OpenRice is determined to provide the most comprehensive information and services to dining industry. They are now the most popular all-in-one portal in Hong Kong for restaurant info, user reviews and ratings, dining offers and a spectrum of restaurant services including targeted and content based advertising, table booking, online queuing and kiosk, prepaid vouchers, food delivery, takeaway, recruitment and POS system. OpenRice further expanded the restaurant database to China, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and some other Asian countries.

To better serve tourists from mainland China, OpenRice required a solution provider that can support high-performance connectivity in both Hong Kong and China at the same time. In addition, efficient computing power and scalability are the keys for their big data strategy to uncover the value in the data of their customers and users. OpenRice also needed an IaaS platform to support their expansion and penetration to other markets especially Asia.

“Alibaba Cloud is able to provide reliable, flexible and secure public cloud IaaS / PaaS to support OpenRice’s services and businesses. OpenRice serve not only local people in Hong Kong, but also huge tourist users from mainland China for restaurant info, reviews, offers, vouchers and most important the best customer experience in accessing our platforms. Alibaba Cloud is the best technology partner to tackle our challenges, and their GPU ECS instances further cost-effectively facilitated our big data strategy.”

After the setup of a private API/SDK, OpenRice is now a white-label provider for 3rd party platforms. It is necessary to expand their services to a full resilience mode across Data Centre. Alibaba Cloud supports private direct site-to-site connection from our Data Centre to their HK-based Cloud. The increasing demand from Chinese tourists is the golden opportunity for OpenRice to expand their businesses to China in which network connectivity in China is the most critical. OpenRice has been serving over half a million Chinese tourists in the past year. Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary network connectivity between Hong Kong and China helps OpenRice to connect with China users without a huge setup and CapEx expenditure.