Working to put food on all of our tables, today’s farmers are facing a higher amount of instability from input supply chain issues to weather patterns. Adding to this challenge are problems farmers face when trying to correctly time grain purchases, sales and transport. Farmers have always been stewards of the land, but now the demand for sustainable products has them needing to better prove their regenerative practices.

At Bushel, we understand these problems can’t be solved overnight or by a single company. We focus on empowering agribusinesses and farmers to work even more closely together to build a more sustainable agricultural supply chain by rapidly responding to market changes. With Bushel, farmers can track market prices in real time, instantly buy and sell grain, analyze inventory and transactions, and securely share verified information with grain operators and other producers. We provide the digital tools to streamline how farmers buy and sell commodities throughout the agricultural industry’s supply chain to help address market inefficiencies that can lead to waste, and have the information and resources to help them flex and adapt as complexity increases in farming operations.

Approximately 40% to 50% of all U.S. grain transactions now pass through the Bushel platform. As we continue to grow, Bushel continues to focus on what digital tEmpowering Farmers: Bushel Drives 40-50% of US Grain Transactions, Fueling Sustainable Agricultureools can support each point in the supply chain. Many focus on the first mile at the farm or last mile at the store. But Bushel is focused on modernizing the middle where grain purchasing and processing sit. We aim to help local grain industries and stabilize regional agricultural supply chains.

Starting with a simple mobile app; now scaling into an agricultural ecosystem

Bushel began its journey in 2017 as a small-scale platform for farmers that delivered grain contracts, cash bids, and receipts. As Bushel evolved into a comprehensive agricultural ecosystem, we realized we needed knowledgeable technology partners to help us rapidly scale while saving time and administrative costs. That’s why we started partnering with the Google for Startups Cloud Program to get support from Google and work with Google Cloud Managed Services partner, DoiT International to help support our use of GKE and create a multi-regional deployment as well as migrate our CUDs to new Compute Engine families and continue to optimize our footprint. We’ll also use DoiT’s Flexsave technology to reduce the management overhead of CUDs in the future.

In just one year, we expanded to over 1,200 live grain receiving locations and quickly grew our services portfolio with electronic signature capabilities, commodity balances, and web development. Because that relationship between farmer and agribusiness is so important, we provide more than 200 grain companies with white-labled digital experiences so each farmer sees their local grain facility they do business with on both desktop and mobile. To further our extension into the digital infrastructure of agriculture, we subsequently acquired GrainBridge and FarmLogs to help farmers handle specific jobs and tasks, and provide the needed insights to improve their business operations. Over 2,000 grain receiving locations across the United States and Canada now use Bushel products. We accomplished all this on Google Cloud.

We leverage the secure-by-design infrastructure to protect millions of financial transactions and keep sensitive customer data safe. Our data is processed and stored in Google’s secure data centers, which maintain adherence to a number of compliance frameworks. We utilize Google Kubernetes Engine extensively as it reduces operational overhead and offers auto scaling up to 15,000 nodes.

Database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other time-consuming tasks are automated with our Cloud SQL usage. Query Insights for Cloud SQL streamlines database observability and seamlessly integrates with existing apps and Google Cloud services such as GKE and BigQuery.

Empowering farmers and agribusinesses in North America

The Google Cloud Account Team had been instrumental in helping Bushel build an expansive agricultural platform that powers APIs, apps, websites, and digital solutions. Google’s startup experts are incredibly responsive, with deep technical knowledge that can’t be found elsewhere. Google Cloud also has provided us credits to explore new ways of analyzing the vast amounts of data we generate, verify, and transfer with solutions such as BigQuery and Pub/Sub.

With BigQuery, we can run analytics at scale with 26%–34% lower three-year TCO than cloud data warehouse alternatives. BigQuery delivers actionable insights on a highly secure and scalable platform, includes built-in machine learning capabilities, and integrates with Pub/Sub to ingest and stream analytic events via Dataflow.

With Bushel, farmers across North America are rapidly responding to sudden market changes by tracking grain prices in real time and instantly buying and selling crops. We see a future where this business information becomes insights – where a farmer can not just know where to sell their grain, but when to sell. The burden right now to engage with carbon markets is high, full of paper-based binders and verification forms. We see a world where farming practices recorded digitally can be permissioned along the supply chain for a better picture of how our food is grown.

With the Bushel platform, millions of farmers around the world will have the digital tools to modernize local grain industries, build more sustainable agricultural supply chains, and help to address global food inequity.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Digital tools offered by cloud computing are fueling transformation around the world, including in Asia Pacific. In fact, IDC expects that total spending on cloud services in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will reach 282 billion USD by 2025.1 To meet growing demand for cloud services in Asia Pacific, we are excited to announce our plans to bring three new Google Cloud regions to Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand — on top of six other regions that we previously announced are coming to Berlin, Dammam, Doha, Mexico, Tel Aviv, and Turin.

When they launch, these new regions will join our 34 cloud regions currently in operation around the world — 11 of which are located in Asia Pacific — delivering high-performance services running on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Enterprises across industries, startups, and public sector organizations across Asia Pacific will benefit from key controls that enable them to maintain low latency and the highest security, data residency, and compliance standards, including specific data storage requirements.

“The new Google Cloud regions will help to address organizations’ increasing needs in the area of digital sovereignty and enable more opportunities for digital transformation and innovation in Asia Pacific. With this announcement, Google Cloud is providing customers with more choices in accessing capabilities from local cloud regions while aiding their journeys to hybrid and multi-cloud environments,” said Daphne Chung, Research Director, Cloud Services and Software Research, IDC Asia/Pacific.

What customers and partners are saying

From retail and media & entertainment to financial services and public sector, leading organizations come to Google Cloud as their trusted innovation partner. The new Google Cloud regions in Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand will help our customers continue to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems. We will work with our customers to ensure the cloud region fits their evolving needs.

“Kami was born out of the digital native era, where in order to scale globally we needed a partner like Google Cloud who could support us on our ongoing innovation journey. We have since delivered an engaging and dependable experience for millions of teachers and students around the world, so it’s incredibly exciting to hear about the new region coming to New Zealand. This investment from Google Cloud will enable us to deliver services with lower latency to our Kiwi users, which will further elevate and optimize our free premium offering to all New Zealand schools.” – Jordan Thoms, Chief Technology Officer, Kami

“Our customers are at the heart of our business, and helping Kiwis find what they are looking for, faster than ever before, is our key priority. Our collaboration with Google Cloud has been pivotal in ensuring the stability and resilience of our infrastructure, allowing us to deliver world-class experiences to the 650,000 Kiwis that visit our site every day. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand, and are looking forward to more opportunities to partner closely on our technology transformation journey.” – Anders Skoe, CEO, Trade Me

“Digital transformation plays a key role in helping Vodafone deliver better customer experiences and connect all Kiwis. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in New Zealand and look forward to working together to offer more enriched experiences for local businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Jason Paris, CEO, Vodafone New Zealand

“Our journey with Google Cloud spans almost half a decade, with our most recent partnership and co-innovation initiatives paving the way for AirAsia and Capital A to disrupt the digital platform arena in the same vein as we did airlines. The announcement of a new cloud region that’s coming to Malaysia – and Thailand too if I may add – showcases Google Cloud’s continuous desire to expand its in-region capabilities to complement and support our aspiration of establishing the airasia Super App at the center of our e-commerce, logistics and fintech ecosystem, while enriching the local community and giving all 700 million people in Asean inclusivity, accessibility, and value. I couldn’t be more excited about this massive milestone and the new possibilities that Google Cloud’s growing network of cloud regions will create for us, our peers, and the common man.” – Tony Fernandes, CEO, Capital A

“Google Cloud’s world-class cloud-based analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) tools have enabled Media Prima to embed a digital DNA across our organization, deliver trusted and real-time news updates during peak periods when people need them the most, and implement whole new engagement models like content commerce, thereby allowing us to diversify our revenue streams and remain at the forefront of an industry in transition. By allowing us to place our digital infrastructure and applications even closer to our audiences, this cloud region will supercharge data-driven content production and distribution, and our ability to enrich the lives of Malaysians by informing, entertaining, and engaging them through new and innovative mediums.” – Rafiq Razali, Group Managing Director, Media Prima

“Google Cloud’s global network has been playing an integral role in Krungthai Bank’s adoption of advanced data analytics, cybersecurity, AI, and open banking capabilities to earn and retain the trust of the 40 million Thais who use our digital services to meet their daily financing needs. This new cloud region is a fundamentally important milestone that will help accelerate our continuous digital reinvention and sustainable growth strategy within the local regulatory framework, thereby allowing us to reach and serve Thais at all levels, including unbanked consumers and small business owners, no matter where they may be.” – Payong Srivanich, CEO, Krungthai Bank

“Having migrated our operations and applications onto Google Cloud’s superior data cloud infrastructure, we are already delivering more personalized services and experiences to small business owners, delivery riders, and consumers than ever before – and in a more cost efficient and sustainable way. With the new cloud region, we will be physically closer to the computing resources that Google Cloud has to offer, and able to access cloud technologies in a faster and even more complete way. This will help strengthen our mission: to build a homegrown ‘super app’ that assists smaller players and revitalizes the grassroots economy.” – Thana Thienachariya, Chairman of the Board, Purple Ventures Co., Ltd. (Robinhood)

Delivering a global network

These new cloud regions represent our ongoing commitment to supporting digital transformation across Asia Pacific. We continue to invest in expanding connectivity throughout the region by working with partners in the telecommunications industry to establish subsea cables — including Apricot, Echo, JGA South, INDIGO, and Topaz — and points of presence in major cities.

Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions.

1. Source: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Whole Cloud Forecast, 2020—2025, Doc # AP47756122, February 2022

In today’s hybrid office environments, it can be difficult to know where your most valuable, sensitive content is, who’s accessing it, and how people are using it. That’s why Egnyte focuses on making it simple for IT teams to manage and control a full spectrum of content risks, from accidental data deletion to privacy compliance.

I used to be an Egnyte customer before joining the team, so I’ve experienced first-hand the transformative effects that Egnyte can have on a company. Because data is fundamental to a company’s success, we take the trust of our 16,000 clients very seriously. There is no room for error with a cloud governance platform, which means that the technology providers we work with can’t fail either. That’s why we work with Google Cloud.

Since Egnyte was founded in 2007, we have delivered our services to clients 24/7. We do this by running our own data centers: two in the USA and one in Europe. But as the company continued its steady growth, owning and managing these data centers became unsustainable. There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into managing everything that we need from a data center. Not only were we constantly building, maintaining, and paying for all this infrastructure, but we’d have to constantly expand our data centers to accommodate our business growth. This caused a never-ending pipeline issue because we had to predict how many businesses we were going to win over the next 12 to 18 months. What if we planned to grow the business by 20%, and ended up growing by 25% instead?

We knew that being limited to our own data centers was going to negatively impact our business, so we looked for alternatives. To gain scalability and introduce another layer of reliability to our business, we decided to collaborate with a reputable cloud provider who could reliably back up our data. We examined the offerings of every cloud provider, and found that in every category that we analyzed, Google was hands-down the winner.

One of these categories is the reach of the network. With its own transoceanic fiber with points of presence in all markets where we’re currently doing business as well as markets where we intend to do business one day, Google network is second to none. Another important criteria for us was flexibility in the product offering, so we could better consider the financial risks of this large-scale data migration. For a while, we needed to pay for both our new cloud infrastructure and our old on-premises one while they overlapped during the migration, but Google Cloud made it easier for us to plan for this.

By December 2021, we had completed our full migration to Google Cloud. This significant migration was completed gradually and without disrupting our services at any point. Our close collaboration with the Google Cloud team is one of the big reasons we completed this so successfully. Google Cloud was able to anticipate some of the problems we’d likely be facing and helped us overcome them along the way.

We were able to shut off our last data center in February 2022, and the beneficial changes to the business are already obvious. Capacity planning, which used to be our biggest challenge on-premises, is now a problem of the past. The ability to spin up new resources on Google Cloud means we no longer need to buy additional resources a year in advance and wait for them to be shipped.

Using Google Cloud means that we no longer rely on aging infrastructure, which is a very limiting factor when you’re developing and engineering a platform as complex as Egnyte. Our entire platform is now always operating on the latest storage, processing, network, and services available on Google Cloud.

Additionally, we have services embedded on our infrastructure such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Memorystore for Redis, which means we no longer need to build services from scratch or shop, install, and build them into the product and company work flow. There’s a long list of Google Cloud services that have significantly simplified our processes and that now support our flagship products, Egnyte Collaborate and Secure and Govern.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to take advantage of what Google Cloud has to offer. Our migration has impacted not only our business but also our clients. We can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our clients whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud or any app, anywhere in the world. We look forward to seeing what’s next.

The practical benefits of migrating SAP systems to the cloud aren’t lost on most businesses. Running SAP in the cloud lets companies simplify tasks, scale quickly, and reduce costs. But as a growing number of organizations are discovering, the cloud is more than the sum of improved processes and workflows. It offers unique and powerful ways to transform an enterprise.

That’s because the cloud is more than a technology. It’s a foundational layer for business and IT transformation. In the best scenario, it unleashes exponential gains that fundamentally change an enterprise. Organizations achieve greater agility and resilience, and they’re equipped to innovate and disrupt like never before.

RISE with SAP and Google Cloud sit at the intersection of these possibilities. RISE with SAP helps organizations embark on the cloud migration journey with minimal risk and on their own terms. Together with Google Cloud, it enables a more advanced framework for a move to the cloud. Think of RISE with SAP on Google Cloud as business-transformation-as-a-service.

Companies move their SAP systems to the cloud for very clear and compelling reasons: 44% say it fuels digital transformation, and 43% are looking to build out a modern IT infrastructure to lower costs and simplify processes. RISE with SAP on Google Cloud takes direct aim at these challenges.

MSC Industrial Supply Co., a premier North American distributor of metalworking and maintenance, repair, and operations products and services to industrial customers views RISE with SAP on Google Cloud as a way to make its IT systems and the business more flexible and scalable by expanding data access in the cloud. With approximately 2 million products and more than 6,500 associates, that’s no small task for the Melville, New York, company.

In June 2021, MSC successfully migrated to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, running on Google Cloud infrastructure. Through RISE with SAP, MSC adopted cloud resources that were both reliable and scalable, without any disruption to its business operations. Advanced data analytics, machine learning, and other AI capabilities are now available to MSC.

At the center of this transformation is BigQuery, with which MSC data scientists can pinpoint business insights among vast and complex data sets from diverse sources, including Ads, Maps, Shopping, or the Google Marketing Platform. The net effect is significantly less time needed to manage and analyze rich data sets.

Energizer Holdings Inc., a leading manufacturer and distributor of primary batteries (think Energizer Bunny), portable lights, and auto care products, has turned to RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to power its move to SAP S/4HANA. The company wants to automate essential business processes, improve customer service, and boost innovation. It had been using a private cloud solution but needed to gain flexibility while better containing costs.

After migrating through RISE with SAP on Google Cloud, Energizer is able to share data and intelligence to keep teams better informed. The framework has also helped contain costs and support business growth through reduced licensing costs and a more economical and efficient SaaS model.

Inchcape plc, the leading multi-brand automotive distributor for Toyota, Mercedes, BMW and others, is turning to RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to take its business-critical sales, marketing and operations systems, and data into the cloud. Doing so will allow the UK-based company to join a diverse range of datasets into a centralized, secure, and scalable platform for the first time.

With operations in over 40 markets and geographies, Inchcape has complex logistics requirements. Google Cloud supports and offers the types of advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities the company requires for today’s complex manufacturing environment.

GCP Applied Technologies Inc. (GCPAT) is dedicated to the development of high-performance products and the advancement in construction technologies, simplifying the complexities of construction worldwide and delivering value to its customers. As a part of their business transformation initiatives, the company was looking to move from an on-premise data center to a more modern framework that can keep up with evolving demands. GCPAT considered various solution options like non-cloud colocation, but ultimately opted to move to the cloud through RISE with SAP on Google Cloud.

The platform provides a resilient foundation for accelerating business process improvement and innovation while optimizing maintenance and licensing costs. With the ability to deliver transformative solutions across the enterprise, GCPAT is now well-positioned to handle the pace of business change.

Veolia is an international company with nearly 180,000 employees across the globe and activities in three main service and utility areas: water management, waste management and energy services. Veolia, which aims to become the benchmark company for ecological transformation, was looking to digitize its processes and operations with a modern, cloud-based enterprise management system. Fundamental to Veolia’s success is its ability to continually roll out new, digital services to its industrial and municipal clients, so the company needed an enterprise management system capable of adapting quickly as the company’s business model evolves.

Veolia Poland upgraded to S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition on Google Cloud through RISE with SAP. Not only has the company been able to take advantage of a simplified, fully managed, and shortened cloud implementation, it has also been able to extend its existing Google environment, including BigQuery, to place data at the center of its digitization strategy and develop predictive capabilities using Google Cloud AI.

4 steps to cloud success

These successful transformation stories share four key characteristics in common.

• Low-risk path: Each enterprise reduced its risk of migrating to the cloud while speeding up time-to-value. Subject matter experts from Google Cloud and its partners guided each enterprise through the transition, and they were able to take advantage of incentives to defray infrastructure costs through the Google Cloud Acceleration Program.
• Near-zero downtime: By increasing SAP application availability with Live Migration, our success stories dramatically reduced planned outages due to infrastructure and maintenance updates, down to less than 1 percent.
• Room to innovate: With advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities, these enterprises are improving processes, reducing costs and driving new revenue streams. Additionally, they have the ability to experiment with modern applications faster and more securely using their SAP data with Apigee.
• IT sustainability: By moving SAP applications to smarter and more efficient data centers, these success stories instantly reduced their IT emissions, while eliminating guesswork. Now, they can set goals based on seamless, agentless assessments and track progress with Google Cloud tools, analytics and reporting capabilities.

The engine of progress for cloud migrations

RISE with SAP on Google Cloud delivers a modular and low-risk path to the cloud for organizations at various stages of the migration and transformation path by clearing roadblocks and using performance indicators and industry benchmarks to pinpoint the best place to start.

The result? Reporting that’s 100x faster, as well as embedded AI technology, real-time advanced analytics, streamlined data display, consumer-grade UX across devices, strong sustainability, and a 50% reduction in a company’s data footprint. In practical terms, all the numbers add up to a simple but profound conclusion: RISE with SAP on Google Cloud is an engine of progress for organizations looking to gain an advantage in today’s highly competitive business environment.

To learn more about RISE with SAP on Google Cloud click here.

B2B marketplace IndiaMART aims to help businesses escape the restrictions of traditional supply chains. By providing access to a digital platform optimized for access from desktops and mobile devices, businesses can improve their operations and generate more revenue. IndiaMART’s suite of services includes web storefront, enquiry support, priority listings, premium number services, a lead management system, and payment facilitation.

IndiaMART also provides “behavior-based matchmaking” that identifies the supplier best equipped to meet buyer needs by product or service, category and location. IndiaMART then matches the designated suppliers with the buyers. Finally, IndiaMART operates as a “horizontal marketplace”—enabling suppliers to market to a large number of potential buyers—presenting a compelling offering for both groups.

Amarinder S. Dhaliwal, Chief Product Officer of IndiaMART, says once IndiaMART grew to a certain size, it benefited from a network effect—as more buyers used the marketplace, more suppliers came on board, prompting yet more buyers to access the service and so on. Suppliers becoming buyers and using IndiaMART to purchase products is another growth driver. “There is not just a network effect, but a community effect as well, as a supplier becomes a buyer,” says Dhaliwal. “This increases affinity, and supplier and buyer ‘lock-in’ to the marketplace increases multifold.”

Positioned to address challenges

IndiaMART’s proactive approach positioned the business well to address the challenges presented by new trends and market conditions. Traffic from mobile devices to its business-to-business marketplace has grown from about 30% to 75% over the last four years.

“Mobile traffic has grown at a compound annual growth rate of almost 100% over the same period,” says Dhaliwal. “The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has brought a considerable number of new users onto the internet and these users look for value—the right price from the right supplier,” he adds. “Furthermore, they can connect at any time and from any location they can access a network.”

The mobility revolution also challenged IndiaMART to provide a user interface and experience optimized for devices of various types and sizes—and that incorporated screens much smaller than the screens incorporated in desktops. The organization also had to help users overcome issues such as inconsistent network coverage and quality—particularly in remote areas.

Becoming a mobile-first organization

IndiaMART is responding by becoming, for buyers, a “mobile-first” organization that meets the group’s technical and user experience requirements.

IndiaMART is also adapting its marketplace to support two key trends:
• Buyers using long, conversational sentences to conduct online searches rather than simply typing in keywords
• Non English-users—the vast majority of people in India—stepping up their use of the marketplace

“We expect that, within a few years, we will have more non-English users than English users on IndiaMART,” says Dhaliwal.

IndiaMART is also benefiting from Indian government measures to reform taxation and stimulate the digital economy. “There has been a huge focus on areas such as digital payments and the digitization of identity,” says Dhaliwal. “We have embraced elements of this agenda by implementing a digital payment platform and are continuing to look at ways of providing new digital services to suppliers.

“Meanwhile, the Indian government’s recent implementation of GST allows us to validate suppliers’ businesses and bring more qualified, more verified suppliers on our platform—improving the experience for buyers and suppliers.”

Speed and reliability an issue

IndiaMART had started operations with servers, storage, networking, and associated systems co-located in a data center in the United States. However, as buyers and suppliers increasingly used mobile devices—over occasionally unreliable networks—to access the marketplace, access speeds and reliability became an issue. With most requests traveling between India and the United States, network latency was unacceptably high. Furthermore, business growth meant IndiaMART needed an environment that could scale to meet demand for the next five to 10 years.

IndiaMART opted for a multi-cloud architecture and established criteria for cloud providers to win its business. “We required an infrastructure that could scale and meet our demand for fast response time without putting our business at risk,” says Dhaliwal. “This meant taking a phased rather than one-shot approach to the migration. We also needed to minimize any wasteful duplication of infrastructure and reduce latency. In addition, as we scaled, we needed to protect our systems, transactions and information, including the details of buyers and suppliers.”

Google Cloud team’s high-quality support

The organization performed proof of concept with the three largest multinational cloud services providers and found Google Cloud was best positioned to act as the cornerstone of its multi-cloud architecture. “The Google Cloud team gave us considerable support in helping us run a proof of concept of its services,” says Dhaliwal.

“The proof of concept also illustrated that Google Cloud was superior to the other cloud services we looked at.

“We could run our marketplace across multiple geo-locations under a single IP address, avoiding duplication, and users in India could connect to Google Cloud via the closest access point, with their traffic passing quickly across the Google network.

“In addition, Google Cloud’s load balancing service would enable encryption between load balancing layers and back ends to ensure security, while all communication would move across Google’s own protected network.”

Being one of India’s early users of G Suite, the organization was also familiar with Google Cloud applications and services.

IndiaMART then opted to work with the Google Cloud team and a certified partner on a step-by-step implementation that minimized any risk of disruption.

Deep engagement from Google

“We engaged very deeply with both Google and the partner to complete this migration,” says Dhaliwal. “The Google team worked very hard to understand our requirements and provide a solution that catered to our needs and could be deployed in a phased manner.” The team ran workshops and technical sessions with IndiaMART and, at a Google Summit, connected the marketplace provider to Google experts in databases and infrastructure.

“These discussions really helped us formulate a strategy moving forward,” says Dhaliwal.

Based on input from Google and its own evaluation, IndiaMART developed an architecture comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Google Cloud’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering; Cloud Load Balancing to support cloud resources distributed across multiple locations; Cloud Pub/Sub to provide enterprise messaging; and Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data.

Cloud Armor works with Cloud Load Balancing to defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; and Geocoding API helps the organization convert geographic coordinates into readable addresses and vice versa. Cloud AutoML allows IndiaMART to train machine learning models to meet its requirements. With Geocoding API, IndiaMART can matchmake buyers and suppliers based on location—providing a high quality experience for both parties. Finally, AutoML Translation allows the organization to create a custom machine learning model that converts product names from English into Hindi and other languages, effectively opening up new markets for buyers and suppliers.

Phase one complete

IndiaMART has completed phase one of the migration that involved moving its web properties across to Google Cloud. The organization is now experimenting with moving its APIs and databases to the service and anticipates completing the exercise over the coming year.

Average page load time down

The initial phase of the project has already delivered considerable benefits to IndiaMART. The organization has cut average page loading time from five seconds to three seconds, and Dhaliwal attributes close to one second of that reduction to the move to Google Cloud. “With Google Cloud, buyers and suppliers can access our marketplace much faster than previously,” says Dhaliwal. “This impacts positively on engagement, time spent on our marketplace, and the user’s entire journey with us.”

DDoS attack repelled

Google Cloud’s security features have already passed their first test. As IndiaMART undertook stage one of the migration, the business experienced a DDoS attack that generated request loads more than 400 times greater than normal. “Because we were on Google Cloud infrastructure, we could develop a solution to combat this severe DDoS attack,” says Sunil Parolia, Sr. VP at IndiaMART. “From a security perspective, this really justified our decision to go with Google Cloud.”

Google Cloud is also helping deliver the availability required by IndiaMART and the scalability to support growing demand. “As the number of people in India who access the internet grows from about 500 million to 700-800 million over the next couple of years, we will continue to build our traffic and be the dominant business-to-business platform,” says Dhaliwal. “On the supplier side, we expect to see more and more businesses come onto our marketplace—ranging from small-to-medium businesses up to larger brands. Google Cloud will enable us to accommodate this traffic without compromising the experience we provide.”