Gone are the days when technology was relegated to the sidelines of a business, only considered essential for industries and professionals directly dealing with it. Today, it is not just a value-add, but an integral part of every enterprise’s operations and ultimately, its success. This has wrought many changes in the way we work, the most noteworthy of which is creating the necessity for every executive – not just the CIO & CTO – to familiarise themselves with the technologies of the future.

Among these is cloud computing, which is essential to doing business in the 21^st century. As the IT infrastructure needs of enterprises grow, and we inch closer to true mobility, it’s no surprise that cloud adoption is increasing by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, too many C-suite executives dismiss cloud computing as being outside of their area of expertise. And while ignoring the technology aspect may have been possible for CEOs and CFOs in the past, it has now infiltrated every aspect of work, and arguably life itself. This makes it essential for executives across different functions and departments to familiarise themselves with at least the very basics of up-and-coming innovations.

One myth that has followed cloud computing is that it is a one-size-fits-all solution that businesses can merely install and use for storage. And while cookie-cutter solutions do exist, they end up doing more harm than good in the long term. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important for enterprises to understand the range of offerings at their disposal, and pick the one that most closely aligns with their needs.

Most people associate cloud deployment with subscribing to a third-party cloud service provider, which owns and manages all the resources that a firm might require. Known as the public cloud, this is the most popular option, especially for small and medium businesses that cannot bear the cost of IT infrastructure. Cost-effectiveness isn’t the only upside of this technology, though, since public clouds offer the added benefits of increased security, greater scalability, maximum uptime and ease of setting up.

Though the public cloud is the most widely used, it’s far from the only option that a business has. Enterprises seeking an added degree of customisation might find private cloud solutions to their liking. These offer an added layer of privacy, which may be mandated by the industry or jurisdiction that they operate in. Moreover, private clouds can allow access even in cases where geography or connectivity is unreliable. One of the factors that has held people back from switching to the private cloud has been the fact that they might need to buy and maintain the requisite infrastructure. In such cases, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets businesses tap into resources stored on a public cloud, within an isolated environment, with more granular control over virtual networks.

A fourth solution, known as the hybrid cloud, also offers the best of two worlds by utilising resources that are on-prem as well as on the public cloud. It is ideal for companies that already have money invested in IT infrastructure, but still want to make the most of the emerging technology. It can also serve as a stepping stone for ventures that are looking to make the switch, but have their reservations about the public cloud.

Each of these offerings comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The key lies in evaluating your needs against the options at your disposal, and making sure that the two align. Only then will you be able to reap all the rewards of cloud implementation.

2020 saw an unprecedented change in consumer behaviour around the world, with shoppers finding new ways of discovering, evaluating and buying products. This has created fresh expectations for both brands and retailers to drive consumer closeness, embrace the digital moment and transform their operations to be more agile and sustainable. These themes have been top of mind in my conversations with our CPG customers, and set the tone at Google Cloud Summit for Retail and Consumer Goods, which concluded this week. I couldn’t be more proud of our team and thankful for our customers that supported us by participating in our sessions and attending the event.

I joined Google Cloud in January 2021 after a long career in the CPG industry, and as I shared in my CPG keynote at the summit, I am thrilled to be helping bring the power of Google to drive industry innovation in CPG. At Google we call this ‘new normal’ the transformation cloud era, where we’re working with customers who want to not just save money on storage or compute, but to use cloud and digital technologies to drive agility across their business. I also call it the era of ‘consumer switching’, because Covid-19 has accelerated the likelihood of consumers to switch brands or the way they shop. Some of these changes are still happening; over 40% shoppers in a recent Google survey reported that in March 2021 they changed brands or shopped online for something they were previously buying in store.

At Google, we have an amazing team of strategists who have been researching, observing, and analyzing the many facets of consumer behavior over the last few years. In the opening keynote at the Summit Capturing the Hearts and Minds of Today’s Consumers, Google’s Human Truths Team kicked off the Retail & Consumer Goods summit by sharing some of their consumer insights, including what behavior patterns they think will “stick” as we move into a post-pandemic world.  I think these insights are especially relevant for brands, as they speak to some of our latest findings on the CPG shopper’s mindset.

Accenture estimates that there could be a 3 trillion dollar shift in value between companies as a result of consumers shifting brands and behaviours. While it is not known who the winners of the shift will be, one thing is certain – those who will be able to leverage data and analytics fastest will benefit the most from these times of rapid change. I shared some of the implications for the CPG industry in my keynote How to grow brands in times of rapid change along with the three key areas in which Google cloud is helping CPG companies drive brand success: 

1. Unlocking consumer growth with data powered insights 
2. Transforming go-to-market in the omnichannel ecosystem
3. Driving connected, efficient, and sustainable operations

Let’s take a quick look at each of them:

Unlocking consumer growth with data-powered insights

The digital marketing ecosystem is transforming for a privacy centric world, and brands are seeing a direct impact in marketing effectiveness. As the CPG industry becomes more consumer-centric and shifts more toward direct-to-consumer (D2C) business models, acquiring and activating consented first-party consumer data presents a clear opportunity to capitalize on new consumer demands. 

As a result, CPGs are turning to consumer data platforms (CDPs) to help them unify, manage, enrich, and secure all of their disparate data from different marketing tools, website analytics, email campaigns, loyalty programs, and more. Google Cloud and our ecosystem of partners can help CPGs build a privacy-centric CDP which brings together all their customer and marketing data into a modern data warehouse, with built-in predictive data visualization tools and models. With a CDP built on Google Cloud, you can integrate data from Google Marketing Platform to drive predictive marketing and media effectiveness. And with pre-built connectors you can also easily integrate non-Google media and data from other enterprise platforms like SAP and Oracle to leverage consumer data for more integrated decision making. Democratize access to data across the organization with our Business Intelligence tool Looker to enable faster decisions in real-time from marketing to supply chain to product innovation.

At the Retail & CPG Summit we shared how retailers and brands can drive consumer closeness in a privacy-centric world  featuring Procter & Gamble’s experience building and activating consumer data in a privacy-safe way to serve consumers better and maximize marketing effectiveness and drive growth across their business. And in a demo, Constellation Brands shared how they’re leveraging real-time data from several commercial sources using Looker to unpack insights and develop action plans.

Transforming go-to-market in the omnichannel ecosystem

Amidst COVID-19 restrictions and rolling lockdowns, ecommerce activity has surged past a point of no return. Direct to consumer (D2C)  or digitally native brands were able to minimize consumers switching during the pandemic  by offering a great online experience. While in-person shopping remains important, consumers are expecting more digital and omnichannel experiences and many will continue to explore new brands and purchase online. CPGs that want to maintain their market leadership can no longer afford to ignore the key role omnichannel capabilities will play in capturing the attention of both retailers and consumers.  Even if D2C sales are not a big portion of your business, you will benefit from first-party data that can help you drive insights and product innovation. 

CPG brands want to transform their older, clunky ordering processes into modern digital shopping experiences. Re-platforming legacy solutions on Google Cloud not only accelerates application innovation, but also makes it easier to quickly launch new features and products. At Google Cloud we have transformed ecommerce for large D2C brands and traditional retailers, so we know what a best in class D2C experience looks like. And we can bring it to your brands. We already help some of the biggest brands in retail modernize ecommerce and enhance product discovery with solutions like Visual Search and Recommendations AI. All of these can help you build a best in class omni channel presence for your brands.

We had several sessions on improving your omni channel experience, including 

Why search abandonment is the metric that matters featuring Macy’s and Conversational Commerce with Google with Albertsons, where we shared how Google’s conversational experiences can help consumers message businesses from wherever they are, and whenever they need them.

Driving connected, efficient, and sustainable operations

The superpowers of  AI/ML are not just for marketing.  Did you know that research from MIT and Google Cloud has found companies that use AI/ML can drive 2x more data-driven decisions, 5x faster decision making, and 3x faster execution? By connecting your operations in real time with demand signals like search, trends, weather, mobility and supercharging this data with AI and ML, you can make smarter and quicker business decisions. For example, you can use search trends to drive demand forecasting and ramp up manufacturing for popular products.

Google Cloud can help you modernize legacy business applications by migrating them to the cloud and using AI/ML and smart analytics to drive business outcomes. Take SAP for example – a Forrester study found that modernizing SAP with Google not only resulted in 56% more efficient IT teams – it also generated 160% 3-year ROI. 

SAP data on Google Cloud breaks down silos across SAP, marketing, manufacturing systems, and external data sources for next-level intelligent operations. For example, with SAP and Google Cloud, you can combine product, media, CRM, digital commerce and site data from SAP and non-SAP sources to uncover stronger consumer insights and fuel product discovery along the path to purchase. You can merge SAP product and sales data with consumer,  market data and Google geo trends to drive targeted promotion outcomes, maximizing the ROI of promotional dollars across retail channels. You can also integrate supply chain and manufacturing data from SAP systems with consumer, marketing and Google geo market data to improve demand forecasting and optimize supply chain logistics. The possibilities are endless. This is why we describe SAP modernization as The Gift That Keeps On Giving. Check out the session on SAP from the Summit and hear from Rodan + Fields on their experience of modernizing SAP on Google Cloud. 

Another solution that excites me is Vertex AI, which transforms the demand forecasting process. Traditional demand forecasting accuracy is a challenge for most CPGs. Current forecasting methods do not take into account granular factors that impact demand, like local weather, demographics, or unforeseen events. With our recently launched Vertex Forecast, Google is making it much easier to start using cutting-edge machine learning models for demand forecasting. In our session Demand Forecasting: Time for Intelligence, Not Intuition featuring American Eagle Outfitters, we share how you can adopt a data science approach to demand forecasting that’s customized to your unique needs.

CPG organizations come to Google for help solving their toughest problems, whether it be driving new consumer growth, unlocking new routes to market, or building connected, sustainable operations. And we bring the best of Google: innovation, culture, infrastructure, AI/ML, and a deep understanding of consumer behaviour to help them build best-in-class brands. 

I’d like to end with a topic that’s very close to my heart. This is around Solving for Sustainability in Retail and Consumer Goods. Our research shows that 62% of shoppers cared about at least one sustainability aspect when purchasing online in 2020. In addition, the events of the past year have triggered consumers to re-evaluate their relationships with brands and prioritize those that are more sustainable in the context of the pandemic. Watch this session to learn more about how retailers and consumer goods companies can leverage technology, data, and machine learning to help make sustainability a core part of the recovery.

All our session content is available on demand. Ready to learn more about how we’re helping CPG brands and manufacturers drive results? Learn more about Google Cloud’s consumer packaged good solutions and reach out to your Google Cloud sales executive to set up a deeper conversation on how we can help you grow your brands today and in the future.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of Ubuntu Pro images on Google Cloud, providing customers with an improved Ubuntu experience, expanded security coverage, and integration with critical Google Cloud features. In partnership with Canonical, we’re making it even easier for customers that have fully embraced open source to ensure security and compliance for their most mission-critical and enterprise workloads.

With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, you  now have access to features like:

• 10-year lifetime security updates – Canonical backs Ubuntu Pro for 10 years with security updates and a guaranteed upgrade path.
• FIPS & CC-EAL2 certification – Ubuntu Pro includes components that meet requirements from entities like FedRAMP, HIPAA, ISO, and PCI.
• Open-source security coverage – Protect your most important open-source workloads including MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Redis, NGINX, and PostgreSQL.
• Multi-version availability – Pro images are available for the three most popular Ubuntu Server distributions: 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, and 20.04 LTS.
• Kernel Livepatch – Kernel patches are delivered immediately without having to reboot your VMs.
• Optional CIS and DISA STIG profiles – Choose from two leading profiles to harden your environment according to industry benchmarks.
• Cloud-based pricing – Ubuntu Pro does not require a contract, and pricing tracks with the underlying compute cost depending on the instance type.

Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Ubuntu Pro

Availability of Ubuntu Pro images is especially important if you’re an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS customer and want extended security maintenance (ESM) for your virtual machines but don’t want to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS versions immediately. ESM is included with Ubuntu Pro 16.04. You can move your workloads from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VM instances to Ubuntu Pro 16.04 instances to continue receiving ESM and all the above-mentioned benefits, without having to test your applications on a new version of the OS.

Gojek has evolved from offering just ride-hailing to a suite of more than 20 services today, serving everyday solutions for millions of users across Southeast Asia.

“We needed more time to comprehensively test and migrate our Ubuntu 16.04 LTS workloads to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which would mean stretching beyond the standard maintenance timelines for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we now have the ability to postpone this, and in moving our 16.04 workloads to Ubuntu Pro, we benefit from its live kernel patching and improved security coverage for our key open source components.”—Kartik Gupta, Engineering Manager for CI/CD & FinOps at Gojek

“With the launch of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we build on our joint investments with Google to optimize Ubuntu performance on Google Cloud, and add comprehensive security patching and Long Term Support for another 30,000 open source packages—the widest range of security-maintained open source on the planet,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “As the world moves to open source for everything, Canonical offers the safety net of security maintenance that enterprises count on to unleash their developers.”

Getting started

Getting started with Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud is simple. You can now purchase these premium images directly from Google Cloud by selecting Ubuntu Pro as the operating system straight from the Google Cloud Console.

To learn more about Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, please visit the documentation page and read the announcement from Canonical.

About Vimeo

Vimeo gives video creators the tools to host, share, and sell videos of the highest quality possible. It reaches viewers in over 150 countries who can watch content anytime, on nearly every Internet-connected device.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: United States

About Fastly

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust the Fastly edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Industries:

Location:

Vimeo is a video-sharing platform that’s home to imaginative video creators and hundreds of millions of viewers. Sixty million people create, host, and sell high-quality videos on Vimeo, including more than 800,000 who subscribe to the service’s premium tools. Over 240 million people in more than 150 countries watch videos monthly.

Vimeo was using its own servers to allow users to upload videos to its service, a cloud storage platform for storing videos, and as an alternative solution for streaming. It was looking for a solution that would do away with its own servers for uploading. Vimeo built a new adaptive video-delivery service on Google Cloud Platform and the Fastly edge cloud that can scale on demand to meet Vimeo’s growing needs for video streaming.

“Our business is dependent on delivering high-quality video; that’s our competitive edge,” says Naren Venkataraman, Senior Director of Engineering at Vimeo. “Thanks to Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, we’re delivering more high-quality videos than ever at less cost, leading to our continuing success and growth.”

Tuning video delivery

Building a great video experience begins with a fast, reliable upload service. Vimeo replaced its servers for accepting video uploads with Google Cloud Storage, fronted by the Fastly edge cloud to help ensure regional routing and low-latency, high-throughput connections for Vimeo’s publishers. Multi-regional Google Cloud Storage offers fast, resumable upload capability that helps make for better user experience.

The video delivery service transcodes videos and streams them to users—videos are customized depending on network traffic and the devices to which the videos are delivered. The goal is to deliver the highest-quality, smooth playback experience across all platforms over varying network conditions and device capabilities.

Google Compute Engine packages the videos, which are stored on Google Cloud Storage. Google Compute Engine can automatically scale to allow Vimeo to deliver videos on the fly, even when demand spikes and many users stream videos simultaneously across a very diverse library. The low latency of Google Cloud Storage helps with fast startup times, while providing scalable storage to host millions of videos from Vimeo’s loyal community of content creators.

“Fastly and Google Cloud Platform enabled us to build a low-latency, highly scalable, on-the-fly adaptive video streaming packager in a short period of time with a small team,” says Naren.

High-quality video means more users

With Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, Vimeo is delivering more and higher-quality videos to its users because of the platform’s low latency, high bandwidth, and ability to scale. Because of the system’s reliability, fewer users stop watching videos because of delays and glitches. Vimeo engineers do not have to spend their time managing infrastructure and now focus on improving the video delivery service, leading to improved customer satisfaction. Costs are reduced because Vimeo does not have to manage the infrastructure in-house.

“We’ve chosen Google for Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator because at Google innovation happens faster, and Google Cloud Platform is driving cloud computing and cloud storage in the right direction,” says Lee Chen, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Fastly.

At Precognitive, we were able to start with a blank technology slate to support our fraud detection software products. When we started building the initial version of our platform in 2017, we had some decisions to make: What coding language to use? What cloud infrastructure provider to choose? What database to use? The majority of the decisions were straightforward, but we struggled to decide upon a database. We had plenty of collective experience with relational databases, but not with a wide-column database like Cloud Bigtable—which we knew we’d need to scale our behavior and device workloads. At launch, our products were supported by a self-managed database, but we quickly migrated to Cloud Bigtable, and we love it.  

To efficiently support our bursty, real-time fraud detection workloads, we needed a cloud database that could satisfy the following key requirements:

• Stability to keep up with increased adoption of our products
• Intelligent scaling that avoids bottlenecks
• Native integrations with BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc
• Managed services that free up our engineers’ time to work on our products

Adding Cloud Bigtable as our performance database

As we scaled our services and added customers, our data collection services for our Device Intelligence and Behavioral Analytics products were seeing thousands of events per second. Cloud Bigtable provided a stable managed database that could handle the volume we were receiving during peak hours. We weren’t always able to handle this scale, as an early version of our product utilized a self-managed database.

Every month, two or three engineers spent hours managing the database instances. Whenever the instances crashed, it would cost at least one engineer a day or two of productivity attempting to restore the instances and recovering any data from our backup database. Managing this database internally was taking precious time away from product development.

We circled back to Cloud Bigtable. After two weeks of R&D, we decided to switch the Device Intelligence and Behavioral Analytics services to Cloud Bigtable.

Cloud Bigtable solved our scaling issues. Cloud Bigtable had been attractive to us from the start because it was fully managed, and offered regional replication and other features we were lacking in our own managed instances. Cloud Bigtable provides horizontal scaling and automatically rebalances row keys (equivalent to a shard key) over time to prevent “hot” nodes. In addition, Cloud Bigtable provides a connector to BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc that allows us to analyze the terabytes of data we are processing and use that data for unsupervised machine learning.

The perks of using Cloud Bigtable

After the migration to Cloud Bigtable, we noticed a number of additional benefits: improved I/O performance, a significant cost reduction, and a sizable decrease in hours spent on database maintenance.

We measured some of our typical metrics before and after implementing Cloud Bigtable. Our request latency dropped by about 30 ms on average (to sub-10 ms) for API requests. Prior to the change, we were seeing latencies of 40+ ms on average. This latency drop on our Behavioral Analytics and Device Intelligence products allowed us to trim about an additional 10 to 15 ms off our average response time across all dependent services.

Before we moved to Cloud Bigtable, we had to scale our database instances every time a new customer was onboarded. We were over-scaling in an attempt to avoid constantly resizing our database servers. By sunsetting our self-managed database and switching to Cloud Bigtable, we cut database infrastructure costs by approximately 35% and can now scale as needed, with a couple of clicks, during onboarding.

We have spent zero hours managing a Cloud Bigtable database since launch, and we put the time we are saving every month toward product development.

Moving forward with Cloud Bigtable

As an engineering team, we love working with Cloud Bigtable. We are not only seeing improved developer experience and reduced latency, which keeps the engineers happy, but also reduced costs, which keeps the business happy. We’re able to build more product, too, with the time we’ve saved by switching to Cloud Bigtable. Stay tuned to our engineering blog for more on the lessons we’ve learned and our contributions to the wider Cloud Bigtable community.