehouse and data analytics processes for its AI and machine learning algorithm. For example, the Group uses ApsaraDB for Redis for in-memory caching and high-speed access, ApsaraDB for MongoDB for flexible and semi-structured data storage, and DataWorks for data aggregation, processing and governance between various data sources, and Realtime Compute for Apache Flink for real-time big data processing.

For the computing power, ADVANCE leverages Alibaba Cloud Elastic GPU Service in large-scale parallel computing modules, such as deep learning, video processing, and visualization.

Moreover, ADVANCE reply on Log Service and Object Storage Service (OSS) to collect, retrieve and analyze huge amount of system logs and operation transactions securely and efficiently with cost optimization.

ADVANCE is committed to providing its customers with enhanced AI services and Alibaba Cloud will continue to support the Group to achieve success through innovative cloud infrastructure services. The combination of AI and Cloud computing will deliver more much value to customers with greater efficiency, productivity, and digital security.