We all experienced, first hand, how Covid-19 has impacted the world and our communities. Last year, store closures, reduced hours, and social-distancing requirements drove people to adopt more e-commerce options, which, according to eMarketer, grew 27.6% worldwide in 2020. Meanwhile, consumer desires to shop locally also grew with Google searches for “____ near me” up 100% year over year,¹ and 1 in 3 consumers having tried curbside pickup over the last year.²

As countries begin to lift Covid-19 restrictions, businesses are looking toward a post-pandemic future and asking ‘Which of these shopping trends will stick and how should I adapt?’ At Google, we expect consumers to continue demanding helpful shopping experiences that blur the line between the physical retail and digital experience, as well as help them to continue shopping locally.³ To address these changes in shopper behavior, we refreshed our retail solutions—adding a new solution, Product Locator, and updating Store Locator Plus—to help you offer the best possible online-to-offline experience and drive shoppers to your stores. 

Introducing Product Locator solution: connecting online shopping to nearby stores

Under Covid restrictions, consumers have grown accustomed to having a myriad of shopping options, from curbside pickup to same-day delivery. Increased searches for ‘along my route’ and ‘in stock’ tell us that convenience is king for today’s consumer.⁴ Retailers can increase online conversion rates and drive store visits by including product availability and pick-up options on each of their product description pages (PDP); emphasizing the speed and convenience of these options and saving on significant shipping costs. 

Our newest retail solution, Product Locator, can further help drive customers to visit by showing the exact distance stores are to the shopper and even estimated driving time, to further highlight the convenience of a store visit. A study conducted by Shopify found that showcasing local inventory boosted key store metrics including 45% of local pickup who made an additional purchase upon arrival.⁵ See the Product Locator solution guide to get started today.

Update your store locator page to address more of shoppers’ needs

Store locators allow shoppers to more easily find your stores and can be made even more helpful with our Store Locator Plus solution. Our updated Store Locator Plus solution refreshes the store locator page to be more informative and engaging by integrating offers redeemable in-store, online scheduling for appointments and services, and text me directions services. Implement Store Locator Plus today using the guide.

Build and customize Store Locator Plus for your business in minutes

At Google Maps Platform, we are always thinking of ways to make building a map easier and faster for our customers. In May at I/O we made Cloud-based Maps Styling generally available, enabling map updates to happen without touching a line of code. Today we’re excited to introduce Quick Builder, our free, low code builder which allows you to demo, customize and build a version of the Store Locator Plus solution for your website in minutes. Experience Quick Builder today.
To learn more about how you can start adopting these retail solutions, visit our retail solutions page.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

^{1 Global Insights Briefing: Getting back out there}

^{2 https://www.shopify.com/pos/future-of-retail-2021}

^{3 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/covid-trends-1-year/}

^{4 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/pandemic-shopping-behavior/}

^{5 https://www.shopify.com/pos/future-of-retail-2021}

Black Knight is a leading provider of technology, data, and analytics to the mortgage industry, catering to both large and mid-tier banks in the United States. Over the past few decades, we tended to manage customer integrations on a case-by-case basis. Whenever a bank needed to connect with a Black Knight app, we’d launch another integration project. Lather, rinse, repeat. Needless to say, this was inefficient; we knew we had to do something to centralize this process.

Building versus buying an API management platform
To start, we created some homegrown API solutions. Despite being largely successful with one of these solutions, we saw that technology advances were outpacing our capacity to update our solutions in-house. We knew we needed to move toward an API platform that would support RESTful architecture and that would fully enable mobile solutions. It also had to be extremely secure. Knowing how complicated such a platform would be to build ourselves, we decided that our developers were better off focusing on providing core solutions to Black Knight clients; engaging with an outside provider was the right way for us to advance our API strategy. 

After a lengthy proof-of-concept process, we went into production with the Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud in 2018. In our opinion, Apigee was the most complete, robust, technically sound and full-featured option from among all of the API management tools we evaluated. Its ease of use was the deciding factor for our developers, and the Apigee analytics capabilities provided considerable insight into the anatomy of an API call—something the other platforms we considered didn’t do as well. 

Choosing Apigee meant that we didn’t have to focus on developing and maintaining a tool or spend enormous amounts of money trying to keep up with security patching. For a large company like Black Knight, an API management tool is something we don’t want to spend a lot of time on. We know that Google Cloud devotes tremendous resources to it, and it would be difficult to replicate that in-house. 

Black Knight has more than 150 client-facing applications. Almost half of them now are built with APIs that are externally facing, and many of these apps use APIs that integrated with other Black Knight applications. Add to that the huge number of applications out there that come from clients and third-party vendors, and suddenly, we had a management challenge from an API perspective.

Driving cultural change
We came to Apigee with the goal of containing and empowering our huge ecosystem of APIs, customers, third parties, and internal users.  

Given Black Knight’s size, our developers and customers understandably each have different business goals, so getting everyone to come to a centralized platform is a great opportunity. My role is to help people consider other options so they can be open to the benefits that Apigee brings us.

Now that we’ve engaged with Apigee for over a year, we see two big benefits. First, the huge reduction in point-to-point integrations has produced tremendous efficiencies for us and our customers, who now get instant integration once they’ve been authorized for a particular API. Second, Apigee’s capacity for mobile enablement lets us satisfy our customers’ needs for secure mobile apps.  

Simplifying security
From a technical perspective, security is complicated for mobile apps. We’re often accessing sensitive information on a mobile device that can’t always be trusted. This kind of scenario requires us to implement a number of security precautions to help ensure confidential information remains protected.  

The Apigee API management platform addresses these needs in the simplest way possible. It solves complex problems related to security without having to deploy a new API proxy each time we need to support a particular mobile device upgrade. Our back-end applications remain protected because Apigee helps manage security, requests, access tokens, and authorizations. Today, our back-end applications work with Apigee to communicate with mobile devices or servers coming over the internet. 

Apigee has also enabled us to do a better job sharing a variety of APIs. The developer portal lets us stitch together APIs and get more creative about how we can innovate and build new solutions based on these collections of APIs. At this point, anybody that has a nondisclosure agreement with us can register for the developer portal. The nature of our business is such that we can’t just open up our APIs to anybody, but it’s available to our contracted third parties.

Our Apigee journey has been exciting, and we’re making great progress. I’m looking forward to what innovations we will come up with next, thanks to the way Apigee enables us to create, implement, and deliver.

What do CIOs and CTOs deliver for the company? If you said “technology,” that’s just the beginning. According to their research, McKinsey found that 85% of CIOs and CTOs interviewed in the spring of 2019 said they were essential for at least two of the three most common CEO priorities—revenue acceleration, improved agility and time to market, and cost reduction.

IT modernization – including migrating to the cloud – is key to business growth and agility. Yet, according to a recent McKinsey study, 80% of CIOs report that regardless of their level of cloud migration, they still haven’t reached their projected agility and business benefits. Sometimes, this is because of issues like training and skills gaps in the IT workforce. Surprisingly often though, the barrier to reaching the goals is based on trade-offs that CIOs themselves feel they must make to strike a balance between the perfect and the possible.

But what if you could have it all without the trade-offs? As Will Grannis, Managing Director of the CTO Office at Google, and Arul Elumalai, Partner at McKinsey & Company discussed in our recent digital conference, many of the compromises CIOs make can be avoided with new technology, modern architectures and by encouraging a transformation mindset across the business. In interviews, CIOs explained how they’ve leveraged the best of the cloud without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility. Here’s how these leaders avoid three of the top perceived trade-offs—both with technology and by transforming their operating model.

Trade-off #1: Developer agility vs. control and governance

Moving to the cloud offers new opportunities for speed, but 69% of organizations indicate that stringent security guidelines and code review processes can slow developers significantly. One CISO of a multinational company mentioned that cloud development was so fast that they had to institute manual checks on their developers’ code. So much for agility. 

To overcome this trade-off and maintain both speed and security, some respondents found success in DevOps, hiring security-experienced talent and introducing automation for security and quality. Building in security into the CI/CD pipeline and increasing automation don’t just eliminate the tradeoff, they result in higher quality and faster innovation.

At Google Cloud, we’ve also observed that customers with strong DevOps practices have increased speed-to-market and product/service quality. From our own journey, we’ve learned seven critical lessons essential to adopting a DevOps model, ranging from taking up small projects and embracing open source to building an overall DevOps culture.

Trade-off #2: Single-vendor benefits vs. freedom from lock-in

CIOs perceive benefits to using the fewest number of clouds, specifically avoiding introducing multiple systems that require their teams to develop and maintain multiple skillsets. Unfortunately, 83% of the CIOs interviewed said that while they would prefer fewer clouds, the potential financial and technical lock-in drives them to multiple providers. 

Successful CIOs said that they can avoid lock-in pitfalls not just with contractual guardrails and executive and board education, but with evolving hybrid cloud technologies that provide additional choices. Hybrid cloud platforms based on containers can further mitigate the risk of using a single cloud vendor. The key to successful hybrid architectures is the infrastructure abstraction and portability that containers create for them, enabling disparate environments to work together. 

This notion has been at the heart of our strategy at Google Cloud with Anthos, which provides an abstraction layer and an application modernization platform for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enterprises can use Anthos to modernize how they develop, secure, and operate hybrid-cloud environments and enable consistency across cloud environments.

Trade-off #3: Best-of-breed tools vs. standardization and familiarity

Optimizing tool chains for different environments can improve productivity, but many CIOs believe that this means reduced functionality and tools. While 77% of CIOs said they had to standardize to the lowest common denominator, some have found a better solution. Rather than giving up the languages, libraries, and frameworks that their teams prefer, effective leaders said that they found success by investing in training programs to upscale talent and adopting new open and vendor-agnostic solutions. Architectures that are based on open-source components have been the keys that helped remove this tradeoff, and eliminate the notion of a lowest common denominator. 

This is why we have built Anthos on open-source components like Kubernetes, Istio and Knative. Anthos gives your business the choice you need. With the ability to create code that works in most environments using the tools, languages, and systems you prefer, you can do more without major changes to how you work.

Regardless of your current cloud adoption level, check out “Unlock business acceleration in a hybrid cloud world” to discover more about McKinsey’s findings, including how CIOs drive agility, methods to make trade-offs unnecessary, and how to prepare your team for the cloud. Then, stay tuned for subsequent posts that  take a closer look at how hybrid solutions and strategies can help CIOs drive a transformation mindset across the business—without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility.