Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.

“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”

“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.

“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

Generating insights at speed

Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.

“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”

“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”

That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.

“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Driving ahead with Noovle

For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”

New app, new customers

In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.

“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”

Cloud engineers face a constant barrage of new cloud services, products, and innovations. By late 2021, Google Cloud alone had released thousands of new features across hundreds of services. Couple this with other technologies and service releases, and it quickly becomes a herculean task for engineers to navigate, consume, and stay current on the ever changing technology landscape. We have heard from engineers this often leads to anxiety and frustration as engineers struggle to keep up. They are faced with a plethora of training options but often lack the time and funding. 

Google Cloud has reinvigorated technical training to make it more informative and applicable to public sector customers and partners. We aim to maximize your training experience so you can get targeted training when you need it. The Google Cloud Public Sector Technical Learning Series addresses customer feedback and provides fun and practical training. Sessions are currently running every two weeks. 

“Short and sweet” technical topics geared to subjects you care about

Generic training doesn’t always resonate with public sector technologists. Our new curriculum targets specific public sector use cases, is delivered by customer engineers, and can be accomplished in less than two hours.  This means participants can apply the learnings directly to real-life challenges quickly. 

Easy to find, easy to enroll 

Training opportunities should always be at your fingertips. Our automated training platform will ensure that you only need to enroll once. The system will automatically notify you of upcoming sessions so you can plan in advance and at your convenience. Sessions will be offered on a recurring basis to meet the needs of your organization.

Fun and engaging

Typical training sessions often include a sea of glazed eyes, unresponsive to basic prompts, falling asleep at our desks, we have all been there. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our goal is to infuse Google culture into our training through interactive exchanges and tangible rewards to keep participants inspired and engaged.

Traditional technology training doesn’t always help you navigate the nuts and bolts of how to effectively introduce a product into an organization. But we know that technology doesn’t operate in isolation; it supports and becomes part of a living organism, managed by humans and confined by other components of an organization’s structure (e.g. existing systems or decentralized business units). 

Part of a larger community of like-minded engineers

Learning with – and from – a community of peers is one way to overcome the challenges and complexities of applying new technology within a complex organization. We created the Public Sector Connect community for this very reason. It is one example of how we surface best practices for public sector innovators. During weekly “Coffee Hours” and working sessions, our community members share their journey and lessons learned with each other. We know that innovation evolves through iteration and diverse perspectives, and Public Sector Connect is committed to helping surface critical challenges and solutions, and connecting those who are solving similar problems. Join the community today.

When your business is rapidly adding new employees, expanding to new countries, and always focused on staying ahead of the competition, you have to take a hard look at the tools that are slowing you down—and swap them out for better ones that can keep pace with the company. We’re expanding YoungCapital in Germany, which means more offices, more people, and more technology to make the business run smoothly. 

As we scale, Google Cloud tools like Chromebooks and G Suite help us grow our business efficiently. They free us up from sluggish, time-intensive technology that’s hard to maintain and repair, and give us the freedom to work together in faster, smarter ways.

Free from hours of device setup. Some months, there are as many as 40 new employees starting at YoungCapital—and as we continue to expand that number will continue to rise, especially now that we’ve opened three new offices in Germany. With our old Windows desktops, setting up new computers could take up to an hour per employee (which can add up to about 40 hours a month for IT). Today, using Chrome Enterprise tools, it takes about five minutes to get an Acer Spin or Pixelbook ready to hand off to a new hire—saving us more than three months per year of device setup time.

Free from VPNs. Our previous Windows machines required a complicated virtual private network (VPN) for accessing corporate files outside of the office. Using a VPN was complicated for our employees because the software wasn’t intuitive; if an employee had trouble signing into the VPN while at home or traveling, they could not log in and work as quickly as they needed to. With Chromebooks, all you need is an online connection to sign into G Suite to access files and work from anywhere. 

From our perspective, Chromebooks are resistant to threats like ransomware and phishing attacks, giving us confidence that our data can stay secure. With Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, our IT admins can strengthen security even further: for example, by enabling advanced security features that help block vulnerabilities, locking down lost or stolen devices right away, and setting device security policies in the cloud so devices everywhere are safer. 

Free from infrastructure. We used to have to invest in servers, and then add more time and money to keep them running. Now we don’t have to run the business on infrastructure or hire people to maintain it—we can just use Google’s cloud. NextNovate is helping us make the most of Google Cloud Platform, like integrating some of our proprietary applications with G Suite and building our own add-ons. For example, we created a button for Gmail that connects to our job candidate database; when candidates email us, we can click on the button and see their profiles and work experience. 

Free from multiple passwords and logins. Chrome Browser and G Suite with single sign-provider SAML are the portal to all the productivity apps our employees need. Once people log in to G Suite, they don’t have to remember a bunch of other user names and passwords. The IT team loves it too, because we don’t have to spend hours zeroing out passwords and creating new ones.

Free to manage cross-country devices easily in the cloud. Our four-person IT support team, which keeps our systems humming, hasn’t grown, even though we’ve doubled the number of employees. When we were on Windows devices, we fielded roughly 1,800 IT support requests every month. Now we get about 1,300 requests a month, from a much bigger employee base. This translates to nearly 30% fewer requests for our lean support team, which reduces their workload significantly even though we have roughly 20% more employees—all made possible with Chrome Enterprise. 

Being free of slow, high-maintenance technology doesn’t just make the IT department happy—people are actually changing how they work. They no longer send files to each other by email or struggle to keep track of versions; they store everything in Google Drive and work together in Google Docs on a single document at the same time. And instead of traveling to other offices, connecting with each other in video conferences on Hangouts Meet has become a completely natural way to do business.

With Chromebooks and G Suite, we’re ready for anything: more new markets, more employees, and more-flexible ways to work together and shake up the staffing industry.