Embedded Intelligence Helps Businesses Prepare for the Unknown
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The disruptions of 2020 elevated the importance of having the right data and insights to pivot quickly when necessary. Here’s a look at how businesses can use embedded intelligence to prepare for uncertainty and meet ever-changing customer expectations.
At work and in life, some unpredictability is always a part of the package. Ten years ago, your business might have experienced sudden product demand or a system outage that slowed down deliveries. Servers or data platforms might have run out of capacity earlier than expected.
In 2020, though, the concept of unpredictability in business reached new heights. These disruptions have elevated the importance of embedded intelligence—that is, having machine learning built into the tools people use every day, so that when a pivot is necessary, everyone has the data and insights they need at their fingertips. In fact, 2020 was so disruptive, with so many changes in customer behavior and so many ripple effects, a lot of historical data and forecasting assumptions may not be helpful in 2021. This only increases the onus on businesses to make the freshest data actionable for more of the workforce.
A decade or so ago, the idea of embedded intelligence might have seemed like science fiction. You might remember hearing that analytics would be able to make predictions, and that technology would be able to take on the complex work of predicting retail demand or helping to create a responsive supply chain. But insufficient hardware, older architecture models, slow queries, and untrustworthy data often got in the way.
Now, that concept has become reality as enterprise decision-making has moved from legacy tools to cloud-powered data intelligence services. Today, it’s possible to perform complex analytics tasks and obtain valuable, trusted outputs much faster than ever before. That speed and scale has allowed businesses to tackle entirely new projects and release new features and products very quickly. In addition, APIs have become a lot more intelligent, making it easy to connect siloed solutions. No matter the industry, businesses can access the technology to get to the bottom of what customers need.
Related: Top 5 trends for API-powered digital transformation in 2021
Meeting ever-changing customer expectations with embedded ML
Bringing embedded analytics to real-world uses continues to evolve, with a number of inspiring examples surfacing in the past year. As a result of the pandemic and shifting public health guidelines, many businesses didn’t know month by month if they’d be interacting with customers primarily through in-person or digital channels. And even if both channels were available, it wasn’t obvious how changing customer behaviors would net out.
At patient engagement platform Force Therapeutics, for example, daily activity on their virtual care platform went up by over 140% during the pandemic. With such a large influx of incoming data, it would have been difficult—if not impossible—for a team of humans to gather, organize, and draw insights from all of that information, especially in a timely enough manner to be of use to healthcare providers.
To deliver the necessary care when and how it was needed, Force Therapeutics required a machine learning solution that could identify patient needs based on a wide range of data. Using an embedded analytics platform, they created an application that allowed them to monitor the progress of post-op patients, answer questions, or triage concerns remotely. The platform also enabled providers to check for spikes and anomalies, in order to identify patients who needed to come in due to a critical issue.
Amidst all of the disruption, it became clear that teamwork is essential, and that effective teamwork relies on having the right data-driven tools to get the job done.
Likewise, home delivery became a bigger part of consumers’ routines. This increased pressure on companies to adapt quickly to changes that might prevent packages from arriving on time, such as worsening weather conditions or upstream supply chain disruptions. Amidst all of the disruption, it became clear that teamwork is essential, and that effective teamwork relies on having the right data-driven tools to get the job done.
One example of this can be seen in Google Cloud customers who are using public data to accelerate their journey from data to actionable insights. Some retailers are utilizing the Google Cloud Public Datasets Program to leverage NOAA’s Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) and Severe Weather Data Inventory datasets in order to better understand disruptive weather events, reroute their supply chains to prevent disruptions, and predict their in-store inventory needs to support communities as they recover from natural disasters.
Implementing ML without the complexity
The idea of embedded ML has been hyped for years, but for many use cases, the status quo tools have not caught up to the enthusiasm. Many business intelligence tools rooted in older database architectures require intense engineering work to deliver insights, queries are often slow, and the output is not always consistent or accurate. Part of the challenge is that building ML pipelines is difficult. Data in a database or data warehouse typically needs to move to an intelligence platform so models can be trained, and the models then need to be deployed and integrated into business workflows.
But modern data warehouses such as BigQuery let users train models in the warehouse itself, without having to move the data—and once the models are created, they can be applied and integrated into business processes using simple SQL. When it comes to embedding ML into enterprise processes, these modern approaches significantly lower the barrier for entry. Plus, tools like Looker, Google Cloud’s platform for modern BI and data applications, were created specifically for modern data needs, with the assumption that data needs would constantly evolve and that iterations should be made quickly without eating up inordinate engineering resources.
For Commonwealth Care Alliance (CCA), Looker was originally implemented to alleviate their pain points around data bottlenecks and data chaos. But when the pandemic hit, the nonprofit, community-based healthcare organization pivoted to make use of Looker’s tools to better serve patients. CCA used BigQuery and Looker to combine numerous datasources, create a predictive model that assesses risk, and distribute that model to its clinicians. This has given response teams the insights to determine who is too high risk to come in for care so they can reach out with home care solutions.
This kind of agility is not a one-time antidote to a one-time disruption, but rather the norm to which organizations must aspire if they want to remain competitive and protect themselves against future disruptions.
This same functionality is also helping businesses like SoundCommerce. Retailers like Constellation Brands, Eddie Bauer, and FTD/ProFlowers use SoundCommerce’s out-of-the-box data platform, which is powered by BigQuery and Looker, to collect retail data from any source and build a model around the metrics and relationships that are most crucial to retail. This has saved brands hundreds of manual reporting hours each month, and reduced platform licensing costs by almost 75%. Just as importantly, during the uncertain times of 2020, brands that used SoundCommerce were able to align real-time and predictive business decisions across marketing and operations with critical retail KPIs like contribution margin and customer lifetime value (CLV).
As 2020 showed us, we can never predict the future—but we can prepare for unpredictability by having the agility to always improve, and by positioning ourselves to make quick, intelligent pivots when the time comes. Last year was in many ways a rubicon: This kind of agility is not a one-time antidote to a one-time disruption, but rather the norm to which organizations must aspire if they want to remain competitive and protect themselves against future disruptions.
Looking for an ‘easy button’ to speed up your BI workloads running on BigQuery? Check out our latest announcement about BI Engine on the Google Cloud Blog.
Debanjan Saha is GM of Data Analytics at Google Cloud, where he leads the strategy and execution of analytics services in GCP. Prior to joining Google, Debanjan was VP of Amazon Aurora and RDS at Amazon Web Services. Earlier in his career Debanjan held multiple executive and technical leadership positions at IBM and Tellium, an optical networking pioneer that he helped grow from an early stage start-up to a public company.
Debanjan is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM. He has co-authored a book, 50 patent applications, and numerous technical articles including award winning papers and Internet standards. He received MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland, and a B.Tech from IIT, all in Computer Science. In 2019, Business Insider named him as one of the top 10 technology executives transforming business.
The Future of Workloads: Google Cloud’s Purpose-Built Infrastructure Evolution
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For far too long, cloud infrastructure has focused on raw speeds and feeds of building blocks such as VMs, containers, networks, and storage. Today, Moore’s law is slowing, and the burden of picking the right combination of infrastructure components increasingly falls on IT.
At Google Cloud we are committed to removing that burden. We’ve engineered golden paths from silicon to the console, with a recipe of purpose-built infrastructure, prescriptive architectures, and an ecosystem to deliver workload-optimized infrastructure. And at this year’s Google Cloud Next, we made some exciting new announcements across key workloads.
In this post, we will put the new Google Cloud releases and capabilities in the context of popular workloads: From AI/ML to high performance computing and data analytics, to SAP, VMware, and mainframes.
Powering AI/ML workloads
No single technology has the potential to drive more transformation than AI and ML. At Next, we announced several new AI-based services: Translation Hub and DocAI services, and the OpenXLA Project, an open-source ecosystem of ML compiler technologies co-developed by a consortium of industry leaders.
To build these innovative services, you also need a powerful infrastructure platform. Today, we announced the following additions to our compute offerings:
- Cloud TPU v4 Pods – Now in General Availability (GA), Google’s advanced machine learning infrastructure is based on the world’s largest publicly available ML hub in Oklahoma and offers up to 9 exaflops of peak aggregate compute. Developers and researchers can use TPU v4 to train increasingly sophisticated models to power workloads such as large-scale natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and computer vision algorithms in a cost effective and sustainable way. In June 2022, Cloud TPU v4 recorded the fastest training times on five MLPerf 2.0 benchmarks, with up to 80% better performance and up to 50% lower cost of training than the next best available alternative.
- A2 Ultra GPU VM instances – Now GA, you can use A2 Ultra GPU VM instances with Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and Deep Learning VMs. A2 Ultra GPUs have the largest and fastest GPU memory of the Google Cloud portfolio and are optimized for large AI/ML and HPC workloads with use cases such as AI assistants, recommendation systems, and autonomous driving. Powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensorcore GPU with 80 GBs of GPU memory, A2 Ultra delivers 25% higher throughput on inference and 2x higher performance on HPC simulations than original A2 machine shapes.
Learn more about A2 Ultra and hear how you can accelerate your ML development and learn from our customers Uber and Cohere in breakout session MOD300.
Boost HPC and data-intensive workloads
Customers rely on Google Cloud to help them run data-intensive workloads such as HPC and Hadoop. The new C3 machine series (currently in Preview) is the first in the public cloud to include the new 4th Gen Intel Xeon processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit that enables 200Gbps, low-latency networking. Learn more about top HPC best practices in breakout session MOD106.
You can pair the C3 with Hyperdisk (currently in Private Preview), our new generation block storage, which offers 80% higher IOPS per vCPU for high-end database management system (DBMS) workloads when compared to other hyperscalers. Data workloads such as Hadoop and databases may no longer need oversized compute instances to benefit from high IOPS. Learn more about Hyperdisk in breakout session MOD206.
Enable new streaming experiences
Media and entertainment customers want streaming optimized workloads that build on our innovation in edge and our global network. Here are some new developments to support streaming use cases:
- Cloud CDN, our original content delivery networking offering, now offers Dynamic compression to reduce the size of responses transferred from the edge to a client, significantly helping to accelerate page load times and reduce egress traffic.
- Media CDN, introduced earlier this year, now supports the Live Stream API to ingest and package source content into HTTP-Live Streaming and DASH formats for optimized live streaming. We are also enabling two new developer-friendly integrations in Preview for Media CDN: Dynamic Ad Insertion with Google Ad Manager, which provides customized video ad placements, and third-party Ad Insertion using our Video Stitcher API for personalized ad placement. With these options, content producers can introduce additional monetization and personalization opportunities to their streaming services.
- For advanced customization, we are introducing the Preview of Network Actions for Media CDN, a fully managed serverless solution based on open-source web assembly that enables programmability for customers to deploy their own code directly in the request/response path at the edge.
With Media CDN, customers like Paramount+ are able to deliver a high-quality experience on the same Google infrastructure we’ve tested and tuned to serve YouTube’s 2 billion users globally.
“Streaming is one of the key growth areas for Paramount Global. When we migrated traffic onto Media CDN, we observed consistently superior performance and offload metrics. Partnering with Google Cloud enables us to provide our subscribers with the highest quality viewing experience.” — Chris Xiques, SVP of Video Technology Group, Paramount Global
Bringing Google Cloud to your workloads
For customers in regulated markets and in countries with strict sovereignty laws, Google Cloud has a spectrum of offerings to help them achieve varying degrees of sovereignty. Sovereign Controls by T-Systems is now GA, and Local Controls by S3NS, the Thales-Google partnership, is now available in Preview. You can expect more region and market announcements in the coming months. And for the most stringent sovereignty needs, we offer Google Distributed Cloud Hosted for a disconnected Google Cloud footprint deployed at the customer’s chosen site.
We are also expanding functionality for existing offerings to give you even more options to run your cloud where you want, how you want.
- Anthos, our cloud-centric container platform to run modern apps anywhere consistently at scale, now has a more robust user interface and an upgraded fleet management experience. Create, update, and reconfigure your Anthos clusters the same way from one dashboard or command-line interface, wherever your clusters run. New fleet management capabilities let you manage growing fleets of container clusters across clouds, on-premises, and at the edge and for different use cases (isolate dev from prod, apply fleet-specific security controls, enforce configurations fleet-wide). And we are pleased to announce the GA of virtual machine support on Anthos clusters for retail edge environments. Learn more about how Anthos can help you run modern applications anywhere in breakout session MOD208.
- Google Distributed Cloud Edge GPU-Optimized Config, is now GA in server-rack form factors powered by 12 Nvidia T4 GPUs. GDC Edge is designed to enable low-latency and high-performance hybrid workloads as a complement to your primary Google Cloud environment or as an independent edge deployment. We’re seeing early adoption by customers and partners for workloads such as augmented reality and retail self-checkout. In addition, software partners such as 66degrees are taking advantage of GDC Edge GPU optimization to provide real-time insights on in-store product availability, while Ipsotek is using machine intelligence at the edge to perform crowd and foot-traffic analysis in large locations such as malls, airports and railway stations. Learn more about GDC Edge and new partner validated solutions here, or watch breakout session MOD207 to hear how you can modernize your data center and accelerate your edge.
Infrastructure building blocks for cloud-first workloads
For most new projects, developers prefer them to be cloud-first optimized workloads, and nearly half of all developers use containers today. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the most automated and scalable container management service on the market today, and when you use GKE Autopilot, developers can get started faster than other leading cloud providers. At Next ‘22, we’re excited to unveil:
- A new workshop to help you discover how to unlock efficiency and innovation with a GKE Autopilot — sign up to get started.
- A new security posture management dashboard in GKE that provides opinionated guidance on Kubernetes security along with bundled tools to expertly help improve the security posture of your Kubernetes clusters and workloads.
When building scalable web applications or running background jobs that require lightweight batch processing, developers are increasingly turning to serverless technologies. We’re helping developers choose serverless with numerous updates to Cloud Run, our managed serverless compute service.
- With new Cloud Run integrations, Cloud Run and Google Cloud services work together smoothly. For example, configuring domains with a Load Balancer or connecting to a Redis Cache is now as easy as a single click, with more scenarios on the way.
- Cloud Run customized health checks for services is now available in Preview, providing user-defined HTTP and TCP Startup probes at the container level. This capability allows Cloud Run users to define criteria as to when their application has started and is ready to start serving traffic, and is particularly useful for applications that might require additional startup time on their first initialization.
- To make continuous deployment easier for our customers, we added an integration between Cloud Deploy, our fully managed continuous deployment service, and Cloud Run. With this integration in place, you can do continuous deployment through Cloud Deploy directly to Cloud Run, with one-click approvals and rollbacks, enterprise security and audit, and built-in delivery metrics. Learn more on Cloud Deploy web page.
Learn more about how to build next-level web applications with Cloud Run in breakout session BLD203.
You also need confidence in the building blocks that make up your workloads from the outset. To help get you started, we introduced Software Delivery Shield, which provides a comprehensive suite of tools offering a fully managed, end-to-end solution that helps protect your software supply chain. The Software Delivery Shield launch also included the following announcements:
- Cloud Workstations, currently in Preview, provides fully-managed development environments built to meet the needs of security-sensitive enterprises. With Cloud Workstations, developers can access secure, fast, and customizable development environments via a browser anytime and anywhere, with consistent configurations and customizable tooling. To learn more about Cloud Workstations, please visit the web page and check out breakout session BLD100.
- A new partnership with JetBrains provides fully managed Jetbrains IDEs as part of Cloud Workstations. This integration can give developers access to several popular IDEs with minimal management overhead for their admin teams.
Read more about Software Delivery Shield.
Open source and open standards are an important part of building applications. With that, we are excited to announce that Google has joined the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group, a consortium of leaders in the Java community working to establish a higher quality, developer-centric standard for Java distributions. Also, we are making Eclipse Temurin available across Google Cloud products and services. Eclipse Temurin provides Java developers a higher quality developer experience and more opportunities to create integrated, enterprise-focused solutions, with the openness they deserve.
Pioneering new technology with Web3 optimized infrastructure
It’s incredible to see the energy in Web3 right now and the focus on developing the broader benefits, use cases, and core capabilities of blockchain. We are helping customers with scalability, reliability, security, and data, so they can spend the bulk of their time on innovation in the Web3 space — unlocking deep user value and building the next app to attract a billion users to the ecosystem.
Companies like Near, Nansen, Solana, Blockdaemon, Dapper Labs & Sky Mavis use Google Cloud’s infrastructure. Yesterday, we announced a strategic partnership with Coinbase to better serve the growing Web3 ecosystem.
“We could not ask for a better partner to execute our vision of building a trusted bridge into the Web3 economy and accelerating broader growth and adoption of blockchain technology. I started Coinbase with a desire to create a more accessible financial system for everyone, and Google’s history of supporting open source and decentralized ecosystems made this a natural fit. Our partnership marks a major inflection point and, together, we are removing barriers to blockchain adoption and accelerating innovation.” — Brian Armstrong, CEO, Coinbase
Lift and transform traditional workloads
Not all workloads were born in the cloud — or have completed their journey to it. Google Cloud offers a variety of programs and capabilities to help optimize traditional workloads for a new cloud era, regardless of whether you’re looking to migrate it as-is, do light optimizations, or fully modernize and transform:
- Migration Center – Now in Preview. For organizations looking to migrate to the cloud and transform their businesses, Migration Center can reduce the complexity, time, and cost by providing an integrated migration and modernization experience. It brings together our assessment, planning, migration, and modernization tooling in one centralized location with a shared data platform so you can proceed faster, more intelligently, and more easily through your journey. Learn more at the Migration Center webpage.
- Google Cloud VMware Engine – Google Cloud is the first VMware partner to market with VMware Cloud Universal support, simplifying the migration of on-premises VMware VMs to VMware Engine in the cloud. With a cloud market-leading 99.99% availability SLA in a single site, VMware Engine is helping large organizations like Carrefour move to Google Cloud.
- Dual Run for Google Cloud – Now in Preview, this first-of-its-kind solution helps eliminate many of the common risks associated with mainframe modernizations by letting customers simultaneously run workloads on their existing mainframes and their modernized version on Google Cloud. This means customers can perform real-time testing and quickly gather data on performance and stability with no disruption to their business. Once satisfied that the performance of the two systems is functionally equivalent, the customer can make the Google Cloud environment the system of record, and operate the existing mainframe system as needed, typically as a backup. Learn more about Dual Run in this press release or on our Mainframe Modernization webpage.
- Google Cloud Workload Manager – Now in Preview for SAP workloads, and available in the Google Cloud console, Workload Manager provides automated analysis of your enterprise systems on Google Cloud to help continuously improve system quality, reliability, and performance. Google Cloud Workload Manager evaluates your SAP workloads by detecting deviations from documented standards and best practices to help proactively prevent issues, continuously analyze workloads, and simplify system troubleshooting.
Learn more about how organizations like Global Payments and Loblaw Technology have migrated with ease and speed in breakout session MOD104.
Protect all your workloads
The foundation of any workload is storage, and this year we expanded the number of supported regions with our Cloud Storage dual-region buckets (GA), so you can ensure that your workloads are protected. In the event of an outage, your application can easily access the data in the alternate region. You can add Turbo replication (GA) with your dual-region buckets. Turbo replication is backed by a 15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO) SLA.
Also, we recently announced Google Cloud’s Backup and DR Service (GA). This service is a fully integrated data-protection solution for critical applications and databases that lets you centrally manage data protection and disaster recovery policies directly within the Google Cloud console, and fully protect databases and applications with a few mouse clicks.
Learn more about Storage best practices in breakout session MOD206.
Migrate, observe, and secure network traffic
We also announced many new capabilities and enhancements to the Cloud Networking portfolio that help customers migrate, modernize, secure, and observe workloads traveling to and in Google Cloud:
- Private Service Connect helps simplify migrations by giving more control to users and integrations with 5 new partners.
- Network Intelligence Center can monitor the network for you with enhanced capabilities like the Performance Dashboard that will give you latency visibility between Google Cloud and the Internet.
- We expanded our Cloud Firewall product line and introduced two new tiers: Cloud Firewall Essentials and Cloud Firewall Standard.
For more information on what’s new with networking, read this blog and check out breakout session MOD205.
Optimize costs
Our customers’ workloads also require technical and commercial options that can deliver the best return on their investments. Here are some new enhancements that can help:
- Flex CUDs – GA coming soon, Flexible Committed Use Discounts help you save up to 46% off on-demand Compute Engine VM pricing, in exchange for a one- or three-year commitment. Like standard CUDs, you can apply Flex CUDs across projects within the same billing account, to VMs of different sizes, and across operating systems. Learn more.
- Batch – Now GA, Batch is a fully managed service that helps you run batch jobs easily, reliably, and at scale. Without having to install any additional software, Batch dynamically and efficiently manages resource provisioning, scheduling, queuing, and execution, freeing you up to focus on analyzing results. There’s no charge for using Batch, and you only pay for the resources used to complete the tasks.
Learn more about how you can optimize for cost savings with Google Cloud in MOD103.
Optimize for sustainability
Any new workloads you develop should have the smallest possible carbon footprint. Google Cloud Carbon Footprint helps you measure, report, and reduce your cloud carbon emissions, and is now GA. Since introducing Carbon Footprint last year, we added features that cover Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, and provided role-based access to other users such as sustainability teams. Active Assist’s carbon emissions estimates related to removing unattended projects are also now GA. Learn how to build a more sustainable cloud with lower carbon emissions in MOD103, and start using Carbon Footprint today.
“At Box, we’re focused on reducing our carbon footprint and we’re excited for the visibility and transparency the Carbon Footprint tool will provide as we continue our work to operate sustainably.” — Corrie Conrad, VP Communities and Impact and Executive Director of Box.org at Box
“At SAP we’re working to achieve net-zero by 2030, making it crucial to measure carbon emissions all along our value chain. Collaborating with Google Cloud on Carbon Footprint ensures that accurate emissions data is available in a timely manner, helping our many Solution Areas make more sustainable decisions.” — Thomas Lee, SVP and Head of Multicloud Products and Services at SAP
Designed around your workloads
These are only a few examples of the many golden paths we are enabling for your workloads. We strive to be the ‘open infrastructure cloud’ that is the most intuitive to consume because everything is designed around your workloads, providing tremendous TCO benefits.
To get even more information on all of this and more check out the Modernize breakout session track and these “What’s New” sessions available on demand at Next ’22:
- MOD105 to learn about new infrastructure solutions for enterprise architects and developers.
- BLD106 to learn what’s new to help developers build, deploy, and run applications.
- OPE100 to learn about the biggest announcements for DevOps teams, sysadmins, and operators.
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Driving Business Transformation in Manufacturing, Industrial, and Transportation Using Google Cloud and AI/ML
Google Cloud partners closely with manufacturing, industrial, and transportation organizations to drive business transformation.
In this video, Mandeep Waraich, Head of Product – Industrial AI, Google Cloud, shares customer stories as well as Google Cloud’s differentiated AI products and solutions.
Waraich covers the current state of automation and industrial efficiency and how artificial intelligence is revealing an entirely new universe of possibilities.
He also speaks about Google Cloud’s approach to bringing these AI technologies to the market, and Google Cloud’s “deploy anywhere” methodology that helps achieve the impact of AI at a global enterprise scale.
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Learn Modern App Development Practices to Ship Software Faster
Cloud-native, Kubernetes, Serverless have been the hottest and most widely discussed topics given the velocity and agility benefits.
Learn more about how you can leverage these modern app development practices to ship software faster, while reducing costs and improving security and compliance.
Learn how Google Cloud lets you modernize existing applications at your own pace using these technologies. Regardless of where you are in your app modernization journey, watch this video to learn how to improve the developer experience and deliver software faster.
Google Cloud Celebrates Journey of 3 Inspiring Founders for the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
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May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month —a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of Asian and Pacific Island heritage. This feature highlights three AAPI founders from the Google For Startups community.
Read on to learn how these three founders built their businesses, leverage Google tech, and suggestion they have for aspiring entrepreneurs.
CultivatePeople
Founder: Lola Han
Description: CultivatePeople’s compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market pay rate data and helps companies make data-driven salary decisions so they can attract and retain their most valuable asset: employees.
Why GCP: “CultivatePeople began using GCP when integrating SSO/SAML authentication after our SaaS product became a high priority. We were able to exceed our clients’ expectations and increase their level of trust in our platform’s capabilities. We’re currently investigating additional machine learning products, such as Cloud AutoML, that will allow us to quickly deliver exciting features.”
Note from the Founder: “I grew up with immigrant parents who value stability and are risk-averse. My parents discouraged me from starting my own company because they didn’t want to see me struggle financially or see my health suffer (due to stress). I felt strongly about what CultivatePeople could do, so I started the company as a sole founder in 2017 and watched it double in size year over year since. While the ones I love most may not have cheered me on initially, it was important for me to hang on to the encouraging words of former bosses, executives, and founders to keep me focused on my mission.
My advice for other AAPI founders is to be a “silent assassin” and believe in the mission and values of your organization. Always remember to stop along the way and:
1) Enjoy the journey by celebrating wins and giving yourself credit;
2) Follow your intuition—it’s (almost) always right;
3) Recognize and invest in your people regularly (ie. give increases more than once a year, if warranted);
4) Give regular words of affirmation to employees on even small achievements.”
Swit
Founder: Josh Lee and Max Lim
Description: Swit is a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management by allowing teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.
Why GCP: “Swit is a cross-category hybrid work tool for chat and tasks. This functionality requires more complicated and heavier architecture for performance. So, configuring and managing virtual machines was really challenging to scale up our systems, while handling occasional unexpected traffic surges and frequent updates. Eventually we divided our monolithic architecture into 35 microservices when we launched our official product. The migration to GKE took around one month, and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems became able to offer high scalability and enough resilience to keep its uptime no matter what happened. Now we’re operating 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability with remarkably low downtime – less than 0.00001%/year.”
Note from the Founder: “As an AAPI founder based in Silicon Valley, I feel proud of the work ethics and diligence fellow Korean American entrepreneurs and professionals have long demonstrated here. Especially with K-pop breaking into the mainstream, I feel even more proud of our culture that strives toward an absolute perfection molded through years of training and dedication. The mission-driven culture of Silicon Valley coupled with Google’s edging technology and creativity really helped us build a product that not only encompasses verticals but also transcends cultures. Swit is growing at an unprecedented rate, and we hope to join the long list of successful AAPI entrepreneurs here. Swit’s close network with the AAPI community wouldn’t have been possible without Google support. We are grateful for this collaborative environment, and we hope to become the next-generation ambassador for collaboration after Google.”
Check out more from Swit in their founder story.
WISY
Founder: Min Chen
Description: Wisy develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy. All of us have a bad experience when we can’t find the product we want to buy. That is a $1.9T problem in the consumer-packaged goods industry that Wisy is solving with AI and analytics to help manufacturers and retailers sell more by reducing out-of-stocks and waste at a global scale.
Why GCP: “GCP has an intuitive, easy to use interface, was lower cost, and offered preemptible instances with flexible compute options. Some of the reasons why Wisy decided to use GCP include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.
Wisy has been able to advance quickly with product development, as well as collaborate better and iterate faster in the creation of our AI models, while reducing costs by 40%. At Wisy, we are solving a problem that affects everyone who shops at a store.“
Note from the Founder: “Two years ago, I moved to San Francisco to expand my second startup, Wisy. This is when I learned that my name ‘Min’ stands for ‘minority.’ I was born in China, raised in a Black community in Panama, received scholarships to attend both Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. I worked for 20 years in several countries, but I have never felt so discriminated against due to my race, ethnicity, gender and age than during my time in Silicon Valley. However, this is also the place I learned that my diverse life experience is my competitive advantage. My background enables me to recruit and relate to people in different countries, create scalable and flexible products for multinational customers, and run global operations efficiently.
My recommendation to AAPI founders is to find strength in their multicultural background. Don’t hide what makes you unique, do not limit yourselves, and do not let others limit you. You will lose your edge when trading authenticity for validation. Be proud and own your story.”
If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.To learn more about how you can help #StopAsianHate during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, visit their website here.
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What is BigQuery?
BigQuery is Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse designed to help you ingest, store, analyze, and visualize big data with ease.
Organizations rely on data warehouses to aggregate data from disparate sources, process it, and make it readily available for data analysis that supports their strategic decision-making.
You can ingest data into BigQuery either through batch uploading or streaming data directly to deliver real-time insights.
As a fully-managed data warehouse, Google takes care of the infrastructure so you can focus on analyzing your data up to petabyte scale.
BigQuery supports the same Structured Query Language, or SQL, for analyzing your data, which you may be familiar with if you’ve worked with ANSI-compliant relational databases in the past.
If you’re looking to create machine learning models using your enterprise data, you can do so with BigQuery ML.
With only a few lines of SQL, you can train and execute models on your BigQuery data without needing to move it around.
When it comes time to visualize your data, BigQuery integrates with Looker, as well as several other business intelligence tools across our partner ecosystem.
Now, how do you use BigQuery?
Luckily, it’s straightforward to get up and running with BigQuery.
After creating a GCP project, you can immediately start querying public data sets, which Google Cloud hosts and makes available to all BigQuery users, or you can load your own data into BigQuery to analyze.
Interacting with BigQuery to load data, run queries, or even create ML models can be done in three different ways.
First is by using the UI and the Cloud Console. Second is by using the BigQuery command line tool. And third is by making calls to the BigQuery API, using client libraries available in several languages.
BigQuery is integrated with Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management Service so you can securely share your data and analytical insights across the organization.
What does it cost to use BigQuery?
With BigQuery, you pay for storing and querying data and streaming inserts.
Loading and exporting data are free of charge.
Storage costs are based on the amount of data stored and have two rates based on how often the data is changing.
Query costs can be either on demand, meaning you are charged per query by the amount of data processed, or flat rate for customers who want to purchase dedicated resources.
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