Royale International Group is seeing rapid growth with its 7-Eleven service after migrating to AWS. Says Kwok, “The business has grown 300 percent in the first six months with our platform on AWS. We are now delivering goods bought from various merchants to 370 7-Eleven stores across Hong Kong.”

At present, couriers are delivering around 1,000 packages a day to the stores, but the number is expected to increase as Royale International Group extends the service to more online merchants who are keen to use 7-Eleven stores as collection points. According to Kwok, the company couldn’t have supported the rapid increase in business with an on-premises solution. “It would take around two weeks to scale our platform with an on-premises infrastructure, and we would need to significantly over provision resources to cope with a sudden increase. This is too costly for us. By using AWS, we can scale the platform in one or two minutes,” says Kwok.

Furthermore, the company has been able to scale the infrastructure easily to meet demand because of the design of AWS. Services are grouped by their function so they can be maintained independently, reducing workloads. Additionally, Royale International Group can deliver tailored solutions to multiple merchants using Amazon API Gateway without the need to modify the underlying system, which also saves the business time and money.

Royale International Group is moving a step closer to ISO 9001 accreditation now that the business is using AWS. This is due to the security of the AWS platform, which enables Royale International Group to maintain a high level of customer service. “Our auditor is very happy because Elastic Load Balancing works with Amazon VPC to make our security robust. Essentially, we can make sure that every connection with our clients is secure and SSL compliant,” says Kwok.

Kwok is excited about the possibilities of introducing Internet of Things (IoT) technology into the operations of Royale International Group through AWS. The company is running a proof of concept right now with AWS IoT. “We see plenty of opportunities for introducing AWS IoT into our warehouse operation. One example would be deploying temperature sensors so we can more closely monitor temperatures, which in turn could help us develop new services around perishable goods,” says Kwok.