From operations to planning, G Suite customers scale data insights with Connected Sheets
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We recently announced the general availability of Connected Sheets, which brings you the power and scale of a BigQuery data warehouse in the familiar context of Google Sheets. With Connected Sheets, you can analyze billions of rows and petabytes of data in Sheets without specialized knowledge of computer languages like SQL. This makes it easy for anyone, not just data analysts, to apply pivot tables, charts, and formulas to massive datasets and unlock insights.
Our customers use Connected Sheets to enable data-driven decision-making across their organizations. We’ve heard many stories about how Connected Sheets has enabled them to achieve operational efficiencies and new ways of unlocking the power of their data; we’d like to share a few here.
Operate with agility
Now more than ever, it’s critical for organizations to react with flexibility and agility to new realities. Connected Sheets helps organizations harness and collaborate on massive amounts of data, making it easier to understand and quickly respond to today’s dynamic landscape.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) helps the UN and its partners deliver peace and security, humanitarian, and development solutions. As COVID-19 emerged, UNOPS used Connected Sheets to help coordinate a swift global response. Says Tushar Dighe, Chief Information Officer at UNOPS, “When the COVID-19 pandemic started, we needed to quickly assess the status of our operational capacity in order to assist governments with the response. We used a Connected Sheet with data from our BigQuery data warehouse combined with manual status inputs on the same Sheet, where colleagues in more than 80 countries were able to collaboratively provide inputs. The results in the form of pivots and charts were instantly available live. It took less than three hours to design and implement the solution, and we had status information from more than 80 countries within the first 24 hours.”
Improve business and financial reporting
Reports and dashboards displaying business metrics, like revenue figures or operational KPIs, play a critical role in organizations. These reports help sales teams track performance, enable finance teams to make projections, and provide business leaders with a picture of their organization’s health. Especially now, as businesses adapt their planning to reflect the new normal and employees remain dispersed, it’s doubly important that teams can quickly access and collaborate on business and financial dashboards, from wherever they are. But building and maintaining these reports can be time consuming and error-prone, and requests for changes or new views result in manual work for data analysts. All of this just extends the time to insight and action.
Connected Sheets helps automate report creation, while maintaining a single source of truth for data in BigQuery. The live connection between BigQuery and Sheets also means that data stays fresh, minimizing the risk that people make decisions based on outdated information and avoiding the data integrity risks of manual data pulls.
Says Alexander Danilowicz, a Software Engineer at data connectivity company LiveRamp, “Our Finance team uses Connected Sheets to automate reports that are shared with other stakeholders to run the business. This enables our business partners to analyze and create pivot tables on massive datasets, which is not possible in a traditional spreadsheet.”
“Now that it’s all integrated, there’s no human error involved. Changes can be made at the click of a button, resulting in 10 hours saved per month,” he adds.
Track product adoption
It’s important for teams across the business to understand customer adoption of products and services, whether it’s the product team tracking usage of a newly released feature or the support team trying to anticipate incoming service requests. Similarly, IT teams need to analyze adoption of an organization’s internal applications and systems, so they know what tools employees are using and how they are being used. But product adoption datasets are often too large for traditional spreadsheets to handle, and new data is continuously being added.
Connected Sheets can provide teams access to large, powerful, and up-to-date usage datasets, in the familiar Sheets interface. PwC, a global professional services organization, uses Connected Sheets as part of its efforts to make technology and data more accessible across its workforce. One way PwC uses Connected Sheets is to monitor and analyze internal adoption of tools like G Suite.
Says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC, “If you look at our own adoption dashboarding, it’s more than three terabytes of data—good luck putting that in any spreadsheet. With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet, rather it lives in the database where it belongs. The ability to go and so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”
We hope Connected Sheets helps to scale data-driven decision making at your organization, by making powerful data easily accessible across your sales, finance, product, and IT teams.
How Mailjet Sends 1.5 billion Emails a Month with Google Cloud
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Mailjet allows companies to create, send, and track millions of emails to their customers and prospects around the world each month. The company’s offerings range from routing these emails to tailor-made tools that allow clients to design and send marketing campaigns with messages related to sales, user clubs, coupons and discounts, and promotions, as well as transactional emails such as purchase confirmations, shipping confirmations, e-tickets, or password resets.
“All of our services are accessible through programming interfaces. We use the same APIs for ourselves and for our customers. This is part of our unique selling point, which is to make life easier for developers and marketers,” explains François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager at Mailjet.
Google Cloud Results
- Provides development, testing, and distribution infrastructure for Mailjet
- Smoothly absorbs up to 20X normal computing power
- Offers technical and economic flexibility on a pay-per-use basis, depending on the computing power consumed
The company scrupulously monitors its service quality to help ensure that emails sent on behalf of its customers don’t trigger spam filters, and that they obtain the best possible open and click rates.
From hosting to the cloud
In its early years, Mailjet used hosted servers. This model had several disadvantages. It was impossible to instantly activate or deactivate computing power; the company could not be charged for actual, to-the-minute usage; and it lacked the flexibility to add disk space or scale servers in real time.
At the beginning of 2016, Mailjet decided to switch to the public cloud in order to improve technical and economic flexibility. “This two-year evolution required us to review our developments. If we use a virtual machine even for just one hour, our computer code must be able to support it in order to preserve the consistency and integrity of the data and processes,” says Fanuel.
“We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.”
—François Fanuel, IT Operations Manager, Mailjet
Mailjet and Google were already partners. The marketing and transactional email specialist is one of only three providers in the world, and the only one in Europe, accredited by Google to send bulk emails through Google Cloud Platform. The choice—based on three main factors—was obvious.
Financial and technical considerations
Factor 1: the right price proportionality. “We are able to activate Google Compute Engine virtual machines on demand, without needing to reserve these instances. While the machine remains active, a sliding-scale price is applied, which is particularly attractive to us,” explains Fanuel.
Factor 2: the quality and level of technical communication. Mailjet has direct access to Google Cloud Platform engineers when required. The company has its own IP addressing infrastructure, which is the foundation of its service quality. “We needed a way to port our IP addresses to Google Compute Engine. In less than a month, the feature had been developed by Google engineers. This reactivity really impressed us and was definitely a deciding factor.” Since then, via specific tunnels, Mailjet IP addresses have been ported directly into Google Compute Engine.
Factor 3: conformity to international data regulations. Mailjet is the only email service provider to be ISO 27001 certified and GDPR-ready, enabling the company to offer its clients the highest level of data security and privacy. Google Cloud Platform is also ISO 27001 certified, which was an important factor for Mailjet.
Power through minimalism
In mid-2016, Mailjet replaced its 30 or so email sending servers installed at a hosting company with smaller Google Compute Engine virtual machines, using the automatic load-balancing function. “Using smaller virtual machines—but more of them—optimized our computing power.” This precision mechanism accompanied an increase in activity for the company, with the number of emails sent doubling every year. As for the company’s some 300 TB of data, this is stored in Google Cloud Storage.
The flexibility and power of Google Cloud Platform helps ensure that Mailjet can adapt to peaks in activity that can reach up to 20 times the normal flow—our customers usually send their messages at the same times and during the same peak periods. “Previously, we had to reserve a lot of computing power with our hosting company, equivalent to 150 servers. Moving to an on-demand infrastructure means we can avoid paying a disproportionate fixed annual cost.”
Google Cloud Platform also provides Mailjet with the infrastructure needed to process events centrally, which facilitates technical support. A new analytics dashboard in the making will provide customers access to their campaigns’ key metrics in real time—a circulation report, open rates, and click-through rates, as well as invalid email addresses— regardless of the volume of emails at stake.
From distribution to development
Following routing operations, the development environment is currently being ported to Google Cloud Platform, and will eventually represent 100 virtual servers. “The addition of any new code is iteratively tested in Google Cloud Platform. We benefit from machines that are custom made for our needs, from machines with one core and 3 gigabytes of memory, up to machines with 64 cores.”
Mailjet uses the Google Cloud Interconnect virtual private network to tailor sending flows by geographical location. “For customers who only use our routing service, we will soon have worldwide load balancers. This will help ensure their API requests are received and their emails are sent to Europe and America from one single IP point, thus avoiding transatlantic latency issues.”
Mailjet also uses the Google Identity Aware Proxy authentication tool. All its employees around the world benefit from unique, more secure access, whether they use Google Sites intranets, or the development, or production environment. “Google Cloud Platform delivers on all the promises of a public cloud: service customization, real-time computing power adjustment during periods of high and low demand, and instant activation of computing resources. For us, it’s the best possible ratio between price, performance, availability, and quality,” concludes Fanuel.
Go Green with Google’s Latest Tool and Pick the Most Sustainable Cloud Region
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As a Google Cloud customer, your carbon footprint is already carbon neutral: Google first achieved carbon neutrality in 2007, and has been purchasing enough solar and wind energy to match 100% of its global electricity consumption since 2017. Now, Google is targeting a new sustainability goal: operating on carbon-free energy (CFE) 24/7, everywhere, by 2030.
We want to empower you to make more sustainable decisions and progress with us towards this 24/7 carbon-free future. Earlier this year, we published the carbon characteristics of our Google Cloud regions. Later, we introduced a simple tool to help you pick a Google Cloud region, taking variables like price, latency and sustainability into account. Our next question was: what’s the best way to surface that sustainability info when you’re actually picking a region for your cloud resources?
Starting today, we are indicating regions with the lowest carbon impact inside Cloud Console location selectors. Available today for Cloud Run and Datastream, you’ll see it roll out to more Google Cloud offerings over time:
Regions that feature the “Lowest CO2” and the leaf have a CFE% of at least 75%, or, if the information is not available for this region yet, a grid carbon intensity of maximum 200 gCO2eq/kWh. You can read more about how we calculate these metrics in our documentation.
Before releasing this feature, we ran experiments to measure its impact: Users who were exposed to the enhanced region picker were 19% more likely to select a “low carbon” region for their Cloud Run service—a significant lift. These results show that by displaying carbon information in context of when you make the decision of picking a region, we are helping you make more sustainable decisions.
By sharing and displaying carbon information of Google Cloud regions, together we’re making tangible progress towards our goal of a carbon-free future. Learn more about Carbon free energy for Google Cloud regions.
Collaboration Helps Nielsen Gain Better Consumer Insights and Save Costs by 20%
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The Nielsen Company is one of the world’s most well-known and respected marketing research firms, with operations in over 100 countries. Its 56,000 employees work to provide insights and data that give customers a better understanding of what people watch, listen to, and buy.
Those insights are essential to companies in a variety of industries, including media and entertainment, consumer products, and retail, that must stay in touch with customers in a fast-changing marketplace.
In order to help customers get the information they need to increase ad sales and boost market share, Nielsen must empower its employees to collaborate across markets and global offices.
But Nielsen’s employees were working out of individual e-mail inboxes that delayed decision-making and made it difficult for the company to take immediate action on time-sensitive information.
The company saw an opportunity to improve collaboration by moving productivity apps to the cloud—Google Cloud’s G Suite—allowing employees to work anytime, anywhere, and on any device and collaborating in real-time.
“In keeping with our cloud-first strategy and digital transformation, we wanted to give our employees state-of-the-art collaboration tools,” says Kimberly Anstett, CIO at Nielsen. “We knew that a global, cloud-based toolset would help change the way everyone in the company works and maximize the value we deliver to our customers.”
Groupe Dauphinoise Grows it Customer Base with G Suite and Google Cloud Platform
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As a leading French agricultural cooperative, Groupe Dauphinoise places collaboration at the heart of its philosophy. Working with farmers in the Rhone-Alpes region, Groupe Dauphinoise takes on a diverse range of activities from agricultural production to research and development to running retail outlets.
As its operations expanded and strained its existing infrastructure, Groupe Dauphinoise saw the opportunity to upgrade its technology solutions and adopted G Suite, Chrome devices and ultimately Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream,” says Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT at Groupe Dauphinoise.
“We transitioned to G Suite to improve our staff’s collaboration. We quickly realized that as the company grew, we needed a new infrastructure. Based on our satisfaction with G Suite, we chose GCP. With Google, ‘any device, anytime, anywhere’ is not just a dream.”
—Sylvain Claudel, Head of IT, Groupe Dauphinoise
Flexible workforce, stable infrastructure
Many of Groupe Dauphinoise’s 1,500 employees spend their days out of the office. Five years ago, with the help of Google partner GoWizYou, the company transitioned to G Suite to improve the flexibility and collaboration of its staff.
As Groupe Dauphinoise began to expand and collect more data, the company reached the limits of its on-premise infrastructure. Adding new storage was not a simple matter. Acquiring, configuring and synchronising new servers costs Groupe Dauphinoise time as well as money. In addition, with all its servers stored in a single room, security was a concern. Groupe Dauphinoise needed a new infrastructure.
Google Cloud Platform was the only solution in mind after Groupe Dauphinoise’s experience with G Suite and Chromebooks. Disruption was kept to a minimum thanks to Google’s licensing agreements with Microsoft products, allowing the company to migrate without affecting its operations.
After migrating its infrastructure to Compute Engine, Groupe Dauphinoise can let Google look after the security and maintenance. Cloud IAM makes it easy for Groupe Dauphinoise to hand out permissions to sensitive resources across a number of sites with maximum security and minimum fuss. The company placed its archives in Cloud Storage, while Cloud SQL allows it to continue to make use of its MySQL databases without disrupting the day to day business. Meanwhile, BigQuery provides Groupe Dauphinoise with the raw power to analyse large datasets quickly.
“Our company is growing and we have more and more data to collect and analyze like sales data, weather patterns or production numbers. With GCP, we have more than a single on-premise data store, so our disaster recovery plan is much more flexible. Compute Engine allows us to add more storage quickly and easily, without having to spend days synchronizing data and installing new servers. We have improved security and maintained the stability of our infrastructure while keeping costs down,” says Sylvain.
Safeguarding the present, looking to the future
With Google Cloud Platform, Groupe Dauphinoise has expanded and secured its infrastructure without sinking costs into on-premise servers or DevOps staff. Its investment in Chrome devices and adoption of G Suite mean that its mobile workforce can fully reap the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure while dramatically cutting the cost of hardware. Meanwhile, working with a 200 million line table of sales data in Google BigQuery, the cooperative found that queries ran ten times faster than with its previous database provider. Groupe Dauphinoise is experimenting with Google BigQuery to expand its BI capabilities. Products like Google BigQuery help Groupe Dauphinoise grow its business, safe in the knowledge that its infrastructure is stable and secure.
“The amount of data we collect is growing very quickly. We need to break our rules and evolve from the mindset that we had with on-premise infrastructure and our old databases. We can now look at collecting more customer fidelity data, or big data for our farmers. With our data and infrastructure in Google’s care, we can concentrate on growing our customer base instead of our IT department!” says Sylvain.
Google Workspace Now has Adobe Add-on!
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Every day, individual people and creative teams combine Google Workspace with Adobe Creative Cloud to bring their best ideas to life and delight their customers or friends, across photography, design, video, 3D design, and more. In fact, Adobe’s add-on for Google Workspace has had over a million installs and counting. By partnering with Adobe, we’re helping people boost creative collaboration wherever and however they work together. And they can benefit from a potential tenfold increase in productivity that results from things like shared libraries and styles across all the apps they use.
We started integrating Adobe apps with Google Workspace last year by introducing Adobe XD integration into Flutter, enabling developers to simplify the design-to-development workflow, and letting creative teams design apps in XD and convert those designs into Flutter code with the click of a button.
Next, we brought together Adobe Creative Cloud and Gmail to make it easier to share links to your creative assets with external teams and stakeholders through email. With this integration, you can search for your Creative Cloud assets and attach public links to synced files, libraries, and creations made on mobile devices without leaving Gmail. You can also save any attachments received in Gmail directly to Creative Cloud in a few clicks.
This year we are furthering our collaboration with Adobe with some exciting new capabilities. We’re integrating Adobe Creative Cloud with Docs and Slides, and launching Adobe Creative Cloud for Chrome.
The integration of Adobe Creative Cloud with Docs and Slides will give creative and business stakeholders a single source of truth and a powerful new way to manage brand assets. With easy access to Creative Cloud Libraries inside both Adobe Creative Cloud (with apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, XD, and more) and inside Google Workspace (with apps like Gmail, Docs, and Slides), marketing and product design teams can seamlessly share work, get feedback, and stay connected along the way. Learn more about this integration.
Adobe Creative Cloud for Chrome is a new extension that lets designers draw inspiration from the web’s most beautiful designs and artwork. Whether you’re looking for color combinations, patterns, vector shapes, or gradients extracted from images, the new Chrome extension helps you capture them from the source and apply them to your own design work. Adobe Capture features are available on mobile, on desktop for Photoshop and Creative Cloud Libraries, and now on the web, so wherever and whenever inspiration strikes, you’ll be ready to capture the moment. This feature became available in May. Learn more
These new integrations between Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Workspace and Google Chrome let creatives focus on what they do best: ideate, create, and innovate. Creative teams of 1 or 100 have fast, seamless access to the digital assets and editor tools that bring their work to life. And they’re ready to capture inspiration from the web whenever and wherever it strikes using Google Chrome. We’re committed to boosting creative collaboration in Google Workspace with Adobe as a trusted partner. Start using Google Workspace and Creative Cloud today.
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