With the rise of technologies like smartphones, retailers have felt the pressure to meet evolving consumer needs and expectations. Seven-Eleven Japan(“SEJ”) has long been on the forefront of this thanks to the way they develop and invest in IT. However, in recent years, Japan’s leading convenience store chain has struggled to maintain its complex legacy systems at the rate needed to keep up with today’s rapid digitization, spurred on by the increasing proliferation of smartphones and an IT vendor-dependent structure.  

Legacy systems limiting real-time responsiveness and innovation 

Since its early days, SEJ has been proactive in adopting information technology, mainly relying on technology solutions from Japan’s leading vendors. But as the systems have grown, key business issues have been resolved using a vendor-dependent structure rather than being driven by SEJ’s own needs.  

Datasets and business logic were combined and built into legacy environments, gradually leading to data silos. As a result, data was distributed across multiple systems, causing a variety of problems, including the inability to efficiently retrieve data when needed, delays in accessing data collected in individual stores, and difficulties taking measurements at the right time in business operations that require real-time responsiveness.

Connecting different systems also takes time and money, and the lead time for introducing new services—from planning to development and launch—has been longer than expected. 

To solve these problems, SEJ’s IT department built “Seven Central”—a new platform for practical data use launched in 2020 to support the company’s future IT strategies and digital transformation initiatives.

At its core, Seven Central’s ultimate purpose is to allow real-time data views. Versatile, real-time datasets—such as point-of-sale (POS) data from 7-Eleven stores—are consolidated into a centralized location in the cloud. They created a simple data mart that provides data via an API to enable them to respond more quickly to requests from individual departments. 

“In such uncertain times, it’s vital to use data to make quick decisions,” says Izuru Nishimura, Executive Officer and Head of ICT Department. “Each department across the entire company will be able to gain an immediate understanding of the situation based on the most up-to-date data and respond accordingly. This is why we built Seven Central.”

Google Cloud selected to help SEJ build and grow their data cloud

Today’s rapidly changing business environment has also highlighted the risk of IT support becoming a bottleneck. The long-term strategy is to gradually expand the datasets managed and collected in Seven Central according to business needs. 

In the first phase, SEJ collected POS data from all 21,000+ stores to enable real-time analysis. Moving forward, they would like to collect other relevant data—for example, unstructured data, such as images and videos, or master datasets that are currently stored externally. 

Google Cloud was already a top contender when SEJ started developing Seven Central in 2019. They compared various public cloud services besides Google Cloud, focusing on three main capabilities.

“We placed particular emphasis on service scalability to drive future digital transformation; security when handling data, which is the lifeline of our company; and finally, openness,” says Nishimura. He emphasizes that openness was perhaps the most important factor for choosing Google Cloud. Breaking away from the negative aspects of an entirely vendor-dependent system enabled them to build an agile development system with multiple vendors. 

Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery and API management platform, Apigee, play a vital role in Seven Central. BigQuery’s high-speed processing at petabyte scale and fully managed infrastructure helped keep costs low during development and verification.   

“Data is stored in a way that allows you to share it easily across organizations, which helps solve the issue of data silos from the perspective of scalability. I also like the fact there are some interesting features that could be used in the future—like BigQuery ML, which enables machine learning on BigQuery,” says Nishimura. 

Apigee allows SEJ to separate datasets and business logic, which is one of the key points of Seven Central. While the trend these days is to standardize interfaces using an API, the reality tends to involve many different APIs rather than the introduction of one unified API. With Apigee, SEJ provides a single unified API for all of its data cloud, and they can now understand what data is used thanks to Apigee’s API usage visualizations.  

“Right now, we collect data from all 21,000+ stores,” says Nishimura. “But in anticipation of a future expansion in business operations, we have designed a system that can scale up and run without issue, even if we were to have 30,000 stores, with 1,000 customers per store per day, purchasing five items per person.”

Real-time insights with BigQuery and Cloud Spanner

Google Cloud partner Cloud Ace came on board early in the planning phases. Based on their recommendations, SEJ decided to continue making full use of BigQuery to analyze data collected from all 21,000+ stores throughout Japan, while also using Cloud Spanner’s availability, near-unlimited scalability and transactional consistency to help achieve the real-time results needed for the project.

“Given that both the data and the regularity with which it is accessed are expected to steadily increase in the future, we chose Cloud Spanner as backend storage for data delivery via API. We consider it a good choice,” says Shota Kikuchi, General Manager, Consulting Department, Technology Division, Cloud Ace Co., Ltd.

Finally, they chose to use Google Cloud’s Stream Analytics Solutions messaging service for collecting POS data in real time, which can then be put to immediate use with Cloud Spanner and BigQuery. 

High-speed responses exceed targets and create new value 

Seven Central went live in September 2020 with surprising results. 

They initially set a target time of one hour from when a customer makes a purchase to the point when Seven Central can use that data. But when the final system was first tried—it took barely a minute. Moving forward they estimate that the latest inventory data from the service side will become available within a few minutes of being added to the system.  

“This is real innovation, and I must admit that I am quite surprised. As well as being able to solve existing issues, we also hope it will lead to new improvements and services that have been unimaginable up until now,” says Nishimura.

The team hopes to roll out the Seven Central platform in all companies affiliated with Seven & i Holdings—not just SEJ. They also plan to explore Google Cloud AI and machine learning technologies to take on challenges in new areas. For example, they are investigating the idea of clustering individual stores using BigQuery ML.

Seven Central has already attracted attention from many departments and received a lot of requests. Nishimura and his team say they hope to continue to grow Seven Central while still observing their fundamental principles—not including business logic, maintaining real-time results, and staying true to the uniqueness of SEJ.

Learn more about Google Cloud smart analytics solutions.

Today at Google Cloud Next we are announcing innovations that will enable data teams to simplify how they work with data and derive value from it faster. These new solutions will help organizations build modern data architectures with real-time analytics to power innovative, mission-critical, data-driven applications. 

Too often, even the best minds in data are constrained by ineffective systems and technologies. A recent study showed that only 32% of companies surveyed gained value from their data investments. Previous approaches have resulted in difficult to access, slow, unreliable, complex, and fragmented systems. 

At Google Cloud, we are committed to changing this reality by helping customers simplify their approach to data to build their data clouds. Google Cloud’s data platform is simply unmatched for speed, scale, security, and reliability for any size organization with built-in, industry-leading machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), and an open standards-based approach.

Vertex AI and data platform services unlock rapid ML modeling 

With the launch of Vertex AI in May 2021, we empowered data scientists and engineers to build reliable, standardized AI pipelines that take advantage of the power of Google Cloud’s data pipelines. Today, we are taking this a step further with the launch of Vertex AI Workbench, a unified user experience to build and deploy ML models faster, accelerating time-to-value for data scientists and their organizations. We’ve integrated data engineering capabilities directly into the data science environment, which lets you ingest and analyze data, and deploy and manage ML models, all from a single interface.

Data scientists can now build and train models 5X faster on Vertex AI than on traditional notebooks. This is primarily enabled by integrations across data services (like Dataproc, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Looker), which significantly reduce context switching. The unified experience of Vertex AI let’s data scientists coordinate, transform, secure and monitor Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) from within a single interface, for their long-running, self-improving, and safely-managed AI services.

“As per IDC’s AI StrategiesView 2021, model development duration, scalable deployment, and model management are three of the top five challenges in scaling AI initiatives,” said Ritu Jyoti, Group Vice President, AI and Automation Research Practice at IDC. “Vertex AI Workbench provides a collaborative development environment for the entire ML workflow – connecting data services such as BigQuery and Spark on Google Cloud, to Vertex AI and MLOps services. As such, data scientists and engineers will be able to deploy and manage more models, more easily and quickly, from within one interface.”

Ecommerce company, Wayfair, has transformed its merchandising capabilities with data and AI services. “At Wayfair, data is at the center of our business. With more than 22 million products from more than 16,000 suppliers, the process of helping customers find the exact right item for their needs across our vast ecosystem presents exciting challenges,” said Matt Ferrari, Head of Ad Tech, Customer Intelligence, and Machine Learning; Engineering and Product at Wayfair. “From managing our online catalog and inventory, to building a strong logistics network, to making it easier to share product data with suppliers, we rely on services including BigQuery to ensure that we are able to access high-performance, low-maintenance data at scale. Vertex AI Workbench and Vertex AI Training accelerate our adoption of highly scalable model development and training capabilities.”

BigQuery Omni: Breaking data silos with cross-cloud analytics and governance

Businesses across a variety of industries are choosing Google Cloud to develop their data cloud strategies and better predict business outcomes — BigQuery is a key part of that solution portfolio. To address complex data management across hybrid and multicloud environments, this month we are announcing the general availability of BigQuery Omni, which allows customers to analyze data across Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Healthcare provider, Johnson and Johnson was able to combine data in Google Cloud and AWS S3 with BigQuery Omni without needing data to migrate. 

This flexible, fully-managed, cross-cloud analytics solution allows you to cost-effectively and securely answer questions and share results from a single pane of glass across your datasets, wherever you are. In addition to these multicloud capabilities, Dataplex will be generally available this quarter to provide an intelligent data fabric that enables you to keep your data distributed while making it securely accessible to all your analytics tools.

Spark on Google Cloud simplifies data engineering 

To help make data engineering even easier, we are announcing the general availability of Spark on Google Cloud, the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for the Google Cloud data platform. This allows data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to use Spark from their preferred interfaces without data replication or custom integrations. Using this capability, developers can write applications and pipelines that autoscale without any manual infrastructure provisioning or tuning. This new service makes Spark a first class citizen on Google Cloud, and enables customers to get started in seconds and scale infinitely, regardless if you start in BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataplex, or Vertex AI.

Spanner meets PostgreSQL: global, relational scale with a popular interface

We’re continuing to make Cloud Spanner, our fully managed, globally scalable, relational database, available to more customers now with a PostgreSQL interface, now in preview. With this new PostgreSQL interface, enterprises can take advantage of Spanner’s unmatched global scale, 99.999% availability, and strong consistency using skills and tools from the popular PostgreSQL ecosystem. 

This interface supports Spanner’s rich feature set that uses the most popular PostgreSQL data types and SQL features to reduce the barrier to entry for building transformational applications. Using the tools and skills they already have, developer teams gain flexibility and peace of mind because the schemas and queries they build against the PostgreSQL interface can be easily ported to another Postgres environment. Complete this form to request access to the preview.

Our commitment to the PostgreSQL ecosystem has been long standing. Customers choose Cloud SQL for the flexibility to run PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server workloads. Cloud SQL provides a rich extension collection, configuration flags, and open ecosystem, without the hassle of database provisioning, storage capacity management, or other time-consuming tasks.

Auto Trader has migrated approximately 65% of their Oracle footprint to Cloud SQL, which remains a strategic priority for the company. Using Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and Looker to facilitate access to data for their users, and with Cloud SQL’s fully managed services, Auto Trader’s release cadence has improved by over 140% (year-over-year), enabling an impressive peak of 458 releases to production in a single day.

Looker integrations make augmented analytics a reality

We are announcing a new integration between Tableau and Looker that will allow customers to operationalize analytics and more effectively scale their deployments with trusted, real-time data, and less maintenance for developers and administrators. Tableau customers will soon be able to leverage Looker’s semantic model, enabling new levels of data governance while democratizing access to data. They will also be able to pair their enterprise semantic layer with Tableau’s leading analytics platform. The future might be uncertain, but together with our partners we can help you plan for it. 

We remain committed to developing new ways to help organizations go beyond traditional business intelligence with Looker. In addition to innovating within Looker, we’re continuing to integrate within other parts of Google Cloud. Today, we are sharing new ways to help customers deliver trusted data experiences and leverage augmented analytics to take intelligent action. 

First, we’re enabling you to democratize access to trusted data in tools where you are already familiar. Connected Sheets already allows you to interactively explore BigQuery data in a familiar spreadsheet interface and will soon be able to leverage the governed data and business metrics in Looker’s semantic model. It will be available in preview by the end of this year. 

Another integration we’re announcing is Looker’s Solution for Contact Center AI, which helps you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of your customers’ full journey by unlocking insights from all of your company’s first-party data, such as contextualizing support calls to make sure your most valuable customers receive the best service. 

We’re also sharing the new Looker Block for Healthcare NLP API, which provides simplified access to intelligent insights from unstructured medical text. Compatible with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), healthcare providers, payers, and pharma companies can quickly understand the context and relationships of medical concepts within the text, and in turn, can begin to link this to other clinical data sources for additional AI and ML actions. 

Bringing the best of Google together with Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud

We are thrilled to announce the preview of Google Earth Engine on Google Cloud. This launch makes Google Earth Engine’s 50+ petabyte catalog of satellite imagery and geospatial data sets available for planetary-scale analysis. Google Cloud customers will be able to integrate Earth Engine with BigQuery, Google Cloud’s ML technologies, and Google Maps Platform. This gives data teams a way to better understand how the world is changing and what actions they can take — from sustainable sourcing, to saving energy and materials costs, to understanding business risks, to serving new customer needs. 

For over a decade, Earth Engine has supported the work of researchers and NGOs from around the world, and this new integration brings the best of Google and Google Cloud together to empower enterprises to create a sustainable future for our planet and for your business.

At Google Cloud, we are deeply grateful to work with companies of all sizes, and across industries, to build their data clouds. Join my keynote session to hear how organizations are leveraging the full power of data, from databases to analytics that support decision making to AI and ML that predict and automate the future. We’ll also highlight our latest product innovations for BigQuery, Spanner, Looker, and Vertex AI.

I can’t wait to hear how you will turn data into intelligence and look forward to connecting with you.

Retailers are becoming more skilled at making individual customers feel heard and valued. This is a necessity given the fact that 66% of respondents to a McKinsey survey stated that they expect email marketing messages to be tailored to their needs. While marketing personalization expertise is growing, it’s still difficult to manage, especially at scale.

Ocado Retail, one of the world’s largest dedicated online grocery retailers, delivering to over 645,000 customers in the U.K., has made personalization integral to its success. 

Let’s look at how Ocado retail worked with Google Cloud and partner Cognizant to develop a new data platform to power its personalization efforts from the ground up. 

Unifying data for more holistic, powerful personalization

To achieve its goals of personalization at scale, Ocado Retail needed a central data warehouse that could turn all forms of merchandising, advertising, business, and customer intelligence data into actionable insights. It wanted a means to accelerate customer segment identification, as well as the ideation and launch of relevant campaigns. 

“We standardized on Google Cloud, including BigQuery, as the foundation for our data platform because we knew it was the right solution for now and the future,” says Kieren Johnson, Head of IT at Ocado Retail. “We have an incredibly lean team and we needed a partner with exceptional expertise to help build an ambitious enterprise data warehouse to provide powerful insights. Cognizant was also the clear choice to help us get there.”

Cognizant worked closely with Ocado Retail to make sure its expertise in Google Cloud and other technologies aligned with Ocado Retail’s vision to drive more advanced personalization at higher scales using machine learning. The partner helped build the foundation on BigQuery, and then incorporated other Google Cloud tools such as Cloud Run, Vertex AI, and Vertex AI Natural Language to provide no-ops, all-code warehousing, and analytics capabilities.

Cognizant also took advantage of the Google Cloud Partner Success Services (PSS) program to ensure best practices were being followed throughout the project. PSS provided advisory services that guided Cognizant through the highly complex process of building the new data warehouse for Ocado Retail on Google Cloud.

Building the enterprise data platform in this way allows Ocado Retail to leverage the full power of cloud-based analytics while maintaining a lean team. It also allows the company to greatly scale up its personalization efforts.

Making customers feel valued at every touch

The work Ocado Retail has done with Google Cloud and Cognizant has positioned it to make its growing customer base feel valued, understood, and supported in every interaction. Before launching the project with Cognizant and Google Cloud, Ocado Retail was only able to run a couple of campaigns per week and knew it lacked optimal insight into each campaign’s efficacy. 

“We now run 10 times the number of campaigns we used to with the help of the data platform Cognizant built on Google Cloud,” says Kieren. “We run multiple campaigns every day for different customer segments, and all of that increased activity is entirely driven by data insights. The positive impacts on our marketing and customer service performance have been clear. We’re now working to expand what we do.”

Ocado Retail has enjoyed solid growth since the new data platform went live, including a 13% rise in active customers during fiscal year 2022, and has also seen a reduction in churn. It attributed these improvements to being better able to tailor products and communications to specific customer preferences.

Throughout the project, Cognizant supported data clean up while maximizing the scalable, flexible, and future-proofed data analytics infrastructure offered by Google Cloud.

Increasing data-driven actions

Ocado Retail plans to provide more data-driven insights to its commercial suppliers through a product called Beet Insights. So far, Beet Insights offers suppliers with intelligence about how their products are performing on the shelves. The result has been improving the role data plays throughout the supply chain, from production to purchase and beyond.

“By putting real-time insights about costs, marketing spend, and supply-funded activities into the hands of our commercial team and buyers, we are better positioned to improve our profits,” says Kieren. “At the same time, building data analytics into every part of our business will allow us to build on our personalization efforts.”

From the project’s inception, Ocado Retail ensured that the platform would be scalable and dynamic. Now, it is working to feed more data sources and streams into the warehouse to accelerate time to insights. Ocado Retail believes this next step in the evolution of the platform will unlock even more opportunities to initiate high-impact programs that transform personalization and every customer interaction.

Learn more about what Google Cloud and partners like Cognizant can do for your customer intelligence and personalization.

Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile and web apps at global scale.

Cloud Firestore is a fast, fully managed, serverless, cloud-native NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile, web, and IoT apps at global scale.

Its client libraries provide live synchronization and offline support, while its security features and integrations with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accelerate building truly serverless apps.

Here’s other stuff it’s good at:

Sync data across devices, on or offline

With Cloud Firestore, your applications can be updated in near real time when data on the back end changes. This is not only great for building collaborative multi-user mobile applications, but also means you can keep your data in sync with individual users who might want to use your app from multiple devices.

With Firebase Realtime Database, we felt we had built the best force-plate testing software on the market. Thanks to Cloud Firestore, in only two weeks, we built a system that’s significantly better and includes features we never thought possible to ship on Day 1.

Chris Wales, CTO, Hawkin Dynamics

Cloud Firestore has full offline support, so you can access and make changes to your data, and those changes will be synced to the cloud when the client comes back online. Built-in offline support leverages local cache to serve and store data, so your app remains responsive regardless of network latency or internet connectivity.

Simple and effortless

Cloud Firestore’s robust client libraries make it easy for you to update and receive new data while worrying less about establishing network connections or unforeseen race conditions. It can scale effortlessly as your app grows. Cloud Firestore allows you to run sophisticated queries against your data. This gives you more flexibility in the way you structure your data and can often mean that you have to do less filtering on the client, which keeps your network calls and data usage more efficient.

Enterprise-grade, scalable NoSQL

Cloud Firestore is a fast and fully managed NoSQL cloud database. It is built to scale and takes advantage of GCP’s powerful infrastructure, with automatic horizontal scaling in and out, in response to your application’s load. Security access controls for data are built in and enable you to handle data validation via a configuration language.