How Google Cloud & NGIS’ Partnership Powers Sustainability & Responsible Sourcing for Consumer Brands
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In the competitive world of consumer goods, sustainability matters more than ever. In recent Google survey, 82% of consumers said sustainability is more top of mind now than it was before COVID-191 and 78% said that big businesses have a role to play in helping to fight climate change.2 As well as delivering on customers’ heightened expectations, sustainable business practices can help organizations reduce waste and lower operational costs and even help attract top talent.
Not only is sustainability good for business performance and the bottom line, it’s great for the planet, too. And it’s something we care deeply about at Google. Since our earliest days, we have focused on developing services that significantly improve the lives of billions of people while operating our business in an environmentally sustainable way. In 2007, we were the first major company to become carbon neutral, and in 2017 we were the first to achieve 100% renewable energy. Today, we proudly operate the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve also been powering humanitarian, scientific, and environmental initiatives studying geospatial information and making it available for analysis via Google Earth Engine.
Powering the future of responsible sourcing
How does all this relate to CPG supply chains? The world relies on raw materials like palm oil, soy, and cocoa to produce the items we consume every day—such as coffee, chocolate, frozen foods, shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, and even household cleaning products. Yet as demand for these materials continues to grow, forests are under threat. Change is needed.
As sustainability moves further into the spotlight, in-demand crops face increased supplier scrutiny. Environmentally conscious companies want to know what percentage of their raw materials is sourced from deforestation-free suppliers—and how they can improve that number. Until recently, many CPG brands have found it hard to get real-time, reliable visibility into operations at a local supplier level, globally.
Google Cloud, in partnership with NGIS, is helping brands gain a deeper understanding of raw material sourcing practices across supplier networks, so they can improve supplier performance and compliance in the fight against deforestation. The TraceMark solution, developed by NGIS, uses Google Earth Engine and BigQuery to analyze and visualize how suppliers behave over time.
Google Earth Engine is the world’s largest archive of open Earth data. It combines a multi-petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets with planetary-scale analysis capabilities to help people detect changes, map trends, and quantify differences on the Earth’s surface.With Earth Engine, organizations can analyze the potential social, and environmental impacts of the decision they make.
Together, TraceMark, Google Earth Engine and BigQuery help companies visualize, monitor, and measure the impact of suppliers’ farming practices. The process starts with Earth Engine, which aggregates and harmonizes planetary data into images that it has been collecting for decades. Then, boundary maps for different suppliers are created and NGIS applies climate data science and machine learning to turn pixels into insights. Finally, BigQuery and Vertex AI -Google Cloud’s unified artificial intelligence platform are used to produce supplier scoring, which is integrated into downstream ERP and procurement systems to support more informed decision-making.
These efforts support the responsible sourcing of raw materials by making supply chains more agile, transparent and traceable.
“NGIS is thrilled to work with Google Cloud and its partners to enable business accountability for sustainable practices at all levels of their supply chain,” said Nathan Eaton, Executive Director, NGIS. “Google Earth Engine provides unique geospatial capability that [gives] leaders visibility and control over their environmental footprint and that of their suppliers in a way that was not previously possible.”
Unilever commits to working towards a deforestation-free supply chain
Unilever is a great example of a company committed to using technology in the quest to become more sustainable. Since 2020, Unilever has partnered with Google Cloud to use data for eco-friendly decision-making, particularly when it comes to sustainable commodity sourcing.
By combining the power of cloud computing with satellite imagery and AI, we’re helping Unilever build a more holistic view of the forests, water cycles, and biodiversity that intersect its supply chain. By gaining a complete picture of these ecosystems, Unilever can detect deforestation while simultaneously prioritizing critical areas of forest and habitats in need of protection.
The cleanest cloud for your sustainable transformation
We are excited to bring Google Earth Engine and NGIS to our CPG customers to help them meet their sustainability goals. Looking ahead, we’re committed to furthering our own ambitious sustainability goals and empowering CPG brands with the technology to do more for our environment and our shared future.
Contact your cloud seller to learn more about Tracemark sustainable sourcing solutions and how Google Cloud can help you advance your sustainability initiatives.
Explore TraceMark on the Google Cloud Marketplace
To know more about how we are helping CPGs transform digitally read this ebook
1. Google/C Space, BR, FR, DE, IN, MX, U.K., U.S., qualitative survey activity, n = 528, Nov. 24–Nov. 26, 2020.
2. Google/Ipsos, Google Sustainability, BR, FR, DE, IN, JP, U.K., U.S., n=16,959 online population 18–70, July 2021.
Groww’s Google Cloud-Powered Platform: The Key to Secure and Successful Investing
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Groww makes investments simple and accessible, using Google Kubernetes Engine to ensure a reliable platform for customers, and makes data-backed decisions to grow its business with BigQuery.
About Groww
Headquartered in Bangalore, Groww is India’s fast-growing online investment platform that offers a simple and easy way to invest in stocks, direct mutual funds, IPOs, ETFs, and digital gold. Its mission is to make investing as intuitive and accessible as ecommerce.
Google Cloud results
- Reduces hardware costs with Preemptable Virtual Machines
- Enables a lean DevOps team with Google Cloud
- Analyzes data effectively and quickly for agile business growth
Investing is one way to ensure financial security. However, the thought of it can be a daunting one, especially for people without any prior experience. With a mission to make investment simple for digital natives in India, Groww was launched in 2016.
“We noticed that many people were on social media, booking cabs, and ordering food online, but the same people were not investing, despite having the means to do so,” says Singh. This observation led to a lightbulb moment for the team, and they realized that in order to appeal to the millennial, mobile-savvy generation, they had to create an investment platform that was as easy to use as an ecommerce platform.
Managing unpredictable spikes with Google Kubernetes Engine
As with any platform, there are bound to be peak and non-peak hours when it comes to traffic. For Groww, regular spikes take place in the early mornings, or in the evenings when people are more relaxed having come home from work. But the nature of the fintech industry is a volatile one. Investors are only human, and their investment decisions can be swayed quickly by the news. As such, spikes in traffic can happen at the most unpredictable times. To cope with this unpredictability, Groww uses Google Kubernetes Engine to scale up and down automatically to meet the required capacity around the clock. This also helps the company save costs, as it pays only for what is needed.
“No matter how much of an expert you are, you can never predict when traffic on the platform will be heavy,” says Singh. “Google Kubernetes Engine helps ensure that we never run out of capacity, without overspending on infrastructure cost.”
More recently, the investment company started using Preemptible Virtual Machines, which run at one third of its hardware cost. It also leverages Anthos to monitor and manage its backend infrastructure and to have better workload visibility. Singh shares, “We are very open to adopting new technologies, and our team is always eager to learn if we can do things better. We believe that technology is always evolving and it’s our responsibility to learn and make use of what’s available out there.”
Despite having so much running in the background, Singh explains that the company keeps a very lean DevOps team. “We’ve only got four or five people in DevOps, and that’s only possible because Google Cloud products are already able to run on their own.”
Making swift, data-backed business decisions
Infrastructure is only part of the equation for a successful business. Outside of operations, the ability to analyze data effectively is arguably the most important component for a startup to thrive. Groww leverages BigQuery to make decisions quickly and efficiently. “With BigQuery, we have a place where we can put all data, fire queries, and build dashboards almost instantly, allowing us to make business decisions quickly,” explains Singh.
The team also uses Looker Studio to clearly visualize the information generated through charts and graphs. The best part? Groww doesn’t need to spend additional time and resources setting up a large data team, since BigQuery does most of the work and in a shorter period of time. The resources saved also enables the team to focus on addressing functional requirements, rather than managing and sizing the data platform.
“From a startup perspective, BigQuery is really helpful because often setting up your own data lake can be very costly, and a distraction when the team is also busy focusing on setting up an infrastructure,” adds Singh.
Ensuring security and compliance with Google Cloud
As a fintech company, security and compliance continue to be top priorities for Groww. It chose Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider because there are three data center replication zones in Mumbai, which means it adheres to financial regulations for keeping its user data within borders.
Moving forward, Groww plans to evolve its platform alongside its users. Singh says, “As we gain more users with different wants and needs, it will be a natural progression that the company evolves. I believe that with Google Cloud, we are well equipped to pave the way to the future.”
NCR’s Emerald Leverages Google Cloud to Help Grocers Boost Operational Agility
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In recent years, the grocery industry has had to shift to facilitate a wider variety of checkout journeys for customers. This has meant ensuring a richer transaction mix, including mobile shopping, online shopping, in-store checkout, cashierless checkout or any combination thereof like buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS).
What’s more, in the past year and a half alone grocers have had to enable consumers new ways to shop for essentials. This has included needing to rapidly integrate or build on-demand delivery apps, offer curbside pickup with near-instant fulfillment as well as support touchless and cashless checkout experiences. Searches on Google Maps for retailers in the US with curbside pickup options have increased by 9000% since March 2020, and we believe these trends from 2020 will continue to define the future of grocery shopping.
The future of grocery will require agility and openness
Firstly, the need to rapidly adapt to changing consumer habits will be the new normal. Grocers will increasingly look to digitally transform legacy retail systems and modernize point of sale (POS) platforms to deliver and scale omnichannel experiences as quickly as possible. This necessitates a more agile and open architectural approach to technology – one built on microservices and leverages APIs so that new applications and experiences can be built, integrated and delivered faster.
Automation and data-driven retailing will be table stakes
In order for retailers to blend what they’re offering in the store with digital experiences more efficiently, they will also need to automate more. For example, with automation and business intelligence, grocers can take labor that might have been tied up with tender operations and checkout and redistribute those resources to restocking shelves, curbside pick-up or improving customer experiences.
Automation and access to real-time in-store inventory & supply chain data can also help grocers avoid the supply chain challenges seen in the early days of COVID-19. Grocers will need to find ways to leverage automation to ingest, organize, and analyze data from physical store networks, digital channels, distribution centers to better forecast demand and manage future fluctuations.
How NCR and Google Cloud are helping grocers adapt to disruption with operational agility
Helping grocers improve operational agility to address changing consumer shopping habits and to thrive during times of disruption is something that NCR and Google Cloud have teamed up to do. NCR has over 135 years of experience in retail, having invented the cash register and are continuing to help grocers innovate. NCR Emerald builds upon the company’s leadership in POS software and has turned it into a unified platform that helps grocers operate the entire store from front to back. The solution supports cashier-led checkout, self-checkout, integrated payments, merchandising, and enables regional managers and corporate employees access to the analytics and tools needed to optimize loyalty programs and promotions.
NCR has invested in a comprehensive, agile, and API-led retail architecture that lets grocers continually innovate and design new experiences as customers and the industry evolve. By running Emerald on Google Cloud, NCR can offer the solution on a subscription basis, helping grocers lower upfront capital expenditures and ensuring scalability. What’s more, NCR can tap into Google Cloud’s strength in data, analytics, and openness to deliver three key imperatives. Let’s take a look at each of these below.
Run the way grocers need to while leveraging Google Cloud as a single source of logic
Traditionally the POS system lived in the store. If disaster strikes, people still need access to food and essentials so the grocery store still needs to operate. It hardly gets more mission-critical than that. NCR Emerald is built on microservices, leveraging Kubernetes for front-of-house compute, and VMs (See graphic 1 below). This makes it easy to support lightweight clients accessible by store employees via any range of mobile devices, computer terminals, self-service kiosks, peripheral devices like receipt printers as well as legacy applications.
What’s unique is that because Emerald runs on Google Cloud, it supports all those in-store and digital touchpoints mentioned above, but also allows grocers to run lean. Emerald leverages Google Cloud as a single source of truth and operates a lot of what it does out of logic. Every sales transaction coming from every channel, including e-commerce, can be logged via NCR’s Hosted Service and centralized in BigQuery and Bigtable as a transaction data master. This enables the grocer to manage any transactional use case very consistently, whether it e supporting customers who want to purchase in one store and return in another, offering digital receipts or the ability to exchange online purchases in store. Emerald on Google Cloud can help retailers extend capabilities through the power of the cloud but not need to live exclusively in the cloud. In other words, the solution allows grocers the ability to run the way they need to.
Enable data-driven and real-time decision making for grocers
Store managers, regional managers, category managers, and others all require different cuts of the data to do their jobs effectively. However, data silos persist and how data is formatted and arranged can still remain pretty static. Therefore allowing users with different roles the ability to view and analyze that data quickly and in different ways continues to be a challenge.
As mentioned above, Emerald leverages Google Cloud data management solutions as the central repository for transactional, behavioral, and merchandising data. Every transaction from every store and every channel can be stored via NCR Hosted Service on BigQuery and Bigtable. NCR Analytics then harnesses the advanced analytical and data visualization capabilities of Looker to help grocers get a consolidated view of their business across all channels and then allow employees to slice and dice the data they way they need to. NCR Analytics also leverages the power of Google Cloud AI and machine learning to add another level of intelligence to the retailer’s data. For example, store managers can visualize how well they’re using their real estate and see how productive lanes 1-3 are compared with 7-10 or compare self-service versus manned lanes. By mapping to the retailer’s own catalog, they can also break down category-level performance and trends.
NCR Analytics takes advantage of Google Cloud’s data pipeline to reduce processing time, with scaling and resource management provided out of the box. By letting the cloud store and process the data, NCR is providing the ability for retailers to analyze their data in near real-time across all platforms – a real game changer in the grocery business.
Open APIs let grocers continually enrich the retail experience
Finally, Emerald is built on an API-first architecture managed through Apigee. It uses the power of Apigee as an open API platform to expose how Emerald can work with other NCR applications like loyalty and promotions, and third party applications like mobile ordering and order delivery to enrich the grocery experience for employees and customers. Every API that Emerald uses is available on Apigee, allowing them to share code samples and giving developers the ability to run scripts. This approach can allow retailers the ability to innovate in a fraction of the time and cost, speeding up 3rd party integrations up front and as businesses grow.
Take, for example, Northgate Market, a chain of 40 stores in California, that were able to transform its digital operations and enable experiences that set it apart from competitors – quickly and simply with Emerald. It took less than 6 months to go from contract to live deployment in the first store. Since then, Northgate Market has been able to extend their intelligence by leveraging the power of Looker and NCR Analytics.
Learn more about how NCR has been able to leverage an open, cloud-enabled architecture to help customers innovate across the retail, hospitality, and banking industries on the webinar “Role of APIs in Digital Transformation”. You can also learn more about how Northgate uses e-commerce to transform customer experience and gain consumer insights.
Unification of Dataplex and Data Catalog: A Full Spectrum of Data Governance and Data Management at Scale
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Today, we are excited to announce that Google Cloud Data Catalog will be unified with Dataplex into a single user interface. With this unification, customers have a unified experience to search and discover their data, enrich it with relevant business information, organize it by logical data domains, and centrally govern and monitor their distributed data with built-in data intelligence and automation capabilities. Customers now have access to an integrated metadata platform that connects technical and operational metadata with business metadata, and then uses this augmented and active metadata to drive intelligent Data management and governance got easier the unification of Dataplex and Data Catalog
The enterprise data landscape is becoming increasingly diverse and distributed with data across multiple storage systems, each having its own way of handling metadata, security, and governance. This creates a tremendous amount of operational complexity, and thus, generates strong market demand for a metadata platform that can power consistent operations across distributed data.
Dataple provides a data fabric to automate data management, governance, discovery, and exploration across distributed data at scale. With Dataplex, enterprises can easily arrange their data into data domains, delegate ownership, usage, and sharing of data to data owners who have the right business context, while still maintaining a single pane of glass to consistently monitor and govern data across various data domains in their organization.
Prior to this unification, data owners, stewards and governors had to use two different interfaces – Dataplex to organize, manage, and govern their data, and Data Catalog to discover, understand, and enrich their data. Now with this unification, we are creating a single coherent user experience where customers can now automatically discover and catalog all the data they own, understand data lineage, check for data quality, augment with business knowledge, organize data into domains, and then use that combined metadata to power data management. Together we provide an integrated experience that serves the full spectrum of data governance needs in an organization, enabling data management at scale.
“With Data Catalog now being part of Dataplex, we get a unified, simplified, and streamlined experience to effectively discover and govern our data, which enables team productivity and analytics agility for our organization. We can now use a single experience to search and discover data with relevant business context, organize and govern this data based on business domains, and enable access to trusted data for analytics and data science – all within the same platform.” said Elton Martins, Senior Director of Data Engineering at Loblaw Companies Limited.
Getting started
Existing Data Catalog and Dataplex customers and new customers can now start using Dataplex for metadata discovery, management and governance. Please note that while the user experience interface is unified via this release, all existing APIs and feature functionalities of both products will continue to work as before. To learn more, please refer to technical documentations or contact the Google Cloud sales team.
Pay-Go Option for MongoDB on Google Cloud Helps Customers Scale as Required
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As the volume and velocity of data grows daily, business success depends on the ability to manage it effectively and transform it into actionable insights. Since 2019, Google Cloud and MongoDB have worked together to give businesses the secure, global, and highly performant infrastructure, the sophisticated data intelligence, and the developer-centric tools they need to power modern, data-driven cloud applications. Our partnership with MongoDB continues to deliver richer yet simpler ways to lead with software.
With MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, developers can build upon a solid foundation that enables them to work with data the way they want in support of global-scale applications. For example, Forbes, a large business media brand, migrated its platform to Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas in just six months. The company’s new cloud infrastructure helped the website scale to accommodate record-breaking growth even while making development more nimble. MongoDB’s document model meant developers could build new features quickly, easily incorporate changes, and better handle a growing diversity of data types. It also allowed for more powerful tools, such a machine-language trending story recommendation engine for journalists. Results have been impressive, including:
- 58% faster build time for new products and fixes
- Accelerated release cycle by 4x
- Reduced total cost of ownership by 25%
- 28% increase in subscriptions from new newsletters
The Forbes team is already looking ahead, with plans for improved personalization, loyalty, and management of first-party data. “Our decision to migrate to Google Cloud was made based on the toolset that it offers, scalability, and developer friendliness,” says Vadim Supitsky, Forbes CTO.
Over the course of the partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud, we have continually added new benefits for our mutual customers, such as the ability to to integrate MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud products; leveraging BigQuery to create a managed, serverless, scalable architecture; rich data connectivity; and flexible scaling. We’ve also made it easier to migrate MongoDB on-premises instances to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.
Making MongoDB on Google Cloud even more flexible with Pay-Go
That’s why we’re excited to see yet another reason for companies to choose MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud: A new pay-as-you-go option, available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. With this new offering, developers now have a simplified subscription experience, and enterprises have a simplified way to procure MongoDB in addition to privately negotiated offers already supported on the Google Cloud Marketplace. There are no up-front commitments required to use MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, and customers pay only for the resources they use and scale based on their needs. Here are just a few of the benefits of this new service:
- Spin up a MongoDB Atlas cluster on the Google Cloud Console within a few minutes
- No need for a separate credit card payment: You can use your Google Cloud Billing account for your MongoDB Atlas environment
- Receive a single bill for Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas
- Apply Google Cloud committed spend to MongoDB transactions through Google Cloud Marketplace
- Get started with MongoDB Atlas with 512 MB of storage for free. Atlas free tier clusters are perfect for learning MongoDB or prototyping applications
We’re excited to see even further growth in our continuing partnership with three new developments: First, because resellers are such an important force, we are pleased to share that reseller partners can now make MongoDB Atlas available via the Google Cloud Marketplace. Second, MongoDB and Google Cloud have expanded our joint reach to 28 global regions after adding Toronto, Canada, and Santiago, Chile. And third, we’ve made a joint commitment to early stage companies through MongoDB for Startups and the Google for Startups Cloud Program. Pay-Go is great for startups because it’s easy to scale and you only pay for what you use. Similarly, MongoDB and Google are helping startups get off the ground with our respective programs, which both include credits and support.
Better together
Your company’s transformation hinges on new cloud database capabilities. The first step to building all-new digital experiences is to select the operational database that will power your application and, in essence, run your business.The partnership between MongoDB and Google Cloud gives you the benefits of a modern database service in a tightly integrated, cloud-native way. Since the beginning of our collaborative journey, we have made significant enhancements to the experience for our mutual customers, and we continue to work toward providing a rich developer experience for MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.
Discover how customers choose MongoDB and Google Cloud to power the future of customer innovation. For more information on how to get started, visit MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Marketplace.
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Skincare Firm Scales 4X in Minutes with SAP on Google Cloud
As the number one skincare brand in the United States, Rodan + Fields must support its team of over 300,000 of independent contractors as well as work to ensure a really personalized experience for customers. To keep pace with the company’s growth, Rodan + Fields realized it needed a more modern, scalable platform for its SAP environment.
After implementing both SAP ERP and SAP Hybris on Google Cloud, Rodan + Fields can focus on its business instead of infrastructure. It can scale four times its size in less than five minutes. Also, BigQuery is now used for data analysis to support critical business decisions.
With SAP on Google Cloud consultants can have 100% confidence that Rodan + Fields systems will provide them the insight, data and tools to succeed.
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