‘Technology is not only the backbone but also central to e-commerce business’
Snapdeal claims to be a data-centric company. What technology have you deployed recently to support this claim?
From day one, the technology has not only been our backbone but also the focus center for Snapdeal and data is its essence. Therefore, we have been extremely conscious about the upgradation of technology from timeto-time to stay ahead of our competitors and continue to set trends in the industry.
Most of our technology solutions are developed internally by our in-house technical experts. These include payment, shipping, catalog, and content management system and we recently implemented a fraud management system and financial management system. Till date, we were just operating as an online marketplace but now we have opened our own warehouse in Kapashera, Delhi and implemented a warehouse management system to ensure supply chain.
So, to enable so many technology solutions running on our infrastructure, we have increased the number of servers from 6 to 70 in the last 6 months. This expansion has ensured a major increase in the number of transactions (from 200 to 20,000 per day) and catalog size (from 200 to 150,000 products).
What’s your technology roadmap for the coming year?
In the next 2 months, we want to dramatically increase our catalog size to 15 mn and by the year end, we want to double our shipping, so we plan to build a sophisticated monitoring platform with 200 servers. Adopting ERP is on our cards in the near future, of which the majority will be internally maintained and the rest will be outsourced.
Currently, we are using the Amazon public cloud with standard solutions. But we are planning to move to a private cloud to smoothen our operations and enhance the overall quality of customer experience. We are already using big data but as far as Hadoop is concerned, we would like to put it on cloud. But the challenge in doing that is many cloud players do not have substantial experience of managing Hadoop operationally therefore, we will wait for the cloud players getting matured.
What are the security measures you are taking along with this expansion drive to ensure data protection?
All the data is encrypted and no data rests on a single system. The entire application gets broken and saved into separate systems in parts. We have a robust monitoring system to keep a strict virtual eye on each activity in the system.