6Estates - Alibaba Cloud Customer Success Stories

Technology

Singapore

SME/Startup

“Alibaba Cloud has delivered reliable and powerful products and services to support our business over the years. We are excited to continue working with Alibaba Cloud to deliver trusted digital solutions to our customers, empowering our growth and efficiency with AI!”

Dr. Luan Huanbo

Founder and CEO of 6Estates

About 6Estates

6Estates is a Singaporean AI FinTech company spun off from a leading AI research center by the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.

As a leading regional Document AI Solution Provider led by AI specialists and seasoned entrepreneurs, 6Estates focuses on business-level complex document understanding and domain-specific knowledge graph construction. 6Estates specializes in Multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Graph (KG), and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) technologies.

6Estates leverages these technologies to help customers process complex and unstructured documents and digitalize manual processes faster, more accurately, and more intelligently than previously possible.

6Estates offers an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platform that delivers next-generation template-free data extraction technology to capture information from structured and unstructured documents (such as photos, PDFs, scanned documents, and ZIP files). The IDP platform is supported by an integrated Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) capability to enable efficient human validation to ensure 99%+ accuracy results. Core IDP functions include Digitalization, File Detection, Rules Checks, Cross Document Matching, Semantic Search, and Analytics. It supports four languages and a comprehensive set of document types across identity, financial, and other business documents and can be quickly trained to support more as needed.

6Estates has domain expertise across financial services, trading, logistics, and shipping but is prepared to help all businesses automate manual tasks to accelerate growth, accuracy, and efficiency in a scalable and easy to adopt way.

For banking and finance, the FAAS IDP product can be applied to:
● Onboarding and KYC
● Fraud checks
● Bank statement analysis
● SME loan assessment
● Mortgage loan assessment
● Motor finance assessment

Generally, the IDP platform is prepared to support use cases across logistics/shipping companies and general domain uses:
● Trade rules and standards checking (UCP and ISBP)
● Cross-document matching
● Sales process automation
● Invoice reconciliation

Challenge

As a newly incorporated startup in 2014, 6Estates' first priority was to find a flexible, cost-effective, and secure cloud solution.

Over the last 7-8 years, as 6Estates has gained customers in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Hong Kong, they also faced new challenges when selecting providers. They needed the provider to have strong local capabilities (i.e., local data centers to comply with customers’ regulatory requirements) and strong business and technical support on the ground in multiple countries. Given 6Estates' AI focus, they also valued providers' strong architecture with regard to AI and GPU-related support services.

One of 6Estates' key priorities today is growing its customer base. Alibaba Cloud’s extensive ISV program supports this by enabling 6Estates to reach a wider customer base through the provider's broad network and deep capabilities.

Why Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud's mature, flexible, and cost-effective solutions have enabled 6Estates’ cross-border team to deliver powerful and secure document AI solutions to customers in multiple markets.

6Estates gained these values together with Alibaba Cloud:
● Technology Value: Fulfills robust computing, database, networking, and security needs, which are inherently complex given the nature of our solution (document AI and analytics) and customer base (primarily financial institutions). Flexibility to serve customers in multiple countries under one cloud provider

● Operations Value: Local expertise and support

● Commercial Value: 6Estates is an Independent Software Provider (ISV) on the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. This partnership leverages 6Estates’ AI technology and Alibaba’s broad sales network and reputation to support customers seeking powerful document AI solutions to enhance business processes and growth.

Alibaba Cloud has a strong international reputation, with 87 zones strategically located across 29 regions worldwide, providing reliable computing support. Alibaba Cloud’s strong capabilities of the local data centers to comply with regulatory requirements, the excellent global business and technical support teams, sturdy architecture, and ISV program that enabled 6Estates to reach a wider customer base through its extensive network and capabilities helped 6Estates overcome its challenges.

Architecture

Alibaba Cloud worked with 6Estates’ Technical Team to design and deploy the solution and has provided ongoing support and guidance in the operation of the solution after it went live. 6Estates uses the following products and services from Alibaba Cloud:

● Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK): ACK is an orchestrated container management service. We use ACK to manage our Kubernetes clusters, accelerating the deployment and iteration of microservices. It also automates scheduling, scaling, and rolling updates for our containerized applications.

● Cloud Container Registry (ACR): ACR is a secure image registry and a vulnerability scanning service for storing and managing container images. We use ACR to store and distribute our application images, using its automated build and image vulnerability scanning to detect and resolve security threats.

● Alibaba Cloud DNS: We use DNS for effective request routing, ensuring our users experience low latency and high-speed response times.

● Domains: Alibaba Cloud Domains simplifies domain name management and provides a centralized resource for maintaining and managing multiple domain registrations. We use it to manage our portfolio of domain names and ensure their proper configuration.

● SSL Certificates: Alibaba Cloud SSL Certificates service provides encryption for our network links, ensuring the secure transmission of data. We apply SSL certificates to improve the security and credibility of our web services.

● Enterprise Email: We use Alibaba Cloud's Enterprise Email Service to send notifications related to our services (such as password reset emails or other relevant transactional messages).

● Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): The VPC service offers business network isolation, enhancing security and privacy. We use it to isolate our production environment from external networks and ensure secure access.

● ApsaraDB for MongoDB: As our backend document database, ApsaraDB for MongoDB offers high-performance, scalable storage. We use it to store and manage flexible JSON-like documents, accelerating application development and improving data access efficiency.

● Short Message Service (SMS): We use the SMS service for two-step authentication and one-time-passwords (OTP) in our mobile app, ensuring the security of user accounts.

● Elastic Compute Service (ECS): Alibaba Cloud ECS provides virtualized, scalable computing resources for our Kubernetes nodes. We use it to quickly deploy, manage, and scale our application workloads, benefitting from its flexibility and cost efficiency.

● Object Storage Service (OSS): OSS is a highly scalable and cost-effective cloud storage solution, housing our business intelligence (such as multimedia, backups, and big data objects). We use it for efficient storage and retrieval of various resources.

● File Storage NAS: Alibaba Cloud File Storage NAS provides a Kubernetes-compatible dynamic storage class, allowing applications to access persistent storage. We use it to manage shared storage effectively and accommodate application demands with consistent, low-latency performance.

● AnalyticDB for MySQL: This backend service relational database supports our data-intensive applications, enabling high throughput and real-time analytics. We use it for its high performance, convenient management, and seamless scaling capabilities.

● AnalyticDB for Redis: We use AnalyticDB for Redis as our business queue and cache solution, accelerating data access and improving application performance while managing large-scale, real-time data processing.

● Elasticsearch: Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch is our choice for indexing and searching large data volumes quickly. We use it to offer powerful search and data analytics functionalities for our applications.

● Server Load Balancer (SLB): The Server Load Balancer provides load balancing, distributing traffic among multiple backend servers. We use SLB to improve application performance, availability, and fault tolerance.

● Elastic IP Address (EIP): We leverage Alibaba Cloud EIP to provide a flexible application egress IP, ensuring our applications have stable public IP addresses for internet access.

● Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS): ARMS offers comprehensive application monitoring and tracing capabilities. We use it to diagnose performance issues, identify bottlenecks, and optimize our applications.

● Resource Access Management: Log Service (SLS): Alibaba Cloud Simple Log Service (SLS) is an all-in-one log data solution provided that allows efficient collection, storage, and querying of application logs. We use this service for its impressive capabilities to analyze log data in real-time, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and monitor application usage patterns. The scalable, cost-effective nature of SLS enables us to manage log data efficiently without compromising performance or security.

● Web Application Firewall (WAF): We use WAF’s robust security features (such as custom security rules, application vulnerability prevention, and real-time monitoring). WAF enhances the security of our applications against common web-based attacks (like SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF), ensuring the integrity and availability of our systems.

● Cloud Firewall: We utilize Cloud Firewall for its rich features (like access control, traffic analysis, and intrusion prevention). This service offers real-time monitoring of network traffic, allowing us to set and enforce security policies easily. It also aids in detecting and mitigating potential network threats, ensuring the security and stability of our cloud environment.

● Server Guard: With Server Guard, we can maintain a robust security posture for our Kubernetes deployments, reducing possible points of weakness within our infrastructure.

● Anti-DDoS Pro: We use Anti-DDoS Pro for its advanced techniques to mitigate and cleanse massive attack traffic, ensuring uninterrupted service availability.

Looking Forward

Alibaba Cloud was the right partner for 6Estates at the beginning, primarily due to its cost-effectiveness and strong reputation.

Over time, 6Estates has benefitted from Alibaba Cloud’s extensive capabilities, support, and local expertise in the target markets.

6Estates and Alibaba Cloud have grown together. Today, 6Estates is proud to be an Alibaba Cloud ISV Diamond Partner, helping 6Estates customers and Alibaba Cloud customers supercharge business growth and efficiency.

6Estates is also part of Alibaba Cloud’s Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Acceleration Program.

In the future, 6Estates will continue to cooperating closely with Alibaba Cloud to introduce innovative technology to consolidate its leading position in the AI industry.

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