Founded in 2019, Trames is a Singapore-based supply chain tech start-up, focused on streamlining the supply chain operations of organizations of all sizes through the provision of a highly collaborative and customizable freight management platform. The company takes a strategic approach to the management of data and sees it as critical to improving operations, increasing cost-efficiencies and in supporting business decisions.

As the company quickly grew after inception and expanded into ASEAN, it needed a strong technology partner that will support its expansion not only in the region but also globally. However, as a startup, it wanted to scale in a prudent manner, without overinvesting in resources. Therefore, Trames was in search of a technology partner with a global infrastructure, one that was also able to support its hybrid cloud strategy. As its initial focus was the China and ASEAN markets, a partner with specialized translation service capabilities in regional languages was also an important factor.

Trames’ Chief Technology Officer Alok Rajiv said, “The assurance of a high-performance network, for the foreseeable future, wherever our customers are located was very important to us in our deciding to work with Alibaba Cloud.” Ease of deployment, the option to invest in infrastructure as the company expanded, rather than requiring upfront spending, global infrastructure as well as the accessibility of an ecosystem of partners for tie-ups were all important considerations that Alibaba Cloud fulfilled.
Results
• Confidence in scaling up business quickly, easily and in a cost-effective manner.
• Comprehensive language support expansion into the diverse ASEAN market.
• High-end data protection through key management and cryptography services.
• Relationships with key Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners.

To help power its hybrid cloud applications, Trames deployed Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS). Trames evaluated Alibaba Cloud's ECS solution and felt that it had the ability to spin up highly available resources in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore as well as in the US and Euro regions. Alibaba Cloud’s Machine Translation solution addressed Trames’ language requirements. The Machine Translation product offered Trames with generic as well as market-specific translations, with good support for ASEAN languages like Vietnamese and Thai. With this product, Trames can navigate the ASEAN landscape much more effectively, removing key constraints on geographies and languages. Trames also deployed Function Compute, a pay-as-you-go, event-driven compute service, which allowed it to scale in a cost-effective manner. Alibaba Cloud’s Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) provided Trames with a fast, user-friendly infrastructure-as-code service that automated the deployment and configuration of cloud resources in different accounts and regions. Finally, Key Management Service provided a layer of high-end protection for sensitive data that traversed Trames’ network, through key management and cryptography services.

“Alibaba Cloud’s strong support, coupled with its open, yet resilient infrastructure is a great fit for our technology teams, enabling our business to realize our growth potential in new and emerging markets,” Alok added. Trames is currently reviewing products and services of not only Alibaba Cloud but also of its ecosystem partners in its bid to broaden its value proposition to customers. “As such, a partner like Alibaba Cloud is more than just a technology vendor to us, they are a strategic business enabler who is supporting our growth in many ways,” Alok said.