Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.

This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.

At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.

Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.

Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.

They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.

With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.

Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”  

In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:

• BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
• Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
• Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
• Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.

Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.

“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”

Start your 2022 New Year’s resolutions by learning at no cost how to use Google Cloud with the following training opportunities:

30 day access to Google Cloud Skills Boost 

Register by January 31, 2022 and claim 30 days free access to Google Cloud Skills Boost to complete the Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path. 

Google Cloud Skills Boost is the definitive destination for skills development where you can personalize learning paths, track progress, and validate your newly-earned expertise with skill badges. 

The Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path will give you the opportunity to earn three skill badges after you complete hands-on labs and courses designed for aspiring cloud engineers and architects. It covers the fundamentals of Google Cloud including core infrastructure, big data and ML, writing gcloud commands, using Cloud Shell, deploying virtual machines, and running containerized applications on GKE.

Cloud OnBoard: half day training on getting started with Google Cloud fundamentals

Attend the Getting Started Cloud OnBoard on January 20 for a comprehensive Google Cloud orientation. Google Cloud experts will show you how to execute your compute, available storage options, how to secure your data, and available Google Cloud managed services. 

Cloud Study Jam: expert-guided hands-on lab

Google Cloud experts will walk you through a hands-on lab included in Google Cloud Skill Boost’s Getting Started with Google Cloud learning path when you join our Cloud Study Jam on January 27. Google Cloud experts will also answer questions live via chat during this event.

Looking back on the past year, I see challenges—but also reinvention. Reinvention in how children are educated. Reinvention in how medical professionals provide care. Reinvention in how customers purchase products. This reinvention was made possible by all of the IT leaders around the world who had a vision about what could be possible with technology.

Technology has allowed people to work and complete critical activities safely outside of their standard locations. But, it has also enabled transformation in ways we have not seen before: in how people collaborate, in how businesses operate, and most important to me, in how organizations innovate.

Rethinking what it means to transform

The leading indicator for organizations that are accelerating their innovation during this time is how they are thinking about transformation. Instead of asking infrastructure questions about where their apps and services should run, they are asking transformation questions about how to build an environment that enables every person, process, and technology to adapt in order to bring the highest level of innovation to the business. 

Innovative companies have moved beyond migrating their data centers to the cloud, changing not only where their business is done but, more importantly, how it is done. For example, Papa John’s recently announced they are building a digital platform that looks at real-time data across the business to improve its loyalty programs, website, and customer and partner experiences. Albertsons Companies is transforming itself by reinventing grocery shopping, both the digital and physical aisle, through shoppable maps, AI-powered conversational commerce, and predictive grocery list building. Airbus is reimagining their work environment to embrace the hybrid work reality. And Siemens is partnering with Google Cloud to reinvent industrial manufacturing with AI to empower employees, automate mundane tasks, and improve product quality.  

Here, transformation is made possible with technologies that enable new innovations for their customers versus decisions about where infrastructure should be run. And this aligns with a recent study by Forrester that states the top two IT initiatives for the next 12 months are to increase innovation and to invest in technology that helps employees do their jobs better.¹

Some of the best conversations I’ve had with customers are focused on how to:

• Accelerate transformation while also maintaining the freedom to adapt to market needs.
• Make every employee—data scientists to sales associates—smarter with real-time data to make the best decisions.
• Bring people together and enable them to communicate, collaborate, and share with each other when they can not meet in person.
• Protect everything that matters to us—our people, our customers, our data, our customers’ data, and each transaction we undertake.

This new customer thinking is driving new technology requirements—requirements that can be solved through a transformation cloud. A transformation cloud accelerates an organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. The result is an organization – and its workers –  that can take advantage of all of the benefits of cloud computing to drive innovation.

The new requirements for innovation

Organizations want to work with multiple cloud providers to choose the best technology for each of their apps and services while also mitigating against inevitable cloud outages and vendor lock in. They value the flexibility of open source based solutions and look to our multicloud platforms like Google Kubernetes Engine and Anthos to instill freedom in how they innovate and drive differentiated customer experiences. It is no surprise that, in a recent Google-commissioned IDG research study, 78% of Global IT leaders stated that multi/hybrid cloud support is a major consideration when selecting a cloud provider and 74% preferred open source cloud solutions.² Customers like MLB, DenizBank, and Macquarie Bank understand the necessity of a multicloud strategy and are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to give them the maximum flexibility to run their business how and where they want.

These organizations also want to use data to better understand their customers, enhance their products, and improve inventory accuracy in order to make real-time decisions—and bring it together into a cohesive data cloud. They value how analytics solutions democratize access to data for all employees and how embedded AI helps them predict and automate the future. The Forrester study mentioned above also shows that companies focused on improving their use of data for better decision-making, are taking actions to improve data self-service capabilities and make access to data and insights more democratic.³ Customers like Twitter, PayPal, The Home Depot, HSBC, and Stanford Medicine, unify their data across their organizations to power deeper AI-driven business insights, make better real-time decisions, and build and run their data-driven applications. 

And while technology is driving many of the transformations we see, so are an organization’s people. Workers are finding new ways to strengthen human connections, deepen their impact, and serve customers while transforming how work happens—as shown in the fact that 59% of organizations in the IDG study accelerated or newly introduced remote working and collaboration capabilities in 2020.⁴ Customers like Kia Motors, Cambridge Health Alliance, and PwC are using Google Workspace to enable teams of all sizes to connect, create,  collaborate, and to drive innovation from any device, and any location.

Finally, the innovation that we see in every digital transaction is matched with new ways to protect and secure the business. Organizations want to protect their employees, customers, and partners against emerging threats, analyze massive amounts of data to secure infrastructure, and build a long term strategy for strategic governance of their assets regardless of their location. Getting this right is essential as organizations see security as a top pain point impeding innovation.⁵ Customers like Equifax and Evernote are using Google Cloud’s secure platform and security products to extend customer confidence anywhere their systems may operate.

Google Cloud technologies are already powering customers’ transformation clouds

Supporting our customers’ reinventions are our top priority and we believe that together, we can pave the way for what is next. With our investments in multicloud and AI/ML, to sustainable infrastructure, industry solutions, and technology that improves our communities, such as COVID-19 vaccine distribution, we are proud that our customers trust Google Cloud solutions to digitally transform their business.

We have lots more to tell you about in the coming months, starting with our Data Cloud Summit on May 26th. Between this event, and the multiple other events we have this summer, you will learn about how our industry leadership and collaboration with our partners are enabling our customers to build powerful transformation clouds to support their continued reinvention.

^{1. Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2021
2. IDG Communications, Inc: “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021
3. Of the companies that prioritize data in decision making, 37% are improving data self-service capabilities and 30% are making access to data and insights more democratic (Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2021)
4. IDG Communications, Inc, “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021
5. 33% of organizations stated Security risks & concerns as a top pain point impeding innovation (IDG Communications, Inc, “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021)}

It’s incredible to see how startups across industries are using cloud technology to help address some of our most pressing, important, and life-altering challenges. Startups and high-growth technology companies are choosing Google Cloud and using technologies like Google Compute Engine (GCE), BigQuery, Looker, Firebase and more to help businesses reduce energy consumption, build more inclusive and sustainable workforces, and in the case of high-growth biotech company Freenome, are creating diagnostic tests that will help detect life-threatening diseases like cancer in the earliest, most-treatable stages.

Freenome is driven by its mission to develop high-quality diagnostic tests to detect and treat diseases like cancer from a simple blood draw. In 2022, Freenome significantly accelerated its growth on Google Cloud to support the business as it began the clinical trials of its diagnostic blood testing technology. Today, the high-growth biotech is further deepening its partnership with Google Cloud in order to support its rapid growth and scale as it concludes clinical validation, takes its tests through FDA approvals, and prepares to bring its product to market.

When detected early, data shows that there is a higher probability for cancer to be beaten, yet not everyone has access to early detection measures. By creating a way to detect the earliest warning signs of cancer with a standard blood test, Freenome is helping bridge the gap between accessibility and early cancer detection. To do this, Freenome built a multiomics platform capable of analyzing and detecting disease-associated patterns in the blood using molecular biology, advanced biology, and machine learning. By applying machine learning models trained to scan for tumor and non-tumor biomarkers to the diagnostic process, Freenome’s tests can identify suspicious molecular patterns in a patient’s blood, which will ultimately help more people detect cancer at its earliest stages in the body.

The amount of molecular data extracted from blood samples can quickly add up to hundreds of terabytes worth of data, so it was clear early on that Freenome would need infrastructure that could support the fast sequencing and processing of large amounts of data. In addition, Freenome’s collaboration technology needed to provide flexibility, security, and proper identity management safeguards, given the nature of its business. To meet these needs and support the company’s plans for growth and innovation, Freenome selected Google Cloud as its primary cloud provider, utilizing services like Google Cloud Storage and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), along with Google Workspace as its collaboration platform.

Using Cloud Storage alongside GKE gives Freenome the computing power needed to sequence and process mass amounts of blood sample data with high-performance, speed, and at scale. Cloud Storage also makes it easy for Freenome to leverage other Google Cloud capabilities like BigQuery for analytics with built-in query acceleration. Additionally, the built-in cluster management capabilities of GKE make it easy for Freenome’s engineering and IT teams to manage and deploy new workflows to the high-performance computing clusters used by the machine learning components of its multiomics platform to speed up cancer detection. Freenome also uses Google Cloud technologies like Artifact Registry and Cloud SQL, which help the company ensure a managed and secure software supply chain of containers and other artifacts.

Today, as a part of its expanded partnership with Google Cloud, Freenome is significantly increasing its use of Cloud Storage and GKE as it works to complete the clinical trials related to its diagnostic test. By expanding its use of GKE and Cloud Storage, Freenome will be equipped to perform the compute-intensive analytical work required for running its research workflow and diagnostic classifier algorithms. In addition, Freenome teams will continue leveraging Google Workspace products across the company so they can securely manage and collaborate on business-critical content.

Besides using Cloud Storage, GKE, and Google Workspace to support the company’s rapid growth, Freenome plans to leverage Google Cloud technologies like BigQuery to support the research and development of new products. The company is also testing security technologies like BeyondCorp to keep its growing workforce secure and productive at scale.

As the future of disease detection continues to evolve, Google Cloud is proud to support the growth of innovative companies like Freenome with infrastructure and cloud technologies so they can help empower more people with early disease detection solutions and ultimately, change more lives for the better.