A 100-year Old Business’ Digital Evolution with Apigee API Management
3866
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Editor’s note: James Fairweather, chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes, has played a key role in modernizing the product offerings at this century-old global provider of innovative shipping solutions for businesses of all sizes. In today’s post, he discusses some key challenges the Pitney Bowes team overcame during its digital transformation, and some of the benefits it has enjoyed from building new digital competencies.
Pitney Bowes will celebrate its 100th birthday in April 2020. Over the past century, we’ve enjoyed great success in markets associated with shipping and mailing. Yet, as with so many established and successful enterprises, we faced slowing growth in the markets that served us so well for so long. While package growth was accelerating, the mail market was declining, creating opportunities and challenges.
To change our growth trajectory and “build a bridge” to Pitney Bowes’ second century, we needed to offer more value to our clients. We needed to move to growth markets, and that required new digital competencies. In 2015, we began a deliberate journey to transform our services, including shipping and location intelligence, for the digital world and make them available via the cloud. We learned a lot throughout this journey. In this post we’ll take a look at three things, in particular, that led to the success of this project—and will help future projects succeed, as well.
Setting expectations and realistic milestones
Organizations tend to undertake product development with a sense of optimism—and it’s often not particularly realistic. You set out thinking something will take a certain amount of time and that you will incur a specific cost, but estimates in technology and development may be optimistic, and costs almost always incrementally increase throughout the development process.
With a digital transformation effort, there’s an additional challenge: You aren’t really heading to a well-defined destination, so the path your team takes can be even more ambiguous. Digital transformation doesn’t have an end state. It’s a process of constant evolution.
For these reasons, and more, it’s important to set informed, realistic expectations—in schedule, in budget, in project scope. It’s also critical that you identify milestones along the way, and recognize and celebrate when you reach them.
When you’re working on a massive, multi-year corporate transformation, after all, it can be hard to recognize that every little action you take each week, everything you win day-to-day, is a part of your progress, your change. So, it’s really important, as a leader, to bring consistency and execution discipline—and be able to point to the progress being made and celebrate accomplishments.
We did our best to follow this advice during our digital transformation. Late 2015 was a critical time for Pitney Bowes as we laid out the technology strategy that would get us to the next century. We were aware of the potential hazards that could arise. You set the strategy, celebrate its publication as an accomplishment… and then nothing happens. To avoid this issue, we broke our strategy out into specific tactics supported by numerous smaller, interim goals. When we started putting big, green checkmarks next to each accomplished milestone, people started realizing that we were making real progress, and were serious about our execution.
One key milestone, for example, was implementing an API management platform. This comprised several granular goals: Selecting a partner, training a subset of our 1,100 team members on the platform, and rolling out our first offering that was built on top of that capability.
We knew that an API platform would be a key part of our digital transformation for three major reasons. First, we had acquired several companies, but their technologies were difficult to share for use cases across the organization. Every time a team needed to use our geocoding or geoprocessing capability, for example, they had to spin up a new environment. By building these capabilities as APIs across the organization, it made it easy to democratize their usage and speed up development.
Secondly, we were running a big enterprise business system platform transformation program and wanted our product teams to be able to consume data from our back-end business systems. This meant that we needed a solid catalog of all these services, so new members of the team could easily find and use them.
Finally, we had a couple of business units that wanted to go to market with APIs. They had a business strategy that entailed selling a service or value, with a vision to build a platform or ecosystem around these capabilities. An API platform (specifically, Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform) is a huge accelerant in enabling all three of these objectives—it’s how you do this well.
Reusability and the Commerce Cloud
The Apigee platform and team helped us build a key offering that arose from our digital transformation: the Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud. It’s a set of cloud-based solutions and APIs that are built on our assets and connect our new cloud solutions to our enterprise business systems, such as billing and package management.
Today, we have close to 200 APIs delivered from the Commerce Cloud in the areas of location intelligence, shipping, and global ecommerce. The Commerce Cloud isn’t just a success as a customer-facing platform, however. We often talk about whether our development teams themselves have leveraged its services when developing new products. These discussions help us understand whether a product team has thought through the digital capabilities we’ve already built, assessed which capabilities fits into its roadmap, and adopted the right technology, capabilities, and practices to align with our corporate digital transformation strategy.
Internal use of these shareable services shaves up to 70% off of our design cycles, because so many decisions are already made. Commerce Cloud adoption means you’ve gotten on the path internally, lowered the friction, and are aligned with the broader company digital transformation strategy.
Measuring success
We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far at Pitney Bowes. But pride only takes you so far. To determine a project’s success, you need to be able to measure it.
We do have some encouraging external measures: our percentage of revenue from new products climbed to roughly 20% of sales in 2018, compared to 5% back in 2012. And our Shipping APIs, which enable customers to integrate U.S. Postal Service capabilities into their own solutions, has gone from a standing start to an over $100 million business in a few years.
On top of those external results, our business has transformed. We’re no longer just participating in a one-time sale of a product, software, or services; we’re participating in transactions every day that drive client outcomes. The more you can improve the quality and effectiveness of those services, the more you and your client enjoy the benefits of the commercial relationship. That’s a very big business model transformation for Pitney Bowes.
We’ve also sped up our time to market and tightened our service-level agreements. But perhaps most importantly, we’ve developed and adopted a new set of internal processes and a mindset that helps us quickly adapt to changing market conditions. Again, digital transformation isn’t a destination. It’s really a set of processes that enable us to be nimble and keep building a bridge to Pitney Bowes’ future.
For more on the Pitney Bowes transformation, check out these videos and this case study.
IDC: Firms Should Migrate VM-based Enterprise Workloads to Google Cloud for Optimal Price, Performance, and Security
DOWNLOAD WHITEPAPER4451
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
5:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Public cloud platforms provide the scale, elasticity, and operational efficiency that enable enterprises to both innovate and deliver more products and services to the market faster. This increased ability to innovate provides enterprises a competitive advantage and the businesses agility to stay ahead of their competition. Enterprises should leverage the business agility that public cloud infrastructure enables to their strategic advantage. Thus incorporating a cloud platform is an inherent part of their initiatives to modernize their IT infrastructure.
Enterprise cloud adoption is not without challenges. Enterprises cite a lack of skill set, decision fatigue, operational challenges, security concerns, and unpredictable TCO as significant inhibitors to adopting a public cloud service provider. Information technology decision makers (ITDMs) are caught between the need to innovate faster and the fear of instability and mismatched expectations. This dilemma is why enterprises that partner with a trusted service provider before, during, and after migration are more likely to succeed in their cloud journey.
Google Cloud is an ideal platform for virtual machine (VM)–based applications due to its key technical capabilities, such as high-performing virtual machines, including compute-optimized and memory-optimized VMs; custom sizes for virtual machines; high-performance network infrastructure for faster data transfers; and data protection capabilities.
Download this IDC report to understand why ITDMs should consider Google Cloud as the preferred cloud services partner — owing to Google Cloud being a reliable platform for VM-based applications; a trusted partner before, during, and after application migration; and an innovator to future proof the enterprise IT infrastructure.
Google Cloud and Ericsson to Deliver 5G and Edge Cloud Solutions
3430
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Editor’s note: 5G is much more than a network—it’s a platform for innovation with the ability to provide immediate global scale and enable use cases that we haven’t even dreamed of yet. But to achieve this, industry players must come together to drive this growing ecosystem. Today, Erik Ekudden, CTO of Ericsson, and Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, share their insights into the potential of edge and 5G.
Experts consider 2021 to be the year that serves as the inflection point between network readiness and 5G availability. However, communications service providers (CSPs) are still faced with the task of modernizing their networks, systems, and infrastructure to maximize the potential of 5G for themselves and for the enterprise customers they serve. As you weigh whether to tackle this challenge, let’s first examine what’s different about 5G and how CSPs can best leverage 5G and the edge together as an even stronger platform for innovation than just 5G alone.
With 5G, applications and mobile networks are no longer isolated
Let’s first address what 5G brings to the table. Faster speeds and lower latency are expected of course, and throughout the evolution from 2G to 3G to 4G, there’s been a step function in performance improvements with each of these. However, with every generation, applications and networks have been like ships passing in the night. Networks have been unaware of what the applications have been doing and applications have been guessing what the network was capable of.
What’s different this time around is that there is some real innovation happening with the development and rollout of 5G itself. The network is on a path to become more accessible via APIs so that applications can call on and consume what they need from the networks in a more programmable way. This sets us up for more open architectures and ecosystems.
5G leverages a more open architecture
One key difference with 5G as compared to prior generations is that it’s the most open and flexible network architecture the CSP industry has seen. This is thanks to its service-based approach and the decoupling of hardware and software components. CSPs are now running core network elements in the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and even multi-cloud, which was unthinkable even five years ago.
The flexibility of this more open architecture allows us to push the cloud to the edge while still being able to manage it from a single pane of glass. This is a huge leap forward from traditional networks, which have been domain-specific, managed in silos, and with slow service creation and delivery. Now, hyperscale cloud vendors and network equipment providers are offering solutions that help CSPs break down these silos to enable more flexible, automated networks with improved orchestration, visibility, and control across multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud-provider environments. In addition, the separation of hardware and software provides a much more flexible and cost-effective way to upgrade from one network generation to the next.
To provide solutions that are relevant to enterprises, CSPs must offer capabilities beyond connectivity. Enterprise service orchestration, including exposure of network assets and network slicing, are foundational capabilities to provide value to the application ecosystem and be in control of the network and the delivered services.
Combining 5G and edge to help industries reimagine user experiences
This convergence of compute, storage and networking at the edge coming together for the first time will enable CSPs and enterprises to offer their customers completely reimagined user experiences. Consider, for example, how the automotive industry might enhance how customers shop for a car. As part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ Virtual Showroom at the recent CES 2021 event, consumers were able to experience the innovative new 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with their phones, and then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of them—virtually placed on their own driveway or in any open space.
By rendering the model in Google Cloud, then streaming it to mobile devices, visitors could also see what the car looked like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior in incredible detail. That is the true digitization of an industry segment and highlights the device-to-network-to-edge-to-cloud application relationship and how it can impact the user experience.
A programmable network unlocks more application use cases
The programmability of the 5G network will truly enable application developers to utilize all the benefits of the underlying network. Programmability supports ease of use and enables CSPs, integrated software vendors (ISVs) and the ecosystem to have the right network-level APIs exposed so that applications can be optimized based on the network behavior and vice versa. Imagine, for instance, automatically pushing applications from a cloud region to the edge based on network latency and performance metrics.
Finally, 5G’s programmability is also about having the right tools available for developers to build and integrate applications on the network with zero-touch onboarding and validation. With this, we’ve come to the point where the network is now a “platform” for application innovation.
5G and edge will be all about the ecosystem
One thing is for certain: the shift to 5G will place tremendous focus on the ecosystem, and it needs to be an ecosystem that includes CSPs, public cloud providers, application developers and technology providers, all coming together to optimize the user experiences across industry applications. For instance, Google Cloud and Ericsson recently announced our partnership to deliver 5G and edge cloud solutions for CSPs and enterprise. In addition, Google Cloud is also teaming up with popular ISVs to deliver more than 200 edge applications from 30-plus partners, all running on our cloud.
With collaboration across ISVs, cloud providers and network equipment providers, we are enabling the rapid delivery and deployment of new vertical services and applications, leveraging capabilities like Anthos, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), as well as multi-vendor, multi-cloud and hyperscale cloud provider service orchestration and global edge networks such as those provided by Google and telecom service providers.
As members of the technology ecosystem, we talk about compute, storage and networking, but when it comes down to it, it’s about optimally placing these resources—whether in the cloud, at the provider core, at the edge or anywhere in between—to maximize the end-user experience. The openness and programmability of 5G lends itself to collaboration like never before. We predict that in 2022 and beyond, it will be all about the ecosystem coming together to leverage 5G and the edge to build innovations that we can’t yet imagine.
To learn more, watch the full Ericsson 5G Things CTO Focus fireside chat, where we discuss these topics and more.
Download the Forrester Study to Explore the Benefits of AI for IT Operations in Cloud Environment
7126
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Organizations are currently modernizing their businesses in order to meet the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape. In effect, business leaders must evaluate the best way to mitigate the challenges which plague their cloud operations, all while meeting customers’ growing expectations around digital experience (DX) through agility, automation, and proactive incident avoidance.
In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing.
Within this July 2021 study, you’ll see that AIOps systems and principles are here to help. It covers how AIOps increases efficiency and productivity across day-to-day operations, and how businesses are taking note. In fact, 91% of respondents have implemented AIOps to address at least one cloud operations issue, and expansion is set to skyrocket. Those that wait to act, risk losing out on the efficacy of their cloud investment and falling behind their more efficient competitors.
As you can see in the image above, there is a plethora of great information in this complimentary study. So, if you’re looking to enhance your cloud operations and/or adopt AIOps within your organization, be sure to download this free study today.
3633
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
5:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Although most companies have migrated some infrastructure to public cloud, most enterprise workloads still run in on-premises data centers. Technology leaders want to migrate more workloads and infrastructure to public cloud, but they are frustrated by the process of assessing their existing workloads, identifying a migration strategy that aligns IT and business needs, and ensuring they have the right talent and skills in-house to execute a migration on time and on budget.
To encourage faster migration of a broader set of workloads to public cloud, enterprises seek not only cost optimization, but also strategy advice, powerful migration tools and professional services, and skill development.
Download this Forrester report to understand how to get your cloud migrations right the first time.
How Pantheon Improved Performance and Reliability by Moving to Google Cloud
5593
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Google Cloud Results
- Improves performance and reliability, enabling Pantheon to serve larger customers
- Supports 99.95% uptime across 200,000+ websites
- Reduces cloud infrastructure costs by 40%
- Enables future analytics offerings based on machine learning and big data analytics
Nearly every business needs a web presence—but the vast majority of companies don’t want to be involved in the technical aspects of coding, deployment, hosting, security, and scaling websites. To stay focused on the business value and creative aspects of their websites and avoid managing infrastructure, thousands of companies turn to Pantheon, a website operations and hosting platform that powers over 200,000 websites.
Pantheon promises its customers speed, reliability, and scalability plus world-class collaboration and workflow tools. For five years, the company was able to deliver high service levels in all three areas running its platform on bare-metal virtual cloud servers. However, as its business grew, network links began to saturate under heavy load, risking instability. As Pantheon’s business evolved to focus on servicing some of the largest websites in the world, the company wanted to partner with a more innovative cloud services provider.
“We wanted a partner that could give us what we offer to our own customers: the flexibility to scale smoothly and consume services without building them from scratch,” says David Strauss, CTO, Pantheon. “It was time to move beyond custom containers on managed VMs and extend our cloud strategy to include next-generation technologies for container management and analytics.”
Pantheon evaluated several leading cloud providers and determined that Google Cloud Platform would be the best fit for its business and customers. Engineering had the final say, running a battery of functionality and performance tests at the storage, database, and web server layers.
“In every test our engineers did, Google Cloud Platform came in as better, faster, and more cost effective than the competition,” says Niall Hayes, COO, Pantheon. “We compared MariaDB to Google Cloud SQL and Cassandra to Google Bigtable, and container density improved from 250 to 400 containers per server.”
Migrating 200,000+ sites in 2 weeks
Pantheon wanted to make the transition transparent to its customers, so a fast and smooth migration to Google Cloud Platform was essential. With help from Google, Pantheon completed the migration quickly and moved 500TB of databases, code, and files with zero customer impact.
“We migrated over 200,000 websites to Google Cloud Platform in 2 weeks, including 50,000 that are heavily trafficked and actively developed, and nobody noticed,” says Josh Koenig, Co-founder and Head of Products at Pantheon. “The speed was incredible. There was no downtime, and we filed no additional support tickets with Google during the entire process.”
The platform for platforms
For its content management system runtime environment, Pantheon runs its own homegrown container management technology on Google Compute Engine. To automate scaling for other core services such as its routing layer and distributed file system, it uses Google Kubernetes Engine for cluster management and orchestration.
“Google is the clear leader in Kubernetes and container management, which aligns very well with our open source values and our vision for the future,” says Niall. “With Google Kubernetes Engine we get better resource efficiency, and automated operations and autoscaling take a lot of administration off our plate.”
In addition to smooth scaling, Pantheon and its customers benefit from improved performance and reliability thanks to the high-quality private network offered by Google.
Further, the Google partnership with Fastly enables direct connectivity to Google Cloud Platform to improve performance for edge caching. As a result of these improvements, Pantheon raised its availability service level agreement (SLA) from 99.9% to 99.95% and can now take on even larger customers.
“Google’s network topology, both locally and globally, performs better and more reliably than competing solutions, making Google Cloud Platform the best choice for us and for our customers,” says David. “Google beats any other cloud provider as the best platform-for-platforms.”
Adds Josh: “Google has unbelievable technology around persistence and replication between zones and regions, and that is not something we could find anywhere else. This allows us to offer advanced disaster recovery and failover services to our customers.”
Strengthening customer relationships
Pantheon uses Google BigQuery, a fully managed, cloud-based data warehouse, to integrate with Fastly and analyze website traffic on behalf of its customers. Previously, Pantheon was unable to ingest edge data quickly enough from Fastly, limiting its ability to identify issues and provide the best customer service. Today, Fastly streams logs in real time into Google BigQuery for analysis, giving Pantheon a wealth of insights.
“We use Google BigQuery to identify customers that have outgrown their infrastructure or need to right-size for business growth,” says David. “We can have proactive conversations and add a lot of value to the relationships. Soon, we plan to make Google BigQuery available to our customers so they can better understand their own traffic.”
Adds Niall: “Google Cloud Platform is more data-oriented than other cloud providers, making it a better match for our needs and our customers’ strategic initiatives.”
Integrated, granular security
Pantheon appreciates that Google Cloud services are built for public cloud, with granular security as a core design and development requirement. Employees simply use their G Suite credentials to gain access to Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and services.
“We’ve been a G Suite shop for years because of the paperless collaboration benefits,” says Josh. “G Suite connects our distributed company, and it was very natural to use those same logins for Google Cloud Platform.”
Staying competitive and productive
Moving to Google Cloud Platform opens up new possibilities for services Pantheon can offer to customers in the future, including machine learning and big data analytics, to give them a more complete view of how digital experiences are driving their businesses. Internally, engineers can move faster, do more effective capacity planning, and provide better service as Pantheon moves its products upmarket.
Pantheon expected to save 20% on cloud infrastructure costs by moving to Google Cloud Platform, but was able to double that savings with resource optimization and managed services.
“Since moving to Google Cloud Platform, our platform is more secure, reliable, and scalable than ever. We reduced our cloud infrastructure costs by 40%, and our customers’ sites run 45% faster than industry benchmarks,” says Niall. “Our engineers are Google fans for a reason—they’re happier, more efficient, and more productive on Google Cloud Platform.”
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
Telehealth Improves Patient and Clinical Experiences across Continuum of Care
According to a National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, social determinants of health (SDoH) account for upwards of 80% of a population's health outcomes. Breaking this down further, 50% come just from socioeconomic and physical environment factors such as education, employment, income, family and social support, community safety, air and water
Finding Your Favorite Google Cloud Product is Now Easy!
Welcome to a new way of exploring Google Cloud products. Finding your favorite products and discovering new ones requires a user interface that’s easy-to-use, clear, informative, and delightful. Google Cloud users have primarily used our side menu to navigate, but with almost one hundred products and growing, it’s safe to
Expanding Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability Program with 12 New Partners
We introduced the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation earlier this year to showcase those partners committed to help global businesses and governments accelerate their sustainability programs. These partners build solutions that enhance the capabilities and ease the adoption of powerful Google Cloud technologies, such as Google Earth Engine and
AWS to Google Cloud Translator: Which AWS Database Service Is Equal to Google Cloud Database?
There are multiple reasons a growing number of database administrators, enterprise architects, application developers and other technology practitioners are moving to Google Cloud’s various database services. Some are being driven by missing features in offering from other providers such as AWS. In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems,
