In times of significant disruption, organizations are faced with three choices: Retrench within legacy solutions, pause and do nothing while waiting for more data or different circumstances, or press ahead, potentially even accelerating to realize the desired outcome. In such an environment, it is critical to ensure you’re delivering the greatest possible impact to the business. 

In Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, or OCTO, we have the privilege of co-innovating with customers to explore what’s possible and how we can re-imagine and solve their most strategic challenges. These collaborative innovation engagements are often core to critical transformational projects, which often include the rehosting, evolution, and at times re-architecture of existing business solutions. 

We are happy to offer this brand new white paper, where we have distilled the conversations we’ve had with CIOs, CTOs, and their technical staff into several frameworks that can help cut through the hype and the technical complexity, to help devise the strategy that empowers both the business and IT. We called one such framework “up or out.” (And we don’t mean some consulting firm’s hard-nosed career philosophy.) 

One model that we found can help enterprises chart their cloud adoption journey delineates cloud migration along two axes—up and out, and we’ll cover this in much greater detail in the white paper itself.

As you can see, there isn’t a single path to the cloud—not for individual enterprises and not even for individual applications. The up or out framework can help an IT organization and its leadership characterize how they can best benefit from migrating their services or workloads. The framework acts as a general pattern that highlights the continuum of approaches to explore, and you can learn all about it by downloading this detailed white paper.

Or, if you’re really ready to jump start your migration today, you can take advantage of our current offer by signing up for a free discovery and assessment.

We opened our Sydney cloud region in 2017 and, since then, we have continued to invest and expand across Australia and New Zealand to support the digital future of organizations of all sizes. In Australia, Google Cloud supports almost A$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to businesses and consumers. This includes A$686 million to businesses using Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform, another A$698 million to Google Cloud partners, and A$1.8 billion to consumers.¹ 

For customers in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. Designed to help businesses build highly available applications for their customers, the Melbourne region is our second Google Cloud region in Australia and 11th to open in Asia Pacific. 

We’re celebrating the occasion with a digital event where federal minister for the Digital Economy, Jane Hume, and customers Australia Post, Trade Me, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, The Australian Football League and Macquarie Bank will share their perspectives. Come join us!

A global network of regions

Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

We also continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland.

Collectively, this will deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across Australia and New Zealand – which is especially important for those in regulated industries such as Financial Services and the Public Sector.  

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and greater economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Melbourne will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working.  

“We moved to Google Cloud to improve the stability and resilience of our infrastructure and become more cloud-native as part of a digital transformation program that keeps the customer at the heart of our business. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in ANZ and the opportunities the Google Cloud Melbourne region presents to improve Trade Me’s agility and performance. – Paolo Ragone, Chief Technology Officer, Trade Me     

“We initially turned to Google Cloud to help us process parcels faster and gain deeper insights into our business and its processes. The relationship has continued to deliver benefits to our customers and our organization and we welcome Google Cloud’s opening of the Melbourne region as presenting even more opportunities for businesses to innovate and generate efficiencies.” – Munro Farmer, Chief Information Officer, Australia Post.

“We are well progressed with our multi-year strategy to grow and transform our organization to be Australia’s bank of choice. Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and renowned culture of innovation are strongly aligned to this strategy and will allow us to become even more innovative and agile in responding to our customers’ ever-changing needs. We were quick to run our workloads out of the Melbourne cloud region and we believe Google Cloud’s expanded investment in local infrastructure will further assist us on our business transformation journey.” – Andrew Cresp, Chief Information Officer, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

“We have a clear vision when it comes to innovating to deliver world-class service to our customers, and our partnership with Google Cloud is core to that strategy. The company’s continued investments in local infrastructure and technology present new opportunities for us as we advance our transformation journey in this digital-first era.” – Chris Smith, Vice President, Digital Service, Optus

Our global ecosystem of channel partners has expanded by more than 400% in the last two years, and we look forward to continuing our close relationships with partners  in Australia and New Zealand as we help customers modernize, innovate, scale and grow.

“Australian companies are increasingly realising the benefits of their cloud investments and are now looking to transform their organisations at scale. We are excited about the potential and new value that the Google Melbourne Cloud region will bring to our clients as we continue to work together on delivering intelligent and innovative solutions to Australian organisations.” – Tara Brady, CEO of Accenture Australia and New Zealand

“Google Cloud has always been there for its customers for the long haul and the opening of the new Melbourne Cloud region is great news. This increased resilience and scale will empower companies of all sizes to be bold in accelerating their digital transformation plans.” – Tony Nicol,  CEO of Servian

“We’re excited about the launch of the Melbourne Cloud region. It will cater to the needs of industries we work closely with including healthcare and financial services, and will further enhance how we jointly deliver on the compliance, privacy and security requirements of companies as they advance their digital transformation.” – Simon Poulton, CEO of Kasna

“The opening of the new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is fantastic news as it now enables DXC customers access to enhanced services for their mission critical application and data solutions across two regions within Australia.  As our customers modernise their application estate, many are seeking dual region cloud services, and DXC is excited to partner with Google Cloud to deliver these services to customers in Australia and New Zealand.” – Tim Fraser, Google Practice Lead ANZ at DXC Technology

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Melbourne offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change.  Click here to learn more about all our Google Cloud locations.

^{1. AlphaBeta, The Economic Impact of Google Cloud to Australia, July 2021}

Startups need to move quickly and focus their limited resources on areas where they can differentiate. If infrastructure isn’t your differentiator, don’t put a lot of energy into your infrastructure when someone else can do it for you. What’s more, time-to-market matters to startups more now than ever. Successful early stage companies know this, and leverage existing tools, libraries, frameworks and innovations whenever possible.  

Next week Google Cloud will be featured at TechCrunch Disrupt, the iconic annual event where “founders and investors shaping the future of disruptive technology” come together to share stories, network, and learn from each other. Google Cloud will host a session and Google Cloud engineers will be available in a virtual booth to answer startup questions. 

The session, “Demo Derby – How startups are disrupting the status quo with innovative data analytics, AI and modern app development” will be a fun, fast-paced set of presentations showing short demos of startups and startup projects built with Google Cloud. 

Demo Derby Presenters

• Andrea Le Vot, Chief Data Protection Officer with startup BlueZoo will deliver a demo showing how they are revolutionizing the property insurance industry with AI and Cloud – and doing so while actually protecting people’s privacy.
• Dale Markowitz and Zack Akil, Applied AI Engineers, will show how easy it is to use AI for everything from video search to editing to automated translation.
• Vidya Nagarajan, Group Product Manager from Google Cloud will deliver a fast paced demo that shows how startups can drive developer productivity with serverless innovations.

“Disrupt is iconic for its engagement with founders, investors, and the broad community of early stage companies,” said Andrea Le Vot, Chief Data Protection Officer at BlueZoo. “We are thrilled to share our insights with others in our community, and to show how we have partnered with Google Cloud to innovate faster than most of the larger, well funded insurance companies in our market.”

The series of snippet sized demos will be followed by a roundtable discussion with the demo developers focused on lessons learned, best practices, how to reduce time-to-market, and how to focus on where you can most effectively differentiate.

The session will air on Day One of the event: Tuesday September 21, 2021 at 1pm PT and will be available on demand after the event for all Disrupt attendees.

Budget concerns and inflation shock are causing noticeable shifts in consumer behavior, a head-spinning turnabout since the pandemic days of 2020. We went from not having access to enough goods to now not having the right goods at the right price points. Heading into the holiday season, retailers will need to look sharp and be able to deliver value to the increasingly cost-conscious consumer — with frictionless product discovery and digital shopping experiences, relevant inventory, and personalization.

Those are a few of the insights gleaned from a recent eMarketer webcast on how retailers can better combat the effects of inflation, with pragmatic recommendations from experts including Amy Eschliman, managing director of retail solutions strategy and industry engagement at Google Cloud; Alexis Hoopes, vice president and head of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) at Mattel Inc; and Elissa Quinby, head of retail insights at Quantum Metric. We’d like to share five key takeaways that retailers can adopt.

1. Be prepared for earlier holiday planning. Budget-conscious buyers are planning their purchases earlier than ever. According to our partner Quantum Metric’s latest Retail Benchmarks research, 40% of U.S. consumers and 30% in the UK have already started their holiday shopping1. At Mattel, Alexis noted, “We’ve learned to be nimble and early for our consumers, and to have products available for them when they’re ready to shop.” With higher prices, she added, “Consumers are preplanning and researching more, viewing product detail pages multiple times to check a higher-price item before adding it to their basket.”

Quantum Metric’s same research also shows that while average cart values grew between January to July 2022 — larger than they were at the same time last year1 — consumers were shopping less frequently. Because of higher prices, 37% of shoppers are now pre-planning and purchasing items all at once to help keep to their budget1. Amy observed. “That means retailers need to make it super easy for customers to find what they want to avoid shopping-cart abandonment.”

Retailers who make it easier for shoppers to find the right products, by providing Google-quality search and recommendations, can help reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.

2. Get a handle on out-of-stock issues. While many of the supply-chain issues that surfaced during the pandemic have cleared up, inventory continues to be a challenge in retail. During the 2021 holiday season, Google/Ipsos research shows that consumers saw a 253% increase in “out of stock” messages versus pre-pandemic2. Elissa further pointed out that a great majority of both U.S. and UK consumers experience out-of-stock issues several times a month. It’s a fluid situation, however, with retailers facing bloated inventory as consumer demands quickly pivot from, for example, branded goods to generic or white-label items. “In the next six months or so, you really need to make sure you have the right inventory to meet consumer demands,” she advised.

The need for end-to-end visibility and the ability to act in real-time across the supply chain has never been more pressing. Google Cloud and our partners are tackling the top supply chain issues head on with solutions that enable end-to-end visibility, analytics and alert-driven event management as well as AI solutions and automation to streamline processes like procurement, fulfillment, and delivery.

3. Introduce value: communicate the quality of the product and the experience. While rising prices are paramount for many shoppers, it’s a common misconception that consumers are making purchase decisions based solely on price. Alexis remarked, “In e-commerce, we talk about price, product, service, and experience. Price is only one of the pillars for consumers. At Mattel, we are fully focused on product and experience. What makes this special? How do we connect directly in new ways to the consumer? Create ‘wow’ moments and deeper connections. When we think about value for our consumers, it’s the strength of the products that will drive the purchase.”

Elissa also noted that while consumers are doing a lot of comparison shopping, it’s really about value, whether a high-quality product or a high-quality experience. Quantum Metric’s Continuous Product Design solution, which is built with BigQuery, ingests data across multiple digital touchpoints, including from mobile and web applications, and connects customer signals to every stage of the product lifecycle to help deliver the products and experiences that customers actually want.

4. Ensure consistent experiences across channels. Today, consumers crave the cross-channel shopping experience. “The channel experience has gone from online to in-store to now everywhere,” Amy commented. “We call it ubiquitous digital shopping.” Elissa added that 75% of consumers do most of their shopping digitally. However, mobile drives 67% of digital traffic, but just 49% of sales.1 “Recent trends in traffic and conversion rates by device show that we can expect the most traffic for the big sale days on mobile,” she said. “People are looking for discovery and awareness, maybe even adding items to the cart as a placeholder or reminder. But they prefer to complete a sale on a desktop. It will be critical for retailers to offer a consistent experience, especially on major sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.” Elissa also advised wrapping up any experiments with product and site design early, making sure to understand the customer experience holistically across the organization and prioritizing efforts to eliminate friction.

Consumers now expect to be able to shop wherever and whenever best fits their needs, whether in a store, on your website, through your app, or from within a social media ad, and have it be a consistently good experience no matter how they first entered or exited your commerce site. Google’s 2022 Retail Marketing Guide provides useful insights and tips on how to grow your online and in-app sales.

5. Personalize touchpoints to build loyalty. Connecting with your customer base and making sure they understand the value of your offering is essential. Alexis noted that the key is to keep your messages fresh as the holiday shopping season expands, providing new messages as they keep coming back to your store. “We need to engage them by helping them find what they are looking for at the right time,” she said. “Recognize that they are doing more planning and wish-list building early, then buying last-minute gifts at lower prices towards the end. Make sure those are front and center.”

Alexis also pointed out that today, consumers are providing more data points with the products they view or the items sitting in their carts. “What’s so great about e-commerce is that we can use all of this to create more personalized, direct messages targeted to those consumers,” she commented.

Amy recommended continuing to focus on conversion with product discovery and personalization, harnessing customer data to drive insights and action. “Any company’s biggest asset is their data. Using it in as many ways possible and activating it across the company is incredibly important,” she remarked. “Take advantage of your first-party data to activate everything from marketing campaigns to a more efficient supply chain. For every customer who comes to one of your digital properties, make sure your product discovery is as easy as possible. Pay attention to your recommendations, driving personalization to make that experience as unique and fruitful for the customer as possible.”

Achieving these objectives requires a modern cloud data warehouse and activation of a customer data platform. Retailers can explore how Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and our ecosystem of partners can power a customer data platform that supports more personalized marketing, shopping experience, and customer service.

While these are our key takeaways, we invite you to register to watch the on-demand webinar, “5 Ways Retailers Can Combat the Effects of Inflation,” for even more insights.

1. Quantum Metric Retail Benchmarks, “Adjusting for Inflation.” The report is based on aggregated browsing behavior from January to July 2022, paired with a survey of 3,400 consumers in the U.S. and UK.
2. Google/Ipsos, Holiday Shopping Study, Oct 2021 – Jan 2022, Online survey, US, n=7,253, Americans 18+ who conducted holiday shopping activities in past two days