IDC Survey: Why 95% of CEOs Have a Digital-first Strategy
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When IDC recently asked CEOs what single word most reflects what their organization needs to thrive in 2022, the overwhelming response was “technology.” CEOs want to acquire greater digital know-how as they recognize that technology will underpin the business model of the future.
Digital transformation, already well underway, is becoming digital first.
In fact, an astonishing 95% of CEOs see the need to adopt a digital-first strategy, according to IDC, and the majority of organizations are down the path of executing their plans. Currently, they report that about 30% of their organization’s revenue comes from digital products, services and experiences, a figure that will reach past 40% by 2027.
But what will power this digital-first enterprise? Successful large-scale digital transformations are executed by a diverse set of partners and vendors—including a cloud partner, valuable channel partners and resellers, independent software vendors (commonly called ISVs), and services partners; multiple cloud partners are even becoming quite common.
These networks of experts are increasingly the driver behind enterprise transformation. They help companies and organizations to establish an actively managed and governed cloud ecosystem that integrates native and third-party solutions, which can create shared value for all partners from the latest digital technologies. In fact, 85% of CEOs told IDC that actively participating in digital ecosystems is important to their revenue growth.
The new digital agenda is built on cloud ecosystems
Recently, I sat down with the author of the IDC CEO survey, Philip Carter. He’s the group vice president, European chief analyst, and worldwide C-suite tech research lead at IDC, and I wanted to better understand from him how executives are approaching their digital-first mission.
He explained that CEOs are turning to cloud platforms as a primary partner to put in place new, industry-specific digital business models. These platforms are at the center of “industry value networks” that accelerate time to value and benefit from cloud architecture’s ability to deliver scale, extensibility, and AI-driven experiences to create new revenue streams.
At Google Cloud, we have made building such industry value networks a priority, comprising of:
- Google Cloud, which provides the infrastructure and develops industry-specific data and analytics capabilities using artificial intelligence.
- Broader Google product areas like Google Shopping, Ads, Maps, Pay, Assistant, Android and Chrome.
- Independent software vendors (ISVs) relevant to a specific industry, who co-innovate with Google to provide end-to-end solutions to industry problems.
- System integrators (SIs) with deep industry knowledge who build the strategy and implement the business transformation for customers.
As an example, Google Cloud customers across multiple industries are looking for digital transformation to reinvent their core functions, such as supply chain. They might be identifying new distribution channels or restructuring their inventory. Google Cloud understands how to link the enterprise ecosystem with the consumer ecosystem. We can help enterprises access this broader ecosystem while leveraging AI-driven insights from data to help inform decisions in real time, at the point of engagement.
Google Cloud’s partner ecosystem can help achieve multiple items on the C-suite tech agenda such as improving customer experience, powering enterprise intelligence, building trust, supporting a distributed workplace, driving innovation, and streamlining operations.
According to IDC, 75% of all organizations will be completely digitally transformed by 2030. Google Cloud has been working hard with our partners to create an extensive ecosystem that can help your organization achieve its digital transformation ahead of competitors. This includes co-developing and co-innovating industry-specific solutions with a host of partners in key areas such as operations, enterprise intelligence, customer experience, workplace productivity, innovation, security, and trust.
And over the next few years, Google Cloud will double its investment in its partner ecosystem with increased co-innovation resources, more incentives, and co-marketing campaigns and funding. We’ll also offer greater integration into the Google Cloud Marketplace and a larger commitment to training and enablement.
For more insights on the C-suite “Future of Enterprise” agenda, you can watch my full IDC interview. You might also download our ebook featuring IDC data on the future of enterprise with ecosystem examples from partners like AMD, Confluent, Fortinet, Genesys, Informatica, and Workspot.
Our goal is to provide comprehensive best-in-class support for our mutual customers’ digital transformations. As we look toward that goal, one thing is for sure: Our ecosystem of partners will continue to grow, adding solutions to meet the needs of digital-first enterprises. Care to join us on that journey?
A Step-by-Step Guide to Lift-and-Shift a Line of Business Application onto Google Cloud
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Want to move an existing business application to the Cloud? Want to make sure that the process is painless, easy, reliable, and provides the necessary cost benefits?
Well, it’s not as complex as many technology professionals think. On the contrary, by understanding the various steps involved in the process, identifying the right set of tools, listing the various phases of the migration process and the tasks involved under each phase, the whole lifting-and-shifting of the business application on to the Cloud can be pretty easy.
Still not convinced? Google Cloud has the answer.
Read the whitepaper and understand how you can:
- Lift-and-shift an existing line of business application onto Google Cloud.
- Identify the steps involved in this migration process.
- Identify and list the various phases involved in the migration process.
- Understand the sub-tasks involved under each of the phases.
- Get the required documentation and support.
- Achieve the migration without changing or adding any code.
Download the Whitepaper to Find Out
Earth Week: Google Cloud at the Heart of Sustainability
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Today’s Google Doodle reminds us of the enormous changes our planet is experiencing due to climate change. Everyone, from businesses to governments to technologists, has the opportunity to meet this challenge — transforming themselves and their organizations to be more sustainable. For this Earth Day 2022, and indeed Earth Week, Google Cloud celebrates the organizations and individuals who are fighting climate change with innovative technology. We don’t want you to miss a thing, so here’s a recap of all our news in one handy location.
We asked global CEOs: what is it going to take to make progress on sustainability in your org?
In a survey of 1,500 CXOs across 16 countries, many executives say they are willing to do what it takes to have more sustainable practices. But despite their ambition, real measures of impact are lacking. To see what will change that, check out the blog.
We announced a new innovation challenge supporting climate science and research…
Our blog on Monday announced the Climate Innovation Challenge Research Credits program, to support researchers as they work to better understand climate change, increase climate resilience and develop new, promising solutions to urgent climate challenges. You can apply for research credits here.
…and shared stories of researchers making a difference
We interviewed Dr. Richard Fernandes from Natural Resources Canada, who built the LEAF toolbox that maps and assesses vegetation with satellite data from Google Earth Engine. You can read our Q&A here.
Canada has approximately 10 million square kilometers of land and the annual data volume of these maps is equivalent to streaming HD movies for over 750 hours non-stop. Cloud computing allows us to manage all this data in a useful and accessible way.Dr. Fernandes, Research Scientist
We also published a story about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, and how they use Google Cloud processing and analysis tools to help sustainably manage 193 million acres of land.
We turned the lights on at new clean energy projects in four countries…
We shared details of our battery project in Belgium, solar projects in Denmark, and wind projects in Chile and Finland. Our battery project in Belgium is the first of its kind, enabling us to switch from diesel generators to a cleaner backup solution that will keep the internet up and running in the event of a power disruption. These will all help us continue to operate the cleanest cloud in the industry.
…and made it easier to learn how to build applications more sustainably
We launched a new lab that walks users through our Carbon Sense suite of products. From using our region picker app to make low-carbon architecture decisions, to analyzing the carbon footprint of your Google Cloud app with Carbon Footprint, we’re building sustainability into the tools you use every day. You can also find Carbon Footprint training in the new Data Warehouse Cloud On-Board.
We formed an ecosystem of partners to help accelerate sustainability projects…
The Google Cloud partner ecosystem is critical to helping our customers act sustainably today. A new whitepaper produced in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group shares real-world solutions that could make an immediate impact — not in the next decade, but right now.
…and shared stories of innovative startups changing the game with Google Cloud.
Take Enexor and its partners, who are producing clean and sustainable energy from discarded plastics and agro-waste. The blog from Lee Jestings, Enexor Founder & CEO, shares how Google for Startups got them started, and which Google Cloud tools help them build predictive models. Check out their story.
Or Nuuly, the rental and resale business created by the URBN portfolio, which also includes Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People. In the blog you can read how Nuuly is using technology to provide a sustainable experience to employees and customers — from upcycling clothing, to recyclable and reusable packaging.
Whether you’re a startup, scientist, executive or developer, at Google Cloud we’ll continue to work hard to help make your digital transformation a sustainable one.
Learn more about our sustainability work here, and don’t miss the inaugural Cloud Sustainability Summit this June. Register now.
Cloud Bigtable brings database stability and performance to Precognitive
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At Precognitive, we were able to start with a blank technology slate to support our fraud detection software products. When we started building the initial version of our platform in 2017, we had some decisions to make: What coding language to use? What cloud infrastructure provider to choose? What database to use? The majority of the decisions were straightforward, but we struggled to decide upon a database. We had plenty of collective experience with relational databases, but not with a wide-column database like Cloud Bigtable—which we knew we’d need to scale our behavior and device workloads. At launch, our products were supported by a self-managed database, but we quickly migrated to Cloud Bigtable, and we love it.
To efficiently support our bursty, real-time fraud detection workloads, we needed a cloud database that could satisfy the following key requirements:
- Stability to keep up with increased adoption of our products
- Intelligent scaling that avoids bottlenecks
- Native integrations with BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc
- Managed services that free up our engineers’ time to work on our products
Adding Cloud Bigtable as our performance database
As we scaled our services and added customers, our data collection services for our Device Intelligence and Behavioral Analytics products were seeing thousands of events per second. Cloud Bigtable provided a stable managed database that could handle the volume we were receiving during peak hours. We weren’t always able to handle this scale, as an early version of our product utilized a self-managed database.
Every month, two or three engineers spent hours managing the database instances. Whenever the instances crashed, it would cost at least one engineer a day or two of productivity attempting to restore the instances and recovering any data from our backup database. Managing this database internally was taking precious time away from product development.
We circled back to Cloud Bigtable. After two weeks of R&D, we decided to switch the Device Intelligence and Behavioral Analytics services to Cloud Bigtable.
Cloud Bigtable solved our scaling issues. Cloud Bigtable had been attractive to us from the start because it was fully managed, and offered regional replication and other features we were lacking in our own managed instances. Cloud Bigtable provides horizontal scaling and automatically rebalances row keys (equivalent to a shard key) over time to prevent “hot” nodes. In addition, Cloud Bigtable provides a connector to BigQuery and Cloud Dataproc that allows us to analyze the terabytes of data we are processing and use that data for unsupervised machine learning.
The perks of using Cloud Bigtable
After the migration to Cloud Bigtable, we noticed a number of additional benefits: improved I/O performance, a significant cost reduction, and a sizable decrease in hours spent on database maintenance.
We measured some of our typical metrics before and after implementing Cloud Bigtable. Our request latency dropped by about 30 ms on average (to sub-10 ms) for API requests. Prior to the change, we were seeing latencies of 40+ ms on average. This latency drop on our Behavioral Analytics and Device Intelligence products allowed us to trim about an additional 10 to 15 ms off our average response time across all dependent services.
Before we moved to Cloud Bigtable, we had to scale our database instances every time a new customer was onboarded. We were over-scaling in an attempt to avoid constantly resizing our database servers. By sunsetting our self-managed database and switching to Cloud Bigtable, we cut database infrastructure costs by approximately 35% and can now scale as needed, with a couple of clicks, during onboarding.
We have spent zero hours managing a Cloud Bigtable database since launch, and we put the time we are saving every month toward product development.
Moving forward with Cloud Bigtable
As an engineering team, we love working with Cloud Bigtable. We are not only seeing improved developer experience and reduced latency, which keeps the engineers happy, but also reduced costs, which keeps the business happy. We’re able to build more product, too, with the time we’ve saved by switching to Cloud Bigtable. Stay tuned to our engineering blog for more on the lessons we’ve learned and our contributions to the wider Cloud Bigtable community.
Three German Retail Firms Choose Google Cloud to Migrate SAP Workloads for Business Transformation
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The retail industry is rapidly evolving, with customers demanding exceptional digital experiences, and retailers adjusting their businesses to be more efficient. With many retailers relying on SAP for critical business functions like digital transactions, finance, supply chains and more, this shift has led them to look for ways to modernize these systems, deliver them on highly scalable infrastructure, and extract more value out of the data from within them.
I’m proud that we are helping German retailers successfully migrate business-critical SAP systems onto Google Cloud, minimizing risk and downtime and ultimately helping them build a foundation for future growth. Our work with retailers like Otto Group, one of the world’s largest ecommerce businesses, MediaMarktSaturn, the large consumer electronics retailer, and METRO, the wholesale retailer with operations across Europe, demonstrates our deep partnership with SAP to support customers’ digital transformations.
Helping Otto Group IT run SAP on secure, sustainable infrastructure
Otto Group, a leading online-retailer and services group in Germany and one of the world’s largest ecommerce companies, migrated their SAP workloads to Google Cloud in order to modernize their SAP landscape and build a more agile environment that would enable them to quickly scale up or down according to business needs.
The Otto Group, which consistently balances the sustainable use of resources and climate-neutral action with economic growth, is also able to leverage Google Cloud’s clean infrastructure to deliver the bulk of its internal SAP environment, ensuring the company’s business systems are running on secure, sustainable infrastructure. Since 2017, Google has matched 100% of its global electricity use with purchases of renewable energy every year, and is now building on that progress with a new goal of running entirely on carbon-free energy at all times by 2030.
With Google Cloud, Otto Group has told us they have access to better means of automation and improved network capability compared to what they had with their previous provider. Through this cloud migration, Otto Group IT is providing modern and flexibly scalable SAP systems to their internal customers.
Powering MediaMarktSaturn’s online ecommerce experience
For MediaMarktSaturn, SAP is critical to the smooth day-to-day running of its business, so the company was keen to ensure maximum availability and stability with a cloud environment. After a thorough examination of its business needs and hands-on support from Google Cloud’s teams, MediaMarktSaturn elected to migrate its SAP HANA database onto Google Cloud, enabling a performance increase of four times compared to its previous on-premises installations.
The SAP suite is critical for the ecommerce platform to run smoothly on a day-to-day basis. By migrating to Google Cloud, the retailer is providing even more support and maximum availability for its customers. With Google Cloud’s industry-specific expertise, MediaMarktSaturn’s customers have access to a reliable and stable ecommerce platform, so they can browse for products online from wherever they are.
Transforming METRO’s business by running SAP workloads in the cloud
With more than 97,000 employees in 34 countries, Germany’s METRO is one of the world’s largest B2B wholesalers. Previously, METRO relied on unique finance systems that were different in each country, and updates or system testing required substantial coordination across numerous teams, which was both time-consuming and costly.
To address these pain points, METRO is moving away from on premise deployments and is now migrating its SAP S/4HANA finance systems to Google Cloud to support everything from classical role-based accounting to the use of cognitive tools. Now, internal METRO teams can work seamlessly across operations, enhancing the services they provide to customers by addressing demands in real time.
To read more about how SAP on Google Cloud drives agility, efficiency, and innovation for our customers, visit our solutions page here.
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A Winner’s Story of Optimizing IT Operations for Informed Business Decisions with Google Cloud
An award-winning leader in the enterprise software industry, Broadcom Software is known for modernizing, securing and optimizing the most complex and largest hybrid environments. It’s broad portfolio of industry-leading, enterprise infrastructure and security software built on different tech stack and vision of tech leaders, are run on on-prem, private and public cloud and operated differently. To have a unified standard platform to run their wide range of products, Broadcom Software needed infrastructure as a service and Kubernetes orchestration layer, standard DevOps and security practices as well as common set of DevSecOps tools. Although the company knew there was no common ground to run all their products, migrating products into container-based architecture, they discovered many common strands that they could leverage for efficiency. Watch to learn the role played by Google Cloud in the Broadcom’s transformation!
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