Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital Cuts IT Support Tickets By 80% With Google
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About Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital specializes in treating eye conditions such as cataracts; glaucoma; corneal problems such as ulcers, inflammation, and thinning; and retinal issues such as degeneration and detachment. The business operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.
Founded by the late Dr. J. Agarwal, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, headquartered in Chennai, India, operates 62 hospitals in cities across India and 14 hospitals in 8 countries in Africa, including Zambia, Nigeria, and Ghana.
According to Dilip Ramadasan, GM-IT, Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital, the business is the second-largest network of eye-care hospitals globally and aims to provide the best eye care in the world.
“We have focused on service over the last couple of years and decided to completely revamp back-end operations such as information technology and finance,” says Dilip.
“Realizing our vision involved moving to a completely new infrastructure that could deliver the scalability, agility, and performance our evolving application stack required.”
Replacing Aging Desktop Hardware and Applications
The business placed particular emphasis on upgrading its aging desktop fleet and traditional productivity applications.
“When I arrived in 2015, we only had 35 hospitals and all of them were using desktops that were five years or older,” Dilip says. “These desktops were due for replacement within the following six months to a year, so I had an ideal opportunity to upgrade our capabilities and address issues such as excessive support costs and resource requirements.”
For example, if a desktop at a hospital in a remote location experienced a problem, Dilip had to dispatch one of his technology team members to fix the issue. This could take up to five days, while the employee whose desktop was underperforming or failing often needed to wait until the fix was applied before resuming work.
Three Criteria for Improvement
When evaluating options to enhance the hospital’s information technology environment, Dilip applied three criteria: increasing revenue, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs.
Dilip elected to replace the traditional desktops and applications with Chromebase devices running Google Chrome and G Suite applications. “This option aligned perfectly with our efficiency and cost criteria,” he says.
The business started a four-month pilot of Chromebase devices with G Suite in October 2015 at four newly-opened hospitals.
“We wanted to see how users would react to the Chromebases running G Suite compared to the traditional desktops and applications,” he adds. “A large component of the project entailed educating users about the benefits of G Suite applications such as Google Docs and Sheets.”
Chromebases Running G Suite Deployed to 600 Users
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital has completed the deployment of Chromebases running G Suite to 600 users. This group comprised team members who needed to access a billing application or a human resources management system and doctors who needed to access patients’electronic medical records.
“My desktop total cost of ownership fell by up to 70% when I deployed these devices,” Dilip says.
With G Suite running on Chromebase devices, Dilip has been able to resolve many desktop support issues remotely, minimizing the need to send support team members to distant locations.
“The number of support tickets we used to process on the desktop computing side has fallen by a full 80%,” he says. “As a result, I’ve been able to cut the number of desktop support team members from eight to three and redeploy them to server and application management and support.”
Dilip cites Sheets and Google Drive as the G Suite applications most beneficial to the business.
Sheets enables hospital team members to share important cost and revenue numbers without having to attach multiple versions of spreadsheets to emails, while Google Drive facilitates collaboration by enabling the team members to store and view shared documents.
“Team members are able to spend more time on core activities rather than on picking up numbers and sharing them with regional managers,” Dilip says.
The business also uses Google Vault to protect management data held in emails and help ensure compliance with legislative requirements.
Google Cloud Platform Products Under Evaluation
Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Hospital is evaluating extending its deployment of Google Cloud Platform products to Google BigQuery and Google Data Studio.
“We are looking to add a business intelligence layer over applications running in other cloud environments, and Google potentially provides an option to do that,” Dilip says.
“This layer would enable us to analyze electronic medical record data to increase our understanding of patterns such as how a particular disease affects an individual across various stages of life and what types of interventions would deliver the best results.”
“Google has introduced the flexibility we need to reposition our engineers as needed, improved the relationship between the information technology team and operations teams, and given the information technology team greater confidence in resolving issues,” adds Dilip. “We will be continuing to scout for opportunities across Google platforms to increase our revenue and efficiencies while decreasing our costs.”
Download the Forrester Study to Explore the Benefits of AI for IT Operations in Cloud Environment
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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.
Accuracy and Real-time Updates with Google Maps’ On-Demand Rides and Delivery Solution Impacts CX
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Last year we launched our on-demand rides and delivery solution to help businesses improve operations as well as transform the driver and customer journey from booking to arrival or delivery. When it comes to on-demand rides and deliveries, every minute matters. When users book a ride or order food, they want a seamless experience and real-time accurate updates. Today, we’re taking a closer look into data quality improvements for location, time and distance accuracy, and motorbike routes.
Machine learning helps drive location accuracy
Location accuracy stands at the base of our customers’ operation. The location signals that are coming from mobile devices can sometimes be off for various reasons and a driver’s location can get stuck, or jump around.
Recently we developed mechanisms in our fleet management product that can take in multiple location signals and determine the most reliable location to use for a given vehicle. With that, we noticed drastic improvements:
- Eliminated long periods of location ‘stuckness’ almost completely; a vehicle is considered ‘stuck’ when we think it’s moving but the measured location is not
- Reduced the jumpiness of the location signal by 52%-86%: ‘jumpiness’ is when a vehicle shows a sudden and usually drastic change in location. A jump is determined to exist when the speed the vehicle had to go at in order to cover the distance it did is unrealistic
- Reduced the average jump distance by 44%-86% : ‘jump distance’ is the distance between two consecutive location pings when we determined a ‘location jump’ has occurred.
Dunzo, a local e-commerce platform in India, explains how integrating the order tracking capability within Google Maps Platform’s On Demand Rides and Delivery solution has helped reduce support calls by 90%. The out-of-the-box solution helped Dunzo’s motorbike delivery partners with updating location sync to reduce stuckness and jumpiness as well as deliver premium user experiences.
When the vehicle location is more reliable, the dispatch decision is of higher quality, meaning there is a higher chance you will be able to make the optimal decision. This can lead to less wait time for consumers, increased driver happiness and fewer cancellations.
Improvements in ETA accuracy in motorbike routes
In many geographic areas, road space is limited and car ownership is prohibitively expensive so motorbike is a prominent transportation mode. Motorbike mapping requires unique routing, ETA models, and navigation capabilities. Improvements in motorbike routing and ETA estimation have enabled customers like Gojek to offer better overall services, even in geographies with poor wifi or missing roads.
Recently, we further improved ETA outcomes by developing new machine learning models trained specifically for motorbikes. These models help our systems account for differences in congestion and traffic flow that arise in different regions and scenarios.
Globally, we measured an ~8% improvement in ETA accuracy for riders in the general public, and a ~6% improvement in on-demand rides and deliveries ETA accuracy. In this on-demand economy, where consumers are accustomed to real-time trip and order progress, these improvements will significantly improve their experience.
We will continue to innovate on both our car and motorbike on-demand rides and deliveries capabilities based on customer demand and requirements. We are committed to the success of our customers by building a seamless experience for all parties—consumers, drivers, and fleet operators—in the rides and deliveries journey.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
Tau VMs Joins Google Cloud to Offer Cost-effective Performance of Scale-out Workloads
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Scale-out workloads demand the best combination of performance and price to bring down the cost of delivering applications, all while providing an excellent user experience. We are excited to announce a new virtual machine (VM) family, Tau VMs, coming to Google Cloud. Tau VMs extend Compute Engine’s VM offerings with a new option optimized for cost-effective performance of scale-out workloads.
T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYCTM processors and leapfrogs the VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider available today, both in terms of performance and workload total cost of ownership (TCO). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture.
As illustrated below, Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance (est. SPECrate2017_int_base) compared to general-purpose VMs from any of the leading public cloud vendors.
SPECrate is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. More information available at www.spec.org
What our customers and partners are saying
Snap
“At Snap, it is critical for our business to continue improving our scale-out compute infrastructure for key Snapchat capabilities like AR, Lenses, Spotlight and Maps,” said Cody Powell, Senior Engineering Manager, Snap Inc. “We were impressed when we tested Google Cloud’s new Tau VMs with Google Kubernetes Engine. While it’s early days, we believe we can gain double digits in infrastructure performance improvements for key workloads—enabling us to do more with less and invest even more in new features for our amazing Snapchat community.”
Twitter
“High performance at the right price point is a critical consideration as we work to serve the global public conversation,” said Nick Tornow, Platform Lead, Twitter. “We are excited by initial tests that show potential for double digit performance improvement. We are collaborating with Google Cloud to more deeply evaluate benefits on price and performance for specific compute workloads that we can realize through use of the new Tau VM family.”
DoiT
“DoiT partners with leading cloud vendors who are focused on growth and cost optimization,” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO, DoiT International. “In our preliminary testing of Google’s new Tau VMs with the Coremark benchmark, we were thrilled to see the incredible performance at 50% better than a comparable ARM-based offering from another leading public cloud. With Tau VMs, Google Cloud has set a new bar for price-performance, making the cloud even more accessible to digital-native companies. We are excited to bring Google’s Tau VMs to our joint customers.”
Designed for demanding scale-out workloads
Tau VMs bring the benefit of Google’s long-standing experience engineering platforms for scale-out workloads to our customers. They come in multiple predefined VM shapes, with up to 60vCPUs per VM, and 4GB of memory per vCPU. They offer up to 32 Gbps networking bandwidth and a wide range of network attached storage options, making Tau VMs ideal for scale-out workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding, and large-scale Java applications.
Google Kubernetes Engine support
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the de facto standard for organizations looking for advanced container orchestration, delivering the highest levels of reliability, security, and scalability. GKE supports Tau VMs on day 1, helping you optimize price-performance for your containerized workloads. You can add Tau VMs to your GKE clusters by specifying the T2D machine type in your GKE node-pools.
Pricing
Tau VMs will be priced to support significant TCO and price-performance improvements for your cloud applications. A 32vCPU VM with 128GB RAM will be priced at $1.3520 per hour for on-demand usage in us-central1.
Coming soon to a Google Cloud region near you
If you are interested in trying out T2D VMs when they become available in Q3 2021 please sign-up here.
Latest Features and Updates to Globally Bolster Translation Services
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Let’s face it: in the globalized world, which is now more than ever a digital demand world, you need to scale and reach your customers right where they’re at. Translation is a critical piece of that, whether you’re translating a website in multiple languages or releasing a document, a piece of software, or training materials.
Manual translation does not scale, which is why machine translation, powered by machine learning (ML), is becoming more important to our customers. Machine translation has historically been challenging because of the sheer volume and breadth of content that can add value when translated into multiple languages. Companies acquire and share content in many languages and formats, and scaling translation to meet needs is a tall order due to multiple document formats, integrations with optical character recognition (OCR), and the need to correct for domain-specific terminology.
Our goal is to simplify translation services, while enabling flexibility and control for our customers’ unique needs across industries. Read on to learn more about recent features and updates.
Formatting matters: Document Translation is now GA
In many cases, the layout of a document dictates how it should be interpreted—e.g., readers navigate text and discern meaning based on formatting, like bold or italicized text, or markups for headers, paragraphs, and columns. Previously, to automate translation of documents, text needed to be separated from these layout attributes, meaning the document’s structure was either lost or needed to be recreated later in the developer pipeline, after the text had been translated. This required translation teams to do a lot of extra work and maintain a lot of additional code. But now, those steps are unnecessary. Formatting can be retained throughout the translation process, handled directly by the Translation API Advanced.
This feature lets customers translate documents in 100+ languages and supports document types such as Docx, PPTx, XLSx, and PDF while preserving document formatting.
And if your needs go beyond Document Translation, we can help you translate audio as well. For real-time streaming translation, check out the Media Translation API, and for offline transcription translation, combine the Translation API with the Video Intelligence API.
Real-Time translation when you need it, Batch when you don’t
One of the biggest differentiators for Translation API Advanced’s document translation capabilities is the ability to do real-time, synchronous processing for a single file.
For example, if you are translating a business document such as HR documentation, online translation provides flexibility for smaller files and provides faster results. You can easily integrate with our APIs via REST or gRPC with mobile or browser applications, with instant access to 100+ language pairs so that content can be understandable in any supported language.
Meanwhile, batch translation allows customers to translate multiple files into multiple languages in a single request. For each request, customers can send up to 100 files with a total content size of up to 1 GB or 100 million Unicode codepoints, whichever limit is hit first.
State of the Art (SOTA) accuracy, with flexibility for customization
In order to achieve the highest level of accuracy for your translation, we now support multiple options:
- Use Google’s SOTA translation models: Each year, Google heavily invests to improve the quality of our translations across Apps, Cloud APIs, and Chrome, as well to enable multilanguage answers in Search. A popular metric for automatic quality evaluation of Machine translation systems is the BLEU score, which is based on the similarity between machine translation and the reference translations that were generated by people. While we push out incremental improvements for individual models on a monthly cadence, there are also times where we make significant leaps. In the releases since 2019, we have improved our average BLEU score by 5pts on average across 100+ languages and 7pts on low resource languages.
- Leverage glossaries for specific terms and phrases: Glossary is our terminology control feature. It allows you to import source content to define preferred translations, such as product names or department names. Then, when calling the glossary in the API request, your preferred translations will be enforced. This will work for words as well as phrase translation.
- Pick a pre-trained model with model selection: If you create custom models for machine translation, we don’t think you should have multiple client libraries and multiple APIs to maintain in order for you to use the best model for your needs. Translation API Advanced now supports Model Selection. Pick your pretrained model or pick your custom ML model built on AutoML for any language pair you’ve created and use the same API and the same client library.
- Build custom translation models with AutoML: AutoML Translation is a suite of ML products that enable you to build high quality models for your own use case or data, with limited-to-no ML expertise or coding required. Bring your past human-validated translations to improve translation specificity for your domain.
Keep localization local with Regional Endpoints
If you are a customer operating in the EU, we recently launched an endpoint specifically for EU regionalization. This is a configurable endpoint for customers to store and perform machine translation processing of customer data only in the EU multi region. For now, this only supports our pretrained translation models and glossary, but batch translations will be coming soon.
How Eli Lilly uses Cloud Translation to translate content globally
Historically, translations at Eli Lilly have been complicated: numerous translation vendors have been needed for different languages and organizations, all with their own processes and expectations. On top of that, translations have been costly and slow.
To solve this, Eli Lilly took a codified approach to enable users and systems to spend less time and resources to safely generate quality translations.
Learn more, and even catch a demo, from Thomas Griffin, Translation Tech Lead & Global Regulatory Architect for Eli Lilly.
Learn more
- To get started using Cloud Translation – Advanced, complete the setup and then try the Translate text (Advanced edition) quickstart.
- Document Translation is priced per page. For more information, see pricing.
How Do You Cut Costs and Improve Staff Productivity, and Business Visibility? Ascend Money Has an Answer
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Hundreds of millions of residents of South East Asia have only limited access to banking and finance services. However, help is at hand. One of South East Asia’s largest fintech businesses, Ascend Money is using digital technologies to realize its mission of enabling as many people as possible to access innovative financial services and live better lives.
According to Ascend Money, 60 percent of the region’s 620 million residents do not have access to a full suite of financial services. Even a relatively small proportion of this market represents a big opportunity for the business.
Ascend Money’s offerings include the TrueMoney regional payment platform for underserved and digital consumers. The TrueMoney platform supports more than 40 million consumers across six countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
TrueMoney also provides an e-wallet app that provides easy ways to top up mobile phones, undertake online shopping, and pay for products and services; a network of 65,000 branded shops; and international remittances, initially between Thailand and Myanmar. In addition, Ascend Money offers financial products to small to medium businesses.
Ascend Money is part of the South East Asian online business Ascend Group, which also operates e-commerce, e-procurement, data centers, cloud services, fulfilment, and digital marketing services.
Cost is a key criteria
Ascend Money initially started operations using physical infrastructure and on-premises workforce productivity applications. However, as the business grew its customer base and expanded into new markets, its technology leaders began to explore options to improve value for money; reduce the maintenance load on in-house team members; improve its data management and analysis; and collaborate more effectively.
“Operating our own on-premises infrastructure entails a higher cost of ownership and maintenance, as well as requiring us to scale up our hardware as needed,” says Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money. “We conducted an evaluation and found that moving to the cloud would deliver a range of benefits.”
G Suite and Google Cloud Platform the best fit
The business evaluated solutions available in the market and opted to move to G Suite and Google Cloud Platform.
“Moving to Google Cloud Platform was an optimization exercise, with lowering our costs our primary goal, and achieving better performance an added benefit,” says Jarrett. Google Cloud Platform monitoring, diagnostic, and analytics tools have enabled Ascend Money to reduce its infrastructure spending, becoming more efficient and cost-effective in the process.
“Managing software is a big cost for us. Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
The Ascend Money team saw Google Kubernetes Engine as enabling a seamless way of transitioning from an on-premises data center to a cloud service. “We considered industry trends such as what people were adopting and who we could hire when making our decision,” says Jarrett. “Engineering teams are focusing on using Kubernetes open source container management at scale and as a way of doing business, which was attractive to us.
“Google Kubernetes Engine presented the easiest way to manage and orchestrate our containers, and drive us away from our existing infrastructure.”
BigQuery best for cost and ease of use
Ascend Money also reviewed data infrastructure solutions, with its business intelligence and data platform teams considering a range of options. The teams quickly ruled out an on-premises solution due to the capital investment required and opted for a cloud service. Following a rigorous evaluation of Google Cloud Platform against the services offered by another cloud provider, Ascend Money opted to run on Google Cloud.
“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business,” says Jarrett. The business is now running an architecture comprising a BigQuery analytics data warehouse; Cloud Storage to store raw and archive data; Cloud Dataflow to process stream and batch data, and Cloud Pub/Sub for event ingestion and delivery.
“We’re expanding our utilization of BigQuery and other services on a daily basis,” says Jarrett.
Ascend Money is also using a range of Google Cloud Platform services for the infrastructure outside its data platform, including Stackdriver logging and monitoring; Cloud KMS to manage cryptographic keys for its cloud services, Cloud Build to undertake continuous integration, delivery, and deployment; Cloud DNS to provide domain name system services; and Cloud Functions to enable its developers to run and scale code in the cloud.
With Google Cloud Platform, Ascend Money is now processing about 12GB of batch data per day and streaming data from about 200 data marts per day in Thailand alone.
Cost effective scalability and faster to market
Google Kubernetes Engine has enabled the business to scale and deliver to market faster. “We can build on the platform, take the application and container and deploy them to scale out,” says Jarrett. “The Google Kubernetes Engine orchestration mechanism that provides containerized, elastic scalability is extremely important in allowing us to manage costs and expend our effort efficiently. Through Kubernetes, we can write once and deploy everywhere.”
With Google Cloud Platform, the business has saved 3,000,000 THB (about US$90,000) in licensing costs and, through automation tools, reduced the time to complete infrastructure activities by 50 percent.
“We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
Ascend Money’s entire workforce is now using G Suite to collaborate and operate productively. The business is achieving a range of benefits including being able to get new team members up and running more quickly and reduced cost. “Managing software is a big cost for us,” says Jarrett. “Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.” Meanwhile, the shorter time to onboard team members to G Suite is paying off with improved productivity and an accelerated ability to collaborate.
Ascend Money team members primarily use Sheets, Slides, and Docs to create internal materials, including product requirement documents in Docs and workforce and project planning spreadsheets in Sheets.
The organization also uses Hangouts Meet to collaborate when working from different locations. “We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion,” says Jarrett. “People can work from home and we have five regions plus Thailand where they can collaborate live on a document, such as a slide deck for board meetings or meetings with our chief executive officer, head of engineering, or other senior managers.”
20 hours per week saved
Jarrett describes the time savings of using web browser-based productivity software and G Suite as saving them an average of 20 hours per week. This has improved productivity and the quality of life for Ascend Money’s hard-working team, increasing overall staff satisfaction.
“The ability to work remotely is a big win for us,” Jarrett says. “Our team members can keep one computer at work and one at home and access the same information, they can work in a plane while it sits on the tarmac, or update a Google Doc or a Google Sheet in real time on their phone. They can work anytime, from any location, as long as they have an internet connection. They have less dead time, meaning more uptime.”
With Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, Ascend Money is ideally positioned to support growing demand for its fintech services in South East Asia, particularly among people with limited access to banking. “We have the agility and dynamism to support rising demand and look forward to continuing to work with Google to realize our business ambitions,” says Jarrett.
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