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.
Two Ways to Deploy SAP HANA System on Google Cloud
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Many of the world’s leading companies run on SAP—and deploying it on Google Cloud extends the benefits of SAP even further. Migrating your current SAP S/4HANA deployment to Google Cloud—whether it resides on your company’s on-premises servers or another cloud service—provides your organization with a flexible virtualized architecture that lets you scale your environment to match your workloads, so you pay only for the compute and storage capacity you need at any given moment. Google Cloud includes built-in features, such as Compute Engine live migration and automatic restart, that minimize downtime for infrastructure maintenance. And it allows you to integrate your SAP data with multiple data sources and process it using Google Cloud technology such as BigQuery to drive data analytics.
SAP server-side architecture consists of two layers: the SAP HANA database, and the Netweaver application layer. In this blog post, we’ll look at the options and steps for moving the database layer to Google Cloud as a lift and shift or rehost, a straightforward approach that entails moving your current SAP environment unchanged onto Google Cloud.
Deploying an SAP HANA system on Google Cloud
Google Cloud offers SAP-certified virtual machines (VMs) optimized for SAP products, including SAP HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, as well as dedicated servers for SAP HANA for environments greater than 12TB. (For a complete list of VM and hardware options, visit the Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware Directory.)
Before proceeding with a rehost migration to Google Cloud, your current (source) environment and Google Cloud (target) environments should meet these specifications:
Prerequisites:
- The configuration of the Google Cloud environment (i.e., VM resources, SSD storage capacity) should be identical to that of the source environment. If the underlying hardware is different, however, you must use Option 2 for your migration, detailed below.
- Both environments should be running the same operating system (SUSE or RHEL Linux).
- The HANA version, instance number, and system ID (SID) should be identical.
- Schema names must remain the same.
- Establishing the network connection between the on-premises environment and Google Cloud will be required in this phase to support rehost of the SAP application.you can use Cloud VPN or Dedicated Interconnect. Learn more about Dedicated Interconnect and Cloud VPN.
Note: Depending on your internet connection and bandwidth requirements, we recommend using a Dedicated Interconnect over Cloud VPN for production environments.
We offer a number of automated processes to accelerate your cloud journey. To deploy the SAP HANA system on Google Cloud, you can use the Google Cloud Deployment manager or Terraform and Ansible scripts available on GitHub with configuration file templates to define your installation. For more details, see the Google Cloud SAP HANA Planning Guide.
Note: To deploy SAP HANA on Google Cloud machine types that are certified by SAP for production, please review the Certification for SAP HANA on Google Cloud page.
Moving an SAP HANA Database to Google Cloud
There are two different options you can use to rehost your SAP HANA database to Google Cloud, and each has pros and cons that you should consider when deciding on your approach.
Option 1: Asynchronous replication uses SAP’s built-in replication tool to provide continuous data replication from the source system (also known as the primary system) to the destination or secondary system—in this case residing on Google Cloud. It’s best for mission-critical applications for which minimum downtime is a high priority, and for large databases. In addition, the high level of automation means that the process requires less manual intervention. Here’s where you can learn more on HANA Asynchronous Replication.
Option 2: Backup and restore relies on SAP’s backup utility to create an image of the database that is then transferred to Google Cloud, where it is restored in the new environment. Downtime for this method varies by database size, so large databases may require more downtime via this method vs. asynchronous replication. It also involves more manual tasks. However, it requires fewer resources to perform, making it an attractive option for less urgent use cases. Here’s where you can learn more on SAP HANA database Backup and restore.
How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Asynchronous Replication
- Create and configure Dedicated Interconnect or Cloud VPN between the current environment and Google Cloud.
- Set up SAP HANA asynchronous replication. You can configure system replication using SAP HANA Cockpit, SAP HANA Studio, or hdbnsutil. See Setting Up SAP HANA System Replication in the SAP HANA Administration Guide.
- Be sure to use the same instance number and HANA SID in the template as the primary instance.
- Configure the Google Cloud instance as the secondary node for using HANA Asynchronous replication.
- Perform data validation once full data replication is completed to the SAP HANA database in Google Cloud. To learn more: HANA System Replication overview.
- Perform an SAP HANA takeover on your standby database. This switches your active system from the current primary system onto the secondary system on Google Cloud. Once the takeover command runs, the system on Google Cloud becomes the new primary system.To learn more: HANA Takeover.
How to migrate the SAP HANA database to Google Cloud using Backup and Restore
- Create a full backup of your SAP HANA database in your current environment.
- Create a new storage bucket in your Google Cloud environment. Visit Creating Storage Buckets in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.
- Download and install gsutil onto the source environment and run it to upload the HANA backup to the Google Cloud storage bucket. To install gsutil utility on any computer or server, visit Install gsutil in the Google Cloud Storage documentation.
Note: You can run parallel multi thread/multi processing in gsutil to copy large files more quickly. - Recover the HANA database on Google Cloud using SAP’s RECOVER DATABASE statement. See RECOVER DATABASE Statement (Backup and Recovery) in the SAP HANA SQL Reference Guide for SAP HANA Platform.
Note: BackInt agent is an integrated SAP interface tool used for HANA database on Google Cloud.Backint agent for SAP HANA can be used to store and retrieve backups directly from Google Cloud Storage. It is supported and certified by SAP on Google Cloud. To learn more: SAP HANA Backint Agent on Google Cloud.
In summary, we recommend using Asynchronous Replication (Option 1) for mission-critical applications that require the lowest downtime window. For all other applications, we recommend Backup and Restore (Option 2), as this approach requires fewer resources. It’s also a great way to implement the backup and restore functionality on Google Cloud.
A rehost migration is the most straightforward path to getting your SAP on HANA system up and running on Google Cloud. And the sooner you migrate, the sooner you can take advantage of the many benefits Google Cloud brings to your SAP solution. For more information on the different migration options please review: SAP on Google Cloud: Migration strategies.
Learn more about deploying SAP on Google Cloud. Technical resources can be found here.
How This Online Shoe Retailer Transformed Itself by Reducing its Workload by Two Hours Per Day
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By offering customers a choice of 30,000 shoe styles at reasonable prices with a straightforward returns policy, Footway has become one of the largest online shoe retailers in Europe. Founded in 2011 and based in Kista, Sweden, the company has grown to become a market leader and four years ago acquired the Heppo and Brandos brands.
In 2017, Footway expanded from the Nordic market to seven other European countries: Poland, Holland, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
To build the business, Footway has had to prove to its customers that buying shoes online is quick and easy. That means, at the backend, processing returns and queries efficiently to provide a seamless consumer experience. However, as the company’s IT infrastructure grew organically, its data storage procedures were not clearly systematized, which made it difficult to implement the efficient, time-saving processes that enable Footway to provide its excellent customer service.
The company needed to move its team onto a system that would resolve this issue, and make compliance to ever-changing data regulations easier. Implementing G Suite was the answer.
“One of our strategic objectives is to automate processes and increase efficiency in our organization,” says Louise Liljedahl, HR Manager and Co-founder at Footway. “We want to work more efficiently every day. One of our main goals with the G Suite project was to get everyone working in the same platform with good structure.”
Systematizing data storage
In order for a relatively small team to run a big retail operation, good organization and process automation are key. Before working with Google Cloud, Footway’s communications and data storage processes were not systematized, making it difficult to work effectively. “Our internal IT had many different places to save files, and, for example, no structure for where to save pictures or graphic elements or where to archive agreements,” explains Louise. “Another trigger for change was the GDPR. To be compliant, we needed to see who has access to what information, and looked for good audit systems to control those permissions”. To do that, Footway implemented G Suite.
With support from implementation partner Avalon Solutions, the migration of the company’s calendar, contacts, and email data using CloudMigrator was swift and seamless. “The transformation process was very lean and quick,” says Louise. “We had a small test group of six people working with G Suite for two weeks to see how to move over to Google Sheets from Excel, for example. Everyone was very enthusiastic.”
To systematize its storage and make day-to-day working easier, Footway moved its document and images to Google Drive. This means Footway can control access both internally and externally. “Google Drive helps us keep everything in the right place. And it is definitely an easier way to share things when it comes to working with external partners, as we know exactly who we’re sharing documents and information with.”
Increasing automation
Following the move to G Suite, Footway automated communications with influencers and bloggers using Gmail and Google Forms. This saves time and means more bloggers can be contacted.
“We send automatic emails through G Suite to different influencers to set up cooperative agreements and partnerships,” says Louise. “Using Gmail and Forms has helped us to go from having contact with 4 bloggers a day, to 200 a day. The person responsible saves two hours a day from his or her workload with this new process.”
Achieving stable growth
Thanks to G Suite, Footway’s data is now organized in a way that is easily accessible and highly secure. “It’s much easier to find company and client information because it’s structured,” says Louise. “That saves a lot of time when searching for something.” The ways people can collaborate have also been transformed, as Footway made the switch to using Google Chromebook, encouraging more flexible working and spontaneous collaboration. “Before, people would take notes on paper and come back to their computer to write everything down. Now they use their Chromebooks instead and have more small, spontaneous meetings.”
Now, Footway plans to extend the use of Chromebooks and to use the functions G Suite offers to further automate the company’s daily processes and grow the business. “People tend to be fearful of change, but this one has been very positive for the whole organization,” says Louise. “We’re excited about how G Suite can help us as a company to grow in a stable way. We can automate processes and use Google products to work more efficiently.”
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Say Hello to Google Workspace
Make way for Google Workspace to connect, create, and collaborate with your team and organization. Watch the video to explore how you can achieve more with Google Workspace and how it can transform the future of workplace!
A Road to Possibilities: Google Maps Platform Website
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For more than 15 years, developers have used Google Maps Platform to deliver location-based experiences to their end users and used location intelligence to optimize their businesses. Along this journey, we’ve made a variety of changes to better support our community as needs have changed and new industries and technologies have emerged. We started rolling out a new website experience, at https://mapsplatform.google.com, to help you better understand the products and solutions best suited to address your objectives. Plus, now you can directly connect to the developer documentation for each product to get started quickly, and you can visualize usage and associated costs to have a better idea of what to expect before getting started.
Getting to your solution faster
Maps, Routes, Places are building blocks that let you develop implementations for any use case. Building for specific use cases, however, typically requires using a combination of APIs and SDKs. To help you quickly understand what’s possible and what you need to build for your use case, you can now visit the solutions tab to select from a list of popular use cases or industries. Once you’ve selected a use case or industry, you’re taken to a page where you can explore relevant products, read helpful blog posts, see how other customers have deployed for similar use cases, and more.
Direct access to developer documentation
Did you know there are more than a thousand pages of developer documentation created to help you get started, unblock you when you’re stuck, and share best practices? Now when you explore a product or solution from the Google Maps Platform website, you can easily navigate back and forth between our website and documentation. Just tap on JS, iOS, Android or API under the product name to get to the documentation you need.
Budgeting for your project
To help you calculate pricing for your project, we’ve introduced a new pricing calculator. Once you find the product and API or SDK you plan to use, pull the slider to reflect your estimated number of monthly requests. This will automatically update the “monthly cost” column for each product and API or SDK you plan to use. If your estimated monthly requests exceed the slider limit, contact our sales team to learn about volume discounts that start at 20% off.
We hope our new website makes it easier to discover our products and solutions, estimate your budget, and start building with our documentation so you can deliver helpful experiences to your users and optimize your business.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit https://mapsplatform.google.com.
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Dr. Alan Hippe, CFO & CIO, Roche Group, shares how collaboration tools help healthcare firms like the Roche Group take timely decisions that help them focus on saving patients’ lives.
For over 110 years, Roche has been pioneering the discovery, development, production and marketing of novel healthcare solutions. Our focus has always been on innovation.
The way our employees communicate and collaborate is diverse, and our employees are spread globally.
Our two different email and calendaring platforms have often been an obstacle for effective collaboration. To end these platform interoperability issues, the Roche Corporate Executive Committee made the decision that all employees will move to G Suite as the single common platform for the Roche Group.
The integrated and socially-focused way that G Suite enables collaboration is very compelling, and we expect this to not only bring our company closer together but give us a strategic advantage. Additionally, being able to deploy G Suite features by simply enabling them via a control panel versus planning for and deploying complex infrastructure in our data-centers will help us focus on our core business–helping save patients’ lives.
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