Meginfo, based in Beijing China, is active in the global market, particularly opportunities within China, the fastest growing economy in the world. In the Chinese market, Meginfo provides customers consulting, training, and support in Mandarin. And with our expertise and experience on Cloud Computing, we help both local companies and multinational companies with branch offices in China understand the concept of Cloud Computing and how it can drive the success of their business. One such client is PSA, France’s biggest car manufacturer.

PSA is the owner of both Peugeot and Citroën brands. PSA has been operating in China for years and its business has been expanding rapidly in the Chinese market. But its Chinese website, built years ago, was not able to meet requirements from the business. Meginfo was chosen as the vendor to build PSA’s new Chinese website which is aligned with its websites in all other languages and at the same time designed to meet requirements specific to the Chinese market.

Issues There were three major challenges that PSA was facing with its old Chinese website:

• Contact Management which involves storing contacts in a centerlized place and interactions with contacts. The old Chinese website is basically a collection of HTML pages which are primarily used to show information, it’s not able to collect contact information and send newsletters.
• Performance is another big issue because it was designed to provide information through text and graphics, it does not have the capability to host rich media content such as videos and flash user interface. And also due to the performance restriction, the old website cannot provide high speed content delivery during major marketing events when the website visiting volume is very high.
• Disaster Recovery, there can be many reasons that can cause the server in which the website is running to go down or become unavailable, such as high volumn of visisting or cable broken. The old design and the hardware cannot handle disasters as such.

Solution After knowing their challenges, Meginfo proposed a solution using Cloud Computing services from two major vendors in this industry: Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com. Amazon EC2 is used to run the website which is rebuilt using Microsoft .NET. Since EC2’s computing capability is configurable, it’s very easy to add more computing resources such as CPU and RAM when the visiting volume is high. When visiting volume becomes lower, the EC2 instance can be switched to a lower configuration thus to save cost.

Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront are used to host and deliver rich media content. With traditional IT infrastructure, this can be very hard and the investiment on hardwares can be very high; with Amazon S3 and CloudFront however, this becomes much easier and cost effective.

According to Lau, disaster recorvery with EC2 was easy. “It only takes a few minutes to start a new EC2 instance from different zones all around the world when the primary EC2 instance becomes unavailable, so the impact to the website can be reduced to the minimum level.”

Salesforce is used to manage contacts and contact communications. A customer portal that registered contacts can use to post messages can be built using Salesforce’s force.com sites and Salesforce’s marketing application can be used to send newsletters. Implementation Building the website took 3 resources 4 months, most time was spent on building web pages and the customer portal. A couple of Amazon web services were used, such as EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc. Result The application of Amazon AWS proves to be very successful. The website passed different tests and has been running very well. Users are having very good experience learningtechnologies applied in PSA’s cars by watching videos from the website, and the administrator is now more confident to guarantee the high availability of the website.

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