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.

As ecommerce for home goods exploded in popularity during COVID, furniture and DIY retailers looked to find new ways to grow online transaction sizes to in-store levels. Shopping for furniture and home improvement projects has always been challenging online. Furniture, kitchen cabinets, fixtures, and appliances become a part of daily life, are challenging to return, and have a low purchase frequency. Once a shopper makes a decision, they tend to live with it for many years. These are visual, tactile, decisions that require measurements, style choices, budgeting, an understanding of available products, and an involved consideration processes. During the pandemic, retailers turned to 3D to enhance these virtual shopping experiences. 

Inspiration and visualization cultivate confidence

Our 3D Room Commerce company, Marxent offers 3D visualization and configuration solutions that help retailers sell complex, configurable products online through consumer-facing 3D design and visualization apps. The Marxent 3D Room Planner with HD Renders helps shoppers to visualize how furniture or kitchen cabinet configurations will look in the specific floorplan of their home. Founded in 2011, Marxent envisions a world where buying a dining table or remodeling an entire kitchen is as easy as buying a car from Carvana or ordering dinner through  Bite Squad. Our 3D apps create a streamlined inspiration to transaction to advocacy model that cultivates shopper confidence and allows retailers to sell the whole room, not just individual items. 

Using Google Cloud as a foundation, we help some of the largest retail and home goods companies in the world provide exceptional customer journeys. We trust Google Cloud because our clients trust us to make it faster and easier for shoppers to buy semi-custom, configurable projects.

Embracing the power of 3D to super-charge ecommerce 

It’s inarguable: e-commerce is on the rise. More people than ever before are shopping online for furniture, kitchen cabinets, decking, and other large-scale configurable products. 

Customers who design with a retailer, usually buy from them. When shoppers visit stores and showrooms, they find inspiration in merchandised scenes that illustrate how products like sofas, chairs, rugs and lamps work together to accomplish a look. Skilled sales people make suggestions and offer advice on how to put pieces together. They may even work up a quick floor plan to show how multiple items work together in a room. In store, the inspiration phase is intimately tied to consideration and, ultimately, to driving transactions.

By contrast, online shoppers typically start home projects by seeking inspiration and ideas from Pinterest, Instagram and unbranded online image searches. Once they have formed their style preferences, shoppers keep searching to compare products across multiple retailers, plan their project, and put together a final budget. 

To own the whole project sale, retailers need to own the entire inspiration to transaction to advocacy journey. With both online and in-store applications, Retailers leverage Marxent’s 3D Room Planner app to build shopper confidence, capture the whole room sale and win the customer over.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_svOdVvX5LA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

PRE-RENDERED MID-POLY 3D SCENE

POST-RENDERED MID-POLY 3D SCENE – This is a slightly different angle of the same room that has been rendered into a “Raw Render” (rendered in under 2 minutes).

Through Marxent’s 3D Room Commerce solution, users experience a cyclical inspiration to transaction to advocacy journey. It starts with shoppers viewing inspirational images and media online. Using Marxent’s applications, they can design directly from inspirational images to create a custom, configured space without any product catalog knowledge. Shoppers can visualize the products they love together and in the context of their own floor plan instead of navigating product pages and wondering if items will work together. 

Then, they can add the whole room to a shopping cart with a single click. While this virtual experience does lead to a transaction, it also allows users to save, collaborate on, and share the spaces they’ve created. They become advocates by sharing their projects on social media, starting the inspirational content cycle again. 

Putting an end to manual operations

To deliver renders at scale, Marxent needed to update their cloud render solution. Initially, our 3D Art team operated a manual on-premise render fleet. However, this required many hours of manual setup, configuration, and operation. We also had to manage expensive graphics servers—bare metal, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, HDD, and more. The only solution was to automate the 3D rendering process and empower end-users to rapidly create their own 3D room renders. 

When we were evaluating new solutions, we saw distinct advantages in the Google Cloud Platform that would help them safely and securely scale their business, while strengthening their partnerships with end customers. For example, in moving to Google Cloud, we could automate and scale our rendering process without having to manage fleets of physical servers. We also viewed the platform as an asset due to Google’s secure-by-design infrastructure, agility, data analytics capabilities, and potential for joining the Marketplace.

Creating magical customer experiences that inspire purchase

To provide our customers and shoppers with contextual experiences, Marxent’s applications use mid-poly 3D models that balance speed and realism. These models provide a latency-free, real-time design experience that can be rendered into scenes that are realistic enough to be perceived as photos on social media. 

The complex process of rendering these images requires a combination of efficiency, speed, analytics, and consistent performance that Google Cloud provides. When configured with powerful and speedy gaming GPUs, Marxent can provide fast rendering that meets customers and shopper demands. Here’s a look at our HD Renders application.

Before a user can request an HD Render, they must create a room in the Marxent 3D Room Planner. Once requested, Marxent pulls the saved project from the database and kicks off the process with Cloud Pub/Sub. The project loads into a gaming GPU, using the same platform code running when the user first creates the room in the application. It boots up the app in the cloud to load the room.

The code then scours the space and prepares it for rendering, adjusting texture formats, and adding in lighting. After going through the render engine, the project automatically uploads to Cloud Storage. Finally, the user receives a link to the final product. Throughout, Cloud Pub/Sub handles messages ensuring the right event processes are happening, such as rendering success or failure.

Using this process, it’s possible to create dozens of images out of a single scene, trading products in and out of a floor plan by leveraging a complete catalog of content geometries and covers, textures, and finishes.

Utilizing Google Cloud throughout the buying journey 

Today, Marxent’s applications power world-class retailers with AR, VR, and 3D commerce experiences. We use cutting-edge graphics hardware to create renderings in less than 2 minutes per screenshot, often much faster. We’re also saving money as we no longer have to manage expensive servers or purchase expensive hardware upfront. Our clients are happier because we have passed on the cost savings to them while now having limitless scaling capabilities to meet demand.

By partnering with Google Cloud, Marxent can confidently offer our customers secure applications built on infrastructure with advanced security tools that support compliance and data confidentiality. Backed by a globally consistent platform, we can also help brands build reliable purchasing experiences across customer touchpoints—without fear of downtime during peak sales periods. This strategic partnership has allowed us to provide a best-in-breed, customer-first experience that our customers demand while providing the reliability that our partners expect.

With customers demanding seamless shopping experiences, Marxent’s 3D technologies open doors to new, easier, more convenient, and more satisfying shopping experiences that empower consumers to buy the right products the first time. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry was facing disruption. Consumers have come to expect personalized and seamless experiences at every point in their relationship with a brand. Additionally, consumers are expecting CPG brands to meet rising standards for sustainability, social responsibility, and transparency. Business models are shifting as well. Direct-to-consumer and subscription models have been gaining ground on traditional business models. Add in the CPG industry’s ever-present pressure for wider profit margins and the effects of the global pandemic, and you get a perfect storm of disruption. 

Leading CPG companies are responding to these changes by capitalizing on the potential of emerging technologies and leveraging the power of the cloud to create digital enterprises. In doing so, they can unlock value through reduced operational costs, faster innovation, improved marketing ROI, and greater transparency and sustainability—among other benefits. For businesses that run on SAP, accessing these benefits requires creating a digital enterprise with SAP at its heart. 

What CPG can expect from SAP on Google Cloud

SAP drives core business processes across most enterprise functions in CPG companies, and modernizing these operations is step one in unlocking next-level data and analytics capabilities. Creating a digital enterprise with SAP at the core requires establishing a digital foundation on a cloud platform capable of supporting and optimizing SAP workloads well into the future. From there, CPG companies can leverage the combination of SAP data and additional data signals to support high-value use cases utilizing the advanced analytics capabilities of the cloud

For CPG companies, running a successful digital enterprise in this climate depends on the power of the cloud because of the unmatched agility, security, scale, and flexibility offered by cloud technologies. More and more, consumer brands are turning to Google Cloud to host their applications—including core enterprise applications such as SAP—to drive business agility and maximize the value of data through smart analytics and machine learning. Google Cloud establishes a digital foundation for SAP customers by simplifying SAP deployments and offering  a suite of applications that integrates with and enhances SAP functionality. A Forrester study on the total economic value of Google Cloud for SAP customers found an average payback of less than six months and a total ROI of over 160%. By turning to Google Cloud to run their SAP systems, companies are able to: 

• Maximize insights 
  CPG enterprise data is often fragmented across disparate systems. Google’s analytics tools including BigQuery and Looker allow businesses to connect customer, operational and business data at scale by unifying data from SAP systems with other Google data signals such as Ads, Maps, Shopping or Google Marketing Platform. This precious data is fully democratized, allowing for complex queries to be completed rapidly so companies can uncover and analyze insights and create an end-to-end view of the consumer and the business.
• Create an intelligent organization
  Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities allow businesses to create built-in intelligence. Instead of reacting to trends, they can accurately predict them. For marketing teams, this could be the ability to evaluate promotions and effectiveness of marketing spend. For forecasting, product quantities and restock timing can be better planned. Supply chain optimization can include external data sources to closely monitor inventory and eliminate stock outs. 
• Future-proof your business
  Running SAP systems on Google Cloud creates an agile, secure and highly available environment that scales quickly as a business grows and as the CPG market evolves. A recent study conducted by IDC showed that SAP on Google Cloud deployments resulted in a 46% lower three-year cost of operations with 83% less frequent unplanned downtime and 56% more efficient IT teams. This frees IT resources to drive innovation and customer centricity. 
• Deliver on sustainability 
  Around the globe, consumers are becoming more and more demanding regarding sustainability. The impact of climate change and the abundance of plastic waste is only fueling this trend. Consumers are leaning into social signalling, and CPG companies are taking note. Sustainable IT is step #1, significantly advanced by  moving applications to Google Cloud, the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve neutralized all of our carbon emissions since our founding in 1998 and matched 100% of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases since 2017. Google Cloud allows SAP enterprises to further drive sustainability compliance and business objectives with AI and ML tools that can drive down waste and provide real-time decision making power to support proactive green initiatives. 

Rémy Cointreau is in high spirits after deploying SAP in the Google Cloud

Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned international maker of fine spirits, has products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. But this long production cycle presents some unique challenges in today’s hyper-competitive premium beverage brands market. Since 1724, the company has been consumed with putting its customers first. In 2020, the company realized it was failing to capitalize on the benefits that the cloud can provide and began searching for a business partner that could help with this transformation.  

Rémy Cointreau made the move to Google Cloud for many reasons. First, the company could connect its SAP backbone to key SaaS applications like Salesforce. This enabled the creation of a 360-view of data among its ecommerce platform, SAP, and Salesforce to deliver sophisticated customer experiences that reflect the heart of the brand. The Rémy Cointreau team quickly realized they now had the ability to be more agile in their finance, manufacturing, and supply chain functions with easy access to valuable SAP system data that drives decision-making. Sebastien Huet, the company’s CTO, explains: “Now that we’re fully deployed on Google Cloud Platform, anything is possible. We can pull data in from multiple sources via integration and analyze it in a matter of days. We don’t need a three-month project to see value.”  

In today’s on-demand, omnichannel world, it’s not enough for CPG brands to understand their consumers. For companies like Rémy Cointreau, it is mission-critical that they anticipate consumer preferences and deliver personalized experiences. The winners will be the companies that can reduce time to insights by treating all their data as strategic assets, breaking down data silos to enable real-time business intelligence. With SAP on Google Cloud, CPGs are transforming consumer relationships and business outcomes.

Are you ready to change how your CPG brand operates? Check out this video and read the Google Cloud for SAP CPG customer white paper and ebook.  Learn more about how your peers are leveraging SAP on Google Cloud to evolve their businesses.

For more than 10 years, NMK Textile Mills has manufactured bed linens for major retailers in the United States and Canada. As e-commerce exploded, the company’s co-founder saw an opportunity to grow the business. So, in addition to manufacturing bed linens wholesale for retail customers, NMK Textile Mills reworked its complete supply chain to manufacture products for California Design Den, which became an e-commerce retailer selling its own fashion-forward products directly to consumers online.

With California Design Den’s push into e-commerce, it became apparent the SMB company (with about 250 global employees) faced the same tough supply chain questions as large retail customers, including maintaining enough inventory to meet customer demand in a timely, efficient way.

California Design Den depended upon a myriad of systems to track its complex forecasting and reordering processes. Team members typically planned inventory manually using desktop spreadsheet software, which could lead to excess inventory. Accurately forecasting demand and supply was essential to the company’s financial success—but it was also a challenge.

A couple years ago, California Design Den partnered with Pluto7, a technology solutions provider that offers a software as a service (SaaS) called Planning In A Box. Leveraging Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, Planning In A Box intelligently helps predict demand and balances it with supply.

But that was just the beginning. “Along the way, we realized that to compete with larger retailers, make quicker decisions, and move faster, we needed to go further,” says Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer at California Design Den.

With guidance from Pluto7, California Design Den began migrating its database to Google Cloud Platform. Using Google BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud SQL, and Google Cloud Storage, and experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, the company is reducing inventory carryovers by more than 50%, improving the accuracy of demand planning quarter over quarter, and gaining granular insights into how individual SKUs are performing.

“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels. With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

No need for army of data scientists

“Using Google Cloud Platform machine learning and AI was essential for California Design Den if it was to compete successfully with larger retailers,” Deepak says.

For example, tastes and fashions in bed linens can change quickly and consumer prices fluctuate. With more than 2,500 SKUs, it wasn’t possible for California Design Den’s team to continuously monitor product demand and experiment with competitive pricing in real time.

“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels,” says Deepak. “With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”

By integrating all its data onto Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den’s team gains deeper insights into product sales over time, which in turn helps the company improve demand planning by better determining which styles to manufacture and sell in the future.

“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge leaves with them. By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

Merging visuals with data

Before Google Cloud Platform, team members had to dig through spreadsheets and run scenarios to get a sense of how particular products had sold. The next step was to perform keyword searches across the company’s photo library in the cloud to find each product’s image. From there, a team member would insert the product images into a presentation, along with relevant data points, to provide a report for stakeholders on how particular styles performed.

Today, California Design Den, with the help of Pluto7, is integrating its entire product image library with its database on Google Cloud Platform. Experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, California Design Den is moving towards a day when team members can run sales scenarios and get deep background data on individual product performance while viewing images of the relevant products.

Merging product visuals with data will help designers and team members better understand sales patterns over time and in context. In the past, making correlations between things like which sheet colors sold well in California, compared to how the same sheet colors performed on the East Coast, was something that California Design Den employees primarily did in their heads.

“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge goes with them,” says Manjunath Devadas, Founder and CEO at Pluto7. “By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”

“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

Reimagining supply-demand balancing

Pluto7’s mission statement is to democratize supply demand balancing with machine learning and AI. California Design Den is a case in point, as the combination of Planning In A Box and Google Cloud Platform gives the company greater control over its destiny.

“Big retailers used to tell us what to manufacture and how much they would pay for it,” says Deepak. “That was our primary business, and if we didn’t accept the terms, a competitor would.” Today, in addition to continuing to make products for retailers, California Design Den can design, make, and sell a variety of designs for itself, including custom and limited-edition products, thanks to Google Cloud Platform and Pluto7 software offerings. The payoff is not only in having a more diversified business. California Design Den also receives more favorable profit margins by selling its own products.

“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything,” Deepak says. “We can make smaller batches. We can connect directly with consumers. We can identify the missing pieces—what should we produce next, when, and how much? We otherwise couldn’t afford the level of talent it would take to do this.”

Cutting through the noise

Google and Pluto7 software helped California Design Den reduce inventory carryovers by more than 50%. Inventory tracking and distribution, along with insights and visibility into product sales, are faster, more efficient, and accurate. Google Cloud Platform flexible pricing, speed, reliability, security, and scalability enable California Design Den to stay relevant and be more competitive.

In addition to benefiting from Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den relies on G Suite—also part of Google Cloud—to enhance collaboration among its global teams. Previously, the company’s email server would sometimes crash, due to the heavy load of sharing product photos and other data. “Gmail and Google Drive handle the everyday demands on the business effortlessly and reliably,” Deepak says.

“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important. We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

The company is exploring additional ways to leverage Google Cloud Platform in the near future. For example, one possibility is to import customer reviews from sites where products are sold into Google BigQuery, and to use that data to perform sentiment analysis via Google Cloud Natural Language. It could provide another valuable data source to help California Design Den’s team decide where to focus future designs.

“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important,” Deepak says. “We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”