Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers –  could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.  

This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.

Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia. 

Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations. 

Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:

• Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online 
• Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here. 
• Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.

Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply. 

Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:  

• Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals. 
• Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.  
• Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness. 

The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience. 

Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:

• Study credit conversion 
• Job opportunities at our career fair
• Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
• Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry

Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.

Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.

With more than 2.5 million customers, Italian utility company A2A is committed to delivering electricity, gas, clean water, and waste collection every day. More recently, the company made another significant commitment: To incorporate the principles of the “circular economy” into its way of doing business — part of the UN 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable-Development Goals — all while also aiming to double its client base by 2030. Growing rapidly but sustainably requires operating as efficiently as possible at every level of the organization, from operating smart meters to generating accurate demand projections. That’s why A2A chose to deploy its SAP S/4HANA ERP and the SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse on Google Cloud.

Roadblocks to innovation

Instead of a linear consumption model that starts with raw materials and ends with use and disposal, the circular economy is a continuous cycle that emphasizes repair, recycling, and the creation of materials rather than their disposal. To take an example from A2A’s own success story: The company keeps 99.7 percent of collected waste out of landfills.1 Of the UN’s sustainability goals, A2A is committing to the three most relevant to its industries:

• Ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Protecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems

Achieving A2A’s sustainability and customer-first strategies requires high scalability, rapid data ingestion, and rich, accurate analytics. None of this could be reliably supported with the company’s legacy on-premises SAP and Data Warehouse, especially given A2A’s projected growth and the increasing complexity of the data landscape, including IoT deployments and energy market liberalization.

Provisioning data infrastructure was also slow and complex. Simply adding a new metric could require increasing capacity by an order of magnitude. And analytical and transactional data lived in siloes, which created a fragmented and out-of-date view of each customer across sales and customer support teams. A2A’s fragmented data also made it difficult to take proactive action when changing priorities or processes required shifting focus from one data source to another.

With a data warehouse that refreshed only once every 24 hours, simple processes such as responding to a customer calling because their power has been cut off due to an unpaid bill became cumbersome.

Scalability was also a concern. With the on-premises solution, A2A needed to define the budget for its data warehouse over a two-year timeframe, but the rollout of new electricity meters — each sending data every 10 minutes — across Italy made those data requirements hard to predict.

The move to the cloud: From monolith to microservices

The move has been a giant step forward in A2A’s goal of meeting its data-driven, customer-centric strategy. In deploying its SAP systems to Google Cloud, A2A can take advantage of a highly flexible hybrid environment and powerful data management and analytics. It can replicate data from Salesforce, SAP, and other systems in BigQuery, which operates as a data lake with Google Cloud SQL, connected directly to Google Analytics and Google Ads for data-driven customer service, decision-making, and marketing.

“From BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it. Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports.” —Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C & B2B, A2A

By running SAP on Google Cloud, A2A can also count on an infrastructure platform that provides:

• Scalability. The robust data architecture on Google Cloud adapts to shifting and increasing demands without compromising on speed or availability, so A2A doesn’t have to worry about over- or under-provisioning as the rollout of smart meters proceeds.
• Speed. The new A2A data solution refreshes every five minutes instead of 24 hours, so the company can respond to its customers’ needs without delays. Customer operators working in Salesforce now receive real-time data from Google BigQuery so that, when a customer calls, operators can see accurate information in seconds. They can now offer value-added services and sustainable options tailored to the customer’s needs, from energy consumption to their preferred method of communication.
• Availability. With microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, the team can update the solution through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), eliminating the need for downtime when changes are required.
• Security and control. The A2A IT team uses Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters of instances on Google Compute Engine, with Google Cloud Load Balancing and backups on Google Cloud Persistent Disk. Google Cloud Anthos ensures operational consistency across on-premises and cloud platforms.

Ready to grow the sustainable way

By moving to Google Cloud — the industry’s cleanest cloud, with zero net emissions — A2A is ready to grow quickly while locking down the efficiency it will need to meet its ambitious sustainability goals. “To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A,” explains Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy at A2A. “Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time.”

Learn more about the ways Google Cloud can transform your organization’s SAP solutions with scalability, speed, and advanced analytics capabilities.

^{1.  Circular Economy: one of the four founding pillars of A2A’s 2030 sustainability policy | Drupal}

For many enterprises, the venerable mainframe is home to decades’ worth of data about the company’s customers, processes and operations. And it goes without saying that the business would like access to that mainframe data — to report on it, to analyze it with big data analysis tools, or to use it as the basis of new machine learning and artificial intelligence initiatives.

At Google Cloud, we are eager to work with organizations to help them transform their mainframe assets for the cloud era. Of course, we can help them modernize their mainframe applications by migrating them to the cloud. At the same time, working with partners and customers, we’ve developed another, more lightweight approach that can help them start to leverage the cloud for their mainframe assets much more quickly than performing a full-fledged migration. We call this approach data-first digitization.   

In this rapidly evolving digital ecosystem, it’s imperative to understand the difference between ‘modernization’ and ‘digitization.’ With modernization you start with the current state and look forward, and rely on mainframe application migration approaches such as rehosting (emulation), refactoring (automated code transformation), reengineering — or simply replacing a custom application with a commercial package. With digitization, you start with the future state that you want to achieve, and work back to what is required to get there.

This data-first digitization approach includes a mainframe data-first integration framework comprising in-house and partner products and tools to migrate heterogeneous data sources from the mainframe to Google Cloud Storage. Once mainframe data has been copied to Cloud Storage, it can then be integrated and leveraged by Google Cloud tools such as BigQuery, AI and machine learning prodcuts  and Smart and Stream analytics platforms. The integration framework covers both bulk batch data transfers and real-time data replication (change data capture).

Data-first digitization is based on the tenet that ‘applications are transient, data is permanent.’ By bringing data first to Google Cloud instead of traditional ways of modernizing applications (for example, with Gartner’s 7 options to Modernize), this allows organizations to leapfrog to new business models, use cases and innovative ways to serve end customers. For example:

• Making decisions with smart and stream analytics platforms and AI/ML engines. These tools need data to make decisions. Google is a pioneer in extracting information and value from the raw structured and unstructured data, and this approach opens up mainframe data for use by BigQuery and AI/ML models. 
• Building new reporting applications. With access to mainframe data, you can use Google cloud products like Looker and Appsheet to build net-new reporting applications, expediting the process of retiring mainframe reporting applications, and accelerating your overall transformation.

In our experience, taking a data-first digitization approach to your mainframe offers a number of benefits:

1. Faster time-to-business: Because data-first modernization is built on existing products, the implementation cycle is much shorter.
2. Less capital investment: You spend your time integrating products, not developing applications.
3. Minimized risk: Data-first integrates with existing, proven and reliable Google Cloud products.
4. Faster overall mainframe transformation: When you shift your modernization center of gravity from the application to the data, you look at mainframe applications from a business perspective instead of just “keeping the lights on.” As a result, only the most business-critical applications are modernized and many support applications can be decommissioned, accelerating your transformation journey. 

Taking a data-first approach to digitization is still relatively new, but we’re heartened by customers’ early successes. Watch this space for additional insights, reference architectures and technical white papers around data-first. And if you think this approach may be right for you, reach out to mainframe@google.com.

Learn more:

• Liberating your mainframe data with Confluent and Google Cloud
• Beyond mainframe modernization: The art of possibilities

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.”