Atlas - Alibaba Cloud

Aviation

Singapore

SME/Startup

"The distribution and sales of low-cost carrier flight content is a market that operates on razor-thin margins, which are immensely sensitive to the cost, scalability, and reliability of our underlying infrastructure. We've been able to maximize our effort on expanding our business and rest easy knowing Alibaba Cloud has our back when it comes to the technical side. We are excited to work with Alibaba Cloud's new AI tools as we continue to grow our business."

Mary Li

Founder & CEO, Atlas

About
Atlas

Atlas is an innovative travel technology startup based in Singapore, founded by serial entrepreneur Mary Li in 2019. Leveraging decades of experience in travel, aviation, e-commerce and technology, Atlas is harnessing the power of data to reimagine the troublesome booking paths and information flow challenges in the airline distribution industry. By boldly exploring and integrating cutting-edge technologies, Atlas has emerged as a rising star in the scene to become the top low-cost carrier content provider in the industry.

“Until now, travelers had limited access to low-cost flights when visiting new countries. Unless they book directly on the airline website, which might be difficult due to various languages and payment systems, let alone limited brand awareness, travelers couldn’t see these abundant flight options on the online travel agencies websites. The reason is that low-cost flight content was difficult to sell – complicated information flows, different APIs, unreliable technology, cross-border payment challenges, and much more. We remove all these barriers for sellers, so that travelers can have better choices and easier access to affordable air travel.”
Mary Li - Founder & CEO, Atlas

Since partnering up with Alibaba Cloud in 2021, Atlas has saved 45% in operational expenses. They’ve successfully seized the opportunity afforded by this success to significantly expand their operations, now servicing over 50 global travel sellers and 150 low-cost airlines around the world. Equipped with an innovative mix of cloud technologies, Atlas has built a robust, cost-effective, compliant, and user-centric distribution platform for travel sellers of the world.

Challenges

Atlas serves customers through API calls via their proprietary Air Travel Retailing and Information Platform (ATRIP), which aggregates real-time flight information, and provides booking management and payment services.

Travelers often run into issues and disappointments when booking flights via online travel agencies. Due to the complicated booking flow invisible to an end consumer, fares often change right before they secure a booking, leading to poor customer experience and low conversions. Atlas is solving it by leveraging machine learning and efficient cloud computing infrastructure and achieving 97% fare accuracy rate throughout the booking process.

Furthermore, the nature of Atlas' business sees them handling vast amounts of data that will only continue to grow, giving rise to challenges in the scalability, security, compliance, and cost of their data storage solutions. Coupled with the fact that their API is called up to 800 million times each day, Atlas also required a powerful and robust solution that can handle and respond to the immense volume of requests.

Why Alibaba Cloud

Building the infrastructure for such a titanic operation is no small feat in technology and cost. While Alibaba Cloud's solutions share many similarities with other leading cloud providers in terms of core functionalities, they shine in terms of their deep integration within their ecosystem, adherence to over 130 international data privacy and compliance standards, and the combination of advanced AI tools directly within the platform.

"One of the major reasons we choose Alibaba Cloud is their developer-friendly user interface, designed for developers, by developers. It enables us easily create and build our products and solutions based on Alibaba Cloud services, with its unique take on UI design that is already optimized for on-cloud workloads. Our developers can quickly pick it up, and it enhances agility in our innovative process."
Liujie Yang – CTO, Atlas

These advantages have not only enabled Atlas to grab the bull by the horns and solve the tough, but unavoidable challenges they face today, but also to do it with excellent after-sales support and affordable price points.

Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud's out-of-the-box business insight solutions are the cherry on the cake that coincides with Atlas' data-led business and product strategy.

Architecture

In response to Atlas' scalability challenges, the core system was built on top of Alibaba Cloud's Container Service for Container Service for Kubernetes, providing a fully containerized and observable data management solution which is deeply integrated with Alibaba Cloud's database and storage solutions including Paired with the ApsaraDB RDS, ApsaraDB for Redis, and Object Storage Service, all of which are easy-to-use, secure, and most importantly - meet international compliance specifications and standards.

Like any customer-facing application, a blip in service availability of Atlas' ATRIP can translate into bad user experience and lead to business losses. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud's Server Load Balancer and Application Real-Time Monitoring Service, Atlas built a solution to distribute traffic, eliminate single-point-of-failures, and respond quickly to issues that arise.

At the core of it all, Atlas has built their data analytics and platform on Alibaba Cloud's Platform for AI to handle real-time machine learning of flight searches, prices and routes, providing actionable insights to support decision making and arming their experts with the most up-to-date data.

Key Results

All-in-all, leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s solutions have supported Atlas save up to 45% in cloud operating costs when measured against comparable offerings with other cloud service providers.

Looking Forward

Atlas believes that travel should be accessible and affordable, enabling more people to explore other cultures and bring more understanding and acceptance to the world. As the market shifts towards catering to a more tech-savvy, budget-conscious, and eco-conscious group of consumers who prefer to spend less on "getting there" and more on "experiencing the destination", Atlas is eyeing the rapidly expanding AI capabilities and out-of-the-box business insight capabilities offered by Alibaba Cloud in helping their customers leverage data-driven insights to grow their business, while meeting expectations of this emerging demographic.

In this ever-changing landscape, Atlas and Alibaba Cloud will be working together and embracing the latest technological advancements, staying one step ahead of the evolving travel industry and offer responsive, attractive, and socially conscious deals to travelers. Exciting times ahead!

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