Thai-owned software company Amity sets sights on becoming a leader in the global market for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) within the next three to five years, its co-founder and CEO Korawad Chearavanont says.
He said it has multiple solutions to help organisations build and maintain their customer base, as well as creating more value to their present customer base through social features.
Established about nine years ago, Amity is worth hundreds of millions of US dollars. Its main business currently involves social software module services for mostly corporate customers, both in Thailand and overseas.
Amity’s business initially focused on communication software called Eko for large organizations with decentralized workforce. Thanks to Korawad’s vision, the company later shifted its focus towards the market of business-to-business software as a service (B2B SaaS).
- Techsauce 10 years on: The CEO’s vision and inspiration
- A view from 29-year-old Flash Express CEO Komsan Lee
For him, B2B SaaS is not as “sexy” as the consumer market. But its size is much larger while the market is stronger and more sustainable — although it may be more difficult to penetrate.
He said Amity’s main business now involves infrastructure as a service (IaaS), constructing online network infrastructures for corporate customers.
Most mobile applications with millions of customers use IaaS services. For instance, more than 90 per cent of apps with the search feature use technology developed by the Dutch company Elastic, which is worth over US$10 billion. Another example is Agora, a US-Chinese firm that develops real-time voice technology for many apps, including Clubhouse.
Those are IaaS service providers that offer certain app components to help speed up the development of apps and save the cost.
“Those companies work behind the scenes and they make a lot of money. Amity has transformed to become an IaaS service provider about two years ago after discovering that more and more customers look for technologies that can be plug-ins in their apps. This market is big and has the potential,” Korawad said.
Social cloud platform
Amity’s concept has remained unchanged from Eko’s days, with the focus on social networking and online communication. It offers plug-ins for social networking and online community building with functions similar to those in Instagram, LINE, Facebook or Tiktok. This is a new market segment as many apps still lack social functions.
The Amity Social Cloud platform has four main modules — Social, Chat, Video and Bots. The Amity Social plug-in has social feed, group community and profile functions.
Amity Chat module, based on Eko, adds the chat function within apps relating to banking and delivery.
Amity Video is a newly launched feature following the boom of such apps as Tiktok, Instagram, Stories and those related to live streaming and live commerce. This feature has been in high demand as it can help businesses build engagement with customers through their apps.
Amity Bots module was included after its 2020 acquisition of ConvoLab, a company specializing in natural language processing (NLP), which is a field of artificial intelligence (AI). ConvoLab was Thailand’s largest provider of chat bots service for organizations.
The bots module can be integrated with the social, chat and video modules to help with sales, marketing and promotion.
The four main modules can be customized to get the user interface and features that are unique to the apps involved. For instance, the Air Asia app — which claims to be a “super app” — uses Amity technology for its Connect social platform for frequent fliers.
Amity uses the cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) to cope with its growth as a provider of full-scale social engagement platform services. Thanks to AWS’s multiple tools and services including database and machine learning, Amity has helped hundreds of its corporate customers in Asia, Europe and North America to build their digital communities and maintain good ties with their customers. Among the large customers are Air Asia, True ID, Subway and Unilever.
B2B SaaS is Amity’s main market
Amity has products that are gaining growing popularity in the world’s three largest markets — America, Europe and China. The Chinese market is considered tough, so it is not under Amity’s focus at the moment.
Customers of Amity are from many industries of diverse sizes, including a healthcare company with 50,000, a fitness platform with 50 million users, and a firm running the largest sport platform in Eastern and Central Europe, with 15 million customers.
Software technology firms in Southeast Asia are still very small and there has been no “unicorn” in the B2B SaaS sector.
Amity, which has set sights on the global market from the beginning, has employees from more than 30 nationalities, with offices in Miami, Milan, London and Bangkok. At its Thai office alone, Amity’s multi-national staffs are from 25 countries.
“Our Thai teams are sent to work at offices in the United Kingdom and Italy to help with management and customer service,” Korawad said.
For the post-Covid market, he expects higher demand for products offered by Amity.
Sales have grown 300 per cent from early 2020, and the number of Social Cloud active users has increased from 2 million to more than 10 million.
Korawad attributed the growth to AWS. “European customers have to follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Quick service releases in line with the regulation can speed up the product launch. AWS helps a lot in this regard,” he said.
AWS, which is a cloud-based B2B SaaS business, is making more profits for Amazon than its e-commerce.
Korawad sees the potential for Thai B2B SaaS firms in Europe and the US. “If you can win in Thailand, you can do it in European and American markets. My advice is that you should focus on specific markets with no players or no strong players,” he said.
High barrier to entry
He said an advantage for Thailand is that the domestic and regional markets have the strength in smartphones, with quicker consumer response to mobile technologies than in America and Europe. Thanks to favourable costs, taxes and regulations, tech firms based in Thailand have an advantage over their competitors in Europe and America.
“We have no direct competitors with social holistic features. There are not many companies in the IaaS business. So, we need to grow as quickly ae we can. There will be more competitors soon,” Korawad said.
Investment in technology helps Amity to stay ahead of competitors. Over the past 12 months, the firm has spent about $7-8 million in research and development (R&D) involving 60-70 software engineers. The company has invested at least some $20 million in R&D for technological development over the past 8-9 years.
“We sell technology to software engineers, so product quality is the top priority for us,” the CEO said.
“We invest heavily to build software architecture that can cope with massive volume of usage. Every month we service 3 billion messages. That is a high barrier to entry, so there is no serious competition,” he added.
Starting as a chat module, Amity faced a lot of competition. The founder and CEO then created the social module in a bid to stand out from the competition. Later, the bots module was included after the ConvoLab acquisition. Lastly, Amity added the important video module.
Amity is looking to help customers make money from their customer base with technologies involving advertising and algorithm similar to those used by Tiktok and Instagram.
Covid crisis makes the market bigger
The social cloud market has seen a big growth during the Covid-19 crisis. Many businesses have become aware of the importance of digital technology, realizing the need to invest more and boost the potential of their business. They are looking for channels to have direct communication with their customers, other than through Facebook or LINE.
However, those businesses must first have their own digital storefront. This is the case for many businesses in Thailand and all over the world, such as Air Asia and Central.
Companies around the globe look for products that help them gain engagement from their customers and create more value to their digital platforms. Amity offers platform solutions that can help them attain their goal.
For instance, thanks to Amity’s solutions, Air Asia app now is not just for buying air tickets or doing online flight check-in. At present, hundreds of thousands of app users chat within the community to look for travel information, among other things.
Amity’s customers range from small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to large organizations in various industries, including healthcare, fitness and museum. In a few months, another flagship client in the US that is a healthcare business will be unveiled. Amity’s customers in Thailand include Unilever, Kasikorn Bank and Charoen Pokphand Group.
Amity’s customers need to have their customer base, mobile app and own website or platform, according to Korawad.
“We have small customers with a customer base of 5,000 that can have their own self-serve platform. Our business model is like that of AWS, which has small customers with self-serve platforms and large customers that outsource the platform service,” he said.
