At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.

We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.

Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.

Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice

We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs. 

AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing. 

Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.

Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.

Launching new Global Delivery Centers

Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.

The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.

In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.

Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint

In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich. 

These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation. 

Adding new leadership to enable customer success

Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.

Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.

Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.

You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.

At 340 square miles, the City of Memphis is among the largest in the United States in terms of land area. Memphis has over 6,800 lane-miles of city streets, enough to drive back and forth to Los Angeles four times. Keeping these streets well maintained and safe for citizens and visitors is a major priority for the city.

Lots of traffic, lots of roads, and a four-season climate prone to wintertime freeze-thaw-refreeze cycles means the opportunity for potholes. Although the city aims to fill potholes within five business days of notification, it can take longer, especially during winter and early spring. Last year, the city’s Public Works crews repaired some 63,000 potholes, only 20% of which were reported by residents. Approximately 32,000-man-hours each year are spent repairing potholes, with seasonal fluctuations requiring ten to twelve Street Maintenance crews working steadily during the winter months. Still, many went unreported, leading the city to flag pothole request resolution under “needs improvement” on its open data portal website.

Like many large cities, Memphis also struggles with vacant and blighted properties. Nearly 15,000 properties in Memphis are likely vacant, and city officials contend that many are owned by out-of-town investors who live elsewhere and do not take necessary restoration or maintenance steps. These properties can decrease the value of surrounding real estate and discourage new businesses and other residents from moving to an area. Citizen frustration and concerns over the number of blighted properties has made blight eradication a major focus of the City of Memphis.

Historically, residents reported potholes and blighted properties by calling 311, or more recently by using the Memphis 311 app. However, these reports only covered about 20 percent of the problems — often the worst cases. And by the time residents took the initiative to submit a 311 report, they usually weren’t feeling good about the situation.

Recognizing that potholes and vacant properties are often the most visible indicators of whether a city government is doing its job efficiently, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and CIO Mike Rodriguez began looking for ways they could apply technology to fix the problems. Mike approached Google for ideas, and Google recommended conducting a machine learning proof-of-concept (POC) with SpringML, a Google Cloud Partner.

“Memphis is focused on easy living, and we want to do everything we can to keep our citizens happy,” says Mike Rodriguez. “Working with Google and SpringML to reduce potholes and urban blight using machine learning and artificial intelligence was an easy decision.”

Bringing machine learning to city operations and budgets

The city’s goal is to detect potholes and abandoned properties by analyzing video footage of roads and residential properties. It wanted to classify potholes by width and depth, and share the information with workers who can repair them. For abandoned properties, it wanted to enable more strategic deployment of resources for homeowners citywide and take action to hold neglectful property owners accountable.

The POC began by training TensorFlow models for ML object detection using preconfigured AI Platform Deep Learning VM Images on Compute Engine. SpringML helped set up cameras and developed a user interface to collect pothole data and automate the 311 ticketing process.

Together, the teams analyzed 30 days of video from a moving city bus and high-resolution video from 360-degree cameras mounted to a code enforcement vehicle, overlaid with data from 311 reports. As the models were refined, accuracy quickly climbed from 50 percent to over 90 percent as models were taught to differentiate a pothole from a manhole cover or other object.

The city also imported routes, potholes, and paving data along with geolocation data from ArcGIS and Google Maps into BigQuery to better understand street conditions and the proximity of potholes to one another. BigQuery also analyzes city property records, tax records, 311 reports, and third-party survey data on-demand to predict where homes are starting to become run down and where neighborhood decay is most likely to occur. The SpringML team created a pilot analysis to begin vacant property protections and developed a user interface tool to interact with the model’s results.

“Google Cloud Platform made it possible for us to experiment with machine learning and artificial intelligence to help solve our city’s problems while working within the budget constraints of a municipal IT organization,” says Mike. “Google turned a ‘nice to have’ into a ‘let’s do this!'”

Identifying 75 percent more potholes

Memphis expects to substantially reduce the number of potholes on its streets, creating a better driving experience for residents and visitors alike. Because drivers won’t be as likely to swerve to miss a pothole, streets will be safer and friendlier to bicycles and scooters. Fewer potholes will also save the city between $10,000 and $20,000 annually in city claims that it pays out in cases where vehicle damage results from a pothole that was not addressed in a timely manner.

“Historically, Public Works has relied primarily upon Street Maintenance crews to proactively locate and fill potholes. As Memphis has over 6,800 lane-miles of public streets, it is a daunting task to reliably survey the entire system in an efficient and systematic way,” says Robert Knecht, Public Works Director for the City of Memphis. “The outcome of the data collected will be invaluable to Public Works so that it can ensure it is managing the city’s street system in a more proactive manner.”

Memphis will be able to better prioritize road maintenance based on condition and impact, increasing the efficiency of its Public Works road crews. Analyzing video of streets also gave the city visibility into issues it wasn’t previously aware of, such as curbs, gutters, and manhole covers that had been mistakenly paved over and need to be excavated. The ML process is easily transferrable to other concerns as well, helping the city identify illegal signs or spools of cable hanging on light posts that could be potentially unsafe.

Helping communities recover and thrive

Memphis is also having success in analyzing predictive trends to combat high rates of abandoned and blighted properties, surpassing 97.5 percent accuracy. “In the past, Public Works experimented with comprehensive, city-wide blight identification by using approximately 200 volunteers to survey and photograph over 237,000 city parcels. This effort was costly, took a long time to complete, and resulted in inconsistent data collection,” says Robert. “Blighted property conditions can change quickly in a city the size of Memphis. Now, with this new technology, Memphis will be able to make a significant difference in the efforts to proactively and comprehensively identify and manage blighted and substandard properties.”

Code Enforcement with better data-driven detection mechanisms enables the city to also identify cases where homeowners are not physically or financially able to keep up with the challenges of homeownership and make them aware of resources that are available to assist them. Memphis Code Enforcement can do a better job of finding people living in derelict properties that pose hazards to inhabitants’ health and safety, and help them fix those problems or find a new place to live.

“Using SpringML and Google Cloud Platform to detect indicators of vacant or blighted properties will help Memphis create safer neighborhoods that will be more attractive to businesses and home buyers,” says Mike. “Property values and employment will go up, crime will go down, and social services can be more focused and effective.”

Revolutionizing service delivery for citizens

Memphis is proving the viability of a cost-effective, cloud-based machine learning model that other cities can follow. The city is already looking into new applications of AI and ML that will further improve city services and help it build a better future for its 652,000 residents.

As part of his commitment to a transparent government, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland created an open data policy that commits to releasing raw data and sharing it with citizens in a variety of downloadable formats. Going forward, this transparency will help citizens understand how their needs are being served and uncover new, innovative use cases for AI and ML.

“Our goal is to become a smart city, and technologies such as Google Cloud Platform and SpringML put us ahead of the game,” says Mayor Strickland. “Google understands data, and there isn’t a better company to help us analyze our data resources for actionable insights.”

When Dassana co-founders Gaurav Kumar and Parth Shah, formerly founder and founding engineer at RedLock (now Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks), set out on a new startup journey in 2020, they knew exactly where to start: sign up for Google Workspace.

“Every startup I’ve been at, we used Google Workspace,” said Kumar. “We’ve been using it for so long, and we’re all used to it. It’s like drinking water—you don’t think about it.”

“We’re big on user experience,” explained Shah. “Google is one of the few companies out there that is all about building the right kind of user experience that’s easy to follow. The sharing capabilities are amazing and, of course, easy to use. Docs, Sheets, Slides—we use all of it.”

Dassana, which emerged from stealth with $5 million in seed funding earlier this year, is a next-generation security data lake. It provides a holistic picture of security risk across an organization and its business units by ingesting large volumes of structured data in a schema-less fashion. Their success is a great testament to why startups are choosing not only Google Workspace, but a range of Google Cloud products.

Though the Dassana team was comfortable with Workspace from the start, not all their early technology choices were the best fit for the company, and Google Cloud services became more crucial as the startup evolved. For example, the team opted to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to start their cloud journey, but ultimately started to explore other cloud options when they decided to run their technology platform on Kubernetes.

“We started looking into which cloud platforms provide the best Kubernetes experience,” said Kumar. “Hands-down, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) had the best experience. If you look at product velocity and how GKE has evolved over time, from its early days to GKE Autopilot and all the features and other native integrations—nothing even comes close.”

In particular, Kumar noted that the native integration between Google Workspace and GKE was particularly unique and useful. “When I go to Google Workspace and then go to GKE, my identity is already there,” he said. “I don’t have to integrate or manage anything. If I disable an account in Workspace, it’s also disabled on GKE.”

Another advantage is that GKE allows you to set up Google Groups to work with Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) for GKE clusters. This lets administrators maintain users and groups outside of GKE and assign RBAC permissions directly to Groups in Workspace without any extra engineering work or overhead management.

“I can actually use my Workspace identity to give granular controls to my GKE workloads. The integration of Google Groups in GKE and Kubernetes is a lifesaver. It’s saved us a lot of hassles,” said Kumar. Kumar also noted that the platform delivers better performance compared to other solutions thanks to the low latency of Google Cloud’s global network.

Like many startups, Dassana has found a powerful combination in Google Workspace and GKE on Google Cloud that lets them connect technologies, easily collaborate with their teams, and rapidly build their product. The team also recognizes the necessity of continued innovation, and is exploring additional Google Cloud products to help them accelerate their momentum. For example, Dassana plans to use the performance and scale of Cloud Storage buckets to store the company’s data. The team is also investigating how to save time by using Pub/Sub to integrate data directly from Google Workspace and other sources for security analytics.

To learn more about why startups like Dassana are choosing Google Workspace and Google Cloud to accelerate their growth and reach their goals, visit our startup solutions pages for Google Workspace and Google Cloud.

In the last year, there’s been an upward trend in cloud adoption in India. In fact, NASSCOM finds that cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% per annum to cross the US$7 billion mark by 2022.

At Google, in our conversations with customers, discussions have evolved beyond cost savings and efficiencies. While those are still very relevant reasons for adopting cloud technologies, Indian enterprises are looking to Google Cloud to help them drive digital transformation, identify new revenue generating business models, reach previously untapped consumer markets, and build customer loyalty through greater insight and personalization.

Here are some companies and their stories.

Tata Steel: Mining data and maximizing its power

Tata Steel is a great example of an established enterprise from a traditional industry that is modernizing and embracing cloud computing. With an ambition to be a leader in manufacturing in India and a digital-first organization by 2022, Tata Steel believes smart analytics is key to enhancing operational efficiency and gaining business advantage. 

To organize data from siloed systems across the organization and make it easily accessible to all employees, Tata Steel is using Cloud Search and plans to scale it to more than one million documents and 28 disparate enterprise content sources including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SharePoint. In fact, Tata Steel is one of the first Indian enterprises to harness the power of Cloud Search to meet some of the most aggressive ingestion demands, with indexing durations reduced from weeks to seconds.

They are also leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery to build their data lake and enterprise data warehouse so they can take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning. Managed services such as AI Platform further enable Tata Steel to manage end-to-end AI/ML workflows within the GCP console. This complements their existing on-premise reporting and analytics tools, and brings data management to the forefront of everything they do—from forecasting market demand to predictive equipment maintenance.

“Digital is not just a goal, it’s become a way of life. We are digitizing everything from the deployment of factory vehicles to improving material throughput to marketing and sales. As a result, we have petabytes of structured and unstructured data that is not only waiting to be mined, but that we can generate intelligence from to create opportunities across our multiple lines of business using GCP,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation & Digital Solutions at Tata Steel.

Helping L&T Financial Services reach customers in rural communities

In rural communities, quick access to financial services can make a tremendous difference to livelihoods. L&T Financial Services provides farm-equipment finance, micro loans and two-wheeler finance to consumers across rural India backed by a strong digital and analytics platform. Their digital-loan approval app, which runs on GCP, makes it significantly faster and easier for people to apply for financial assistance to purchase important things such as farming equipment and two-wheelers. It also helps rural women entrepreneurs get quicker access to funds for their businesses through micro loans.

L&T Financial found G Suite to be a far better collaborative tool to help staff work together efficiently. Employees can interact with each other in real time using Hangouts Meet, and the task of information sharing is more seamless and secure through Drive. BigQuery also helps L&T Financial Services generate behavior scorecards to track credit quality of its micro-loan customers.

“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years.” said Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services.

Creating conversational connections for Digitate’s customers

Digitate, a venture of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), has integrated Dialogflow into its flagship brand ignio, an award-winning artificial intelligence platform for driving IT operations, workload operations and ERP operations for diverse enterprises. This integration is the next step in ignio’s product development journey, and will enable users to chat or talk with ignio to detect issues, triage problems, resolve them and even predict system behavior.

“ignio combines its unique self-healing AIOps capabilities for enterprise IT and business operations with Dialogflow’s AI/ML-based, easy to use, natural and rich conversational capabilities to create an unparalleled, intuitive and feature-rich experience for our customers,” says Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Digitate.

Indian enterprises going G Suite

The base of Indian enterprises that are making the switch to G Suite to streamline their productivity and collaboration also continues to grow. Sharechat, BookMyShow, Hero MotorCorp, DB Corp and Royal Enfield are now able to move faster within their organizations, using intelligent, cloud-based apps to transform the way they work.

A hybrid and multi-cloud future in India

IDC predicts that by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds. (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2019 Predictions  — India Implications (# AP43922319). We look forward to sharing more success stories of Indian enterprises that have taken the next step in their digital transformation journey.

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.