Anker Innovations Limited (hereinafter referred to as Anker Innovations) was founded by Google’s former engineers in 2011. Anker Innovations aims to become a global benchmark brand in the filed of smart devices and accessories and promote the spirit that represents smart manufacturing in China. Anker, a USB charger brand owned by Anker Innovations, has become one of the leading brands of on-line markets in North America, Japan and Europe, involved in products sell well in more than 100 countries and regions, with more than 30 million satisfied users, highly praised by consumers in the mainstream markets worldwide, and winning excellent public reputation. Anker Innovations has been focused on creating rigorous and thoughtful smart companions with excellent quality in the areas of USB charger, intelligent Home, audio and digital devices and protective accessories, etc., with every technical advancement meeting the true requirements of users and every particular innovation integrated into the balanced thinking of technology, art and life.
Searching for “Anker” on Amazon website will easily lead you to various e-commerce products from Anker Innovations. In fact, it is not uncommon for local foreign trade e-commerce companies to open stores on foreign shopping platforms, but only a few of them have claimed their own brands like Anker Innovations. Since its establishment in 2011, with its exquisite product designs and focus on branding, Anker Innovations has quickly opened the overseas markets and grown to a consumer electronics enterprise with an annual revenue of about CNY 4 billions. “From the business perspective, Anker Innovations is an internationalized company oriented toward the global region markets, with its system therefore to be able to cover and support different areas worldwide, which is also one of major challenges for us in the IT planning and selection, ” said Gao Weicheng from Anker Innovations Limited.
To go-live the new ERP core business system group, we faced a tight schedule, heavy workload and high degree of difficulty. The rapid growth of our company also creates high demand for support from IT, so we planned and implemented the entire IT architecture from the top in order to support the company in the long run, which also came with great flexibility, stability, availability and global region extensibility. Amazon Web Services platform is the answer to what Anker Innovations has been struggling with, with its assistance, Anker Innovations has successfully deployed its Oracle ERP systems to Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Anker Innovations will deploy more and more applications to cloud through a variety of powerful cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services, and its digital transformation and business innovation practices will ride into a fast lane.
Gao Weicheng
BP&IT Director, Anker Innovations Limited
Why Amazon Web Services?
At the beginning of 2017, Anker Innovations started a new project to implement its core system groups. Despite of a tight schedule, heavy task and high degree of difficulty in the project, the unremitting efforts of all members of the system group made the 7 systems with Oracle ERP as the core successfully go online in only half a year. As the project needed to meet the requirements such as flexible and scalable, stable and efficient, and quick to go live, Anker Innovations turned to cloud computing.
“In the planning phase, we also evaluated the proposal to build our own data center, but considering that cloud computing is the trend of the future and getting more and more mature as an industry, a lot of users have started deploying their core applications on the cloud, and Anker Innovations is growing its business very fast and cloud services will fully meet the requirement of flexibility for a fast growing business, so we decided to deploy our system groups to the cloud, ” said by Gao Weicheng.
“In the process of service selection, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation including performance comparison test, proposal comparison test, commercial comparison test and other aspects. Technically speaking, as we run core business systems on the cloud, the stability and availability of the platform are the key metrics that we would like to take into consideration. After evaluation, we think Amazon Web Services has great advantages in terms of overall performance, price, stability and maturity; And Amazon Web Services has global leading IPs that are mature and reliable, long-term good reputation, sophisticated Amazon Web Services partnership ecosystem and comprehensive service support mechanisms, which are the key reason that we selected Amazon Web Services as the cloud platform to host our system groups, ” said Gao Weicheng.
This is a decision which "gives wings" to the current and future business development of Anker Innovations for it to "fly" to the global market higher, faster and further, and it is Amazon Web Services that carries and realizes this feat together with Anker Innovations.
Figure 1 is a diagram for the cloud platform architecture of Anker Innovations, based on the Amazon Web Services Cloud services includingAmazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Cloudwatch, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Direct Connect and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) etc..
Anker Innovations gradually deployed and tested Oracle EBS core ERP system on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform from May 2017, and the system went online in early July. Amazon Web Services not only helped Anker Innovations deploy Oracle EBS core ERP system in a fast, steady and efficient way, it also successfully completed the holistic deployment and data migration for peripheral systems, including Order Management System (OMS), Warehouse Management System (WWS) and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM).
Achievements
Currently, Anker Innovations runs MySQL and Oracle database on Amazon Web Services cloud platform, with its core ERP system group deployed in Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) region operated by Sinnet and US Oregon region, which are interconnected with each other by a dedicated line. In the scenario that involves Oracle, Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) are mostly used, in the scenario that involves subsystems, Amazon RDS is mostly used.
“When the new system group goes live, Amazon Web Services presents us with a whole new experience of how fast the systems are deployed and going live, we are all impressed by the high system efficiency and stability and how it minimizes operation cost. In hardware, one-time cost investment was avoided, and Anker Innovations spent only half a year to achieve full cloud platform coverage for its core ERP and peripheral subsystems. Gao Weicheng also said, “In terms of security, Amazon Web Services provides cloud security components which ensures high security of access via various tools, such as NCAL, so we can use cloud service as reassured. ”
Besides supporting core businesses and peripheral subsystems, Anker Innovations also utilized Amazon Web Services cloud platform to enable agile and efficient big data analysis. Anker Innovations performs comprehensive analysis to external data and data that derives from peripheral systems (such as ERP) via Amazon Redshift data warehousing and Amazon EMR data analysis platform, so that it could render reports for sales and supply chain instantaneously to help business identify gap areas and improve faster and more effectively. “In the future, we will further explore how to utilize the services provided by Amazon Web Services in terms of big data and intelligent reporting. The data coupling with smart devices is also one of the important objectives. Going forward, data from some Anker Innovations’ smart devices may be kept on Amazon Web Services, and such seamless connectivity will bring endless imagination to our product and solution innovations. ” said by Gao Weicheng.
More Information
For detailed information on how to use Oracle solutions on Amazon Web Services cloud, please visit Oracle and Amazon Web Services detail page.
