Since 2007, PrestaShop has helped companies unlock the power of e-commerce through its open-source platform. Over 300,000 merchants worldwide use the PrestaShop platform to grow their business and serve online shoppers.

“Our open-source strategy to ecommerce enablement sets us apart,” says Rémi Paulin, Ph.D., Data Architect at PrestaShop. “Customization is becoming more crucial to retailers, and our open-source platform allows companies to continually evolve their sites and services to stand out from competitors.”

As PrestaShop grew, it wished to derive more value from its data, but the company ran into issues caused by a legacy, siloed architecture that negatively impacted data consistency and accessibility.

Let’s look at how PrestaShop works with Google Cloud and partners Fivetran and Hightouch to gain more control over data, enable a beyond-BI data strategy, and increase employee engagement from less than 10% to more than 40%.

Improving trust in data

Core systems at PrestaShop, including SQL and NoSQL databases, and SaaS Applications, were siloed; each presenting its own data, often captured from different sources such as support tickets, marketing engagement, purchase activity, and product usage. This setup made data overall inconsistent as no single system would contain a source of truth, resulting in many inefficiencies, poor collaboration across teams, and a reluctance to use data to support key decisions.

“Not long ago, less than 10% of the company regularly relied on data, so we were missing opportunities to make more data-driven decisions,” says Paulin. “Data was underutilized, and people were rapidly losing trust in data.”

PrestaShop set out to design a new architecture to address past challenges, such as lack of data consistency, and improve data accessibility.

“Google Cloud, along with Hightouch and Fivetran, allowed us to build a modern stack to solve these challenges and support our beyond-BI data strategy.”

Building a modern data stack

The first step was to build a robust data ingestion pipeline. After considering several vendors, PrestaShop chose to work with Fivetran to extract data from SaaS applications, including Zendesk, HubSpot, and GitHub, to load into BigQuery. They also use Datastream to stream Change Data Capture (CDC) data from transactional databases into BigQuery in real-time.

“Fivetran and Datastream are no-ops, efficient and highly reliable, and relieve our Data Engineers of management tasks. This brings us a high degree of confidence to build the rest of the stack atop these services,” says Paulin.

PrestaShop relies on several Google Cloud solutions, including Dataflow, and a managed Spark service by Ascend.io, for data transformation. It also uses Looker for its semantic modeling capacities and as a self-serve data platform.

As the company continued on its journey to transform how it manages and benefits from data, it engaged Hightouch to enable data accessibility through activation. Sitting on top of Looker, Hightouch unlocks all data models for operational intelligence. For example, in just a few days, the team built a customer knowledge model combining data from multiple sources and used Hightouch to sync data from the semantic layer to Zendesk via Reverse ETL. This allowed the care team to make more data-informed decisions, speeding up the time to resolve support tickets submitted through Zendesk by 33%.

“Hightouch feels like a natural extension of Looker and reinforces the position of the semantic data model as the single source of truth,” says Paulin. “It powers a variety of Data Activation use cases, supporting our beyond-BI strategy by providing teams with access to data when and where they need it to improve everyday operations. This has a big impact on the company, bolstering employee trust in available data.”

Becoming data-driven

In less than six months, PrestaShop managed to get the entire data stack up and running, build over 30 data models and engage over 120 employees with a small team of only two Data Engineers.

“Data is now accessible to every stakeholder within the company, regardless of their technical abilities,” says Paulin.

PrestaShop has already seen much progress in its shift to a more data-driven company and is excited to roll out more self-service intelligence capabilities in the future.

“Google Cloud drives home a culture of simplicity around our data stack, which is essential for us, especially given the small size of our engineering team,” says Paulin. “Fivetran and Hightouch share this culture of simplicity. Together, they offer strong foundations to support our data needs.”

Dashboards, which the company had always had an appetite for, are seamlessly created today. Before moving to Looker, a full-fledged dashboard would take an average of six weeks to develop. Now, it takes less than two days – and a simple dashboard can be created autonomously by business users in as little as 15 minutes.

Furthermore, data usage goes beyond dashboards. Thanks to Looker’s self-service exploration capabilities, many stakeholders can now glean insights surrounding product issues and business opportunities. Thanks to Hightouch, teams can activate their data to make better and smarter operational decisions.

“This is a big leap forward and one of many to come as we continue to add new models, activate our data, and onboard more users,” says Paulin. “Given our global reach and unique approach to e-commerce enablement, we know this is just the start of the great things we can accomplish with Google Cloud, Fivetran, and Hightouch.”

Check out Fivetran on Google Cloud Marketplace, or sign up for a free Hightouch workspace to learn more about what partners can do for your business.

Do hamburgers really come from Hamburg? This may still be a matter of debate, but the popularity of American-style burger joints not just in Hamburg but all over Germany, is clear. Germany’s top two fast food companies are both burger chains. One of them is BURGER KING®, a global brand that welcomes more than 11 million customers worldwide every day. The company arrived in Germany in 1976, when its first restaurant opened in Berlin. It now operates more than 100 restaurants across Germany, with franchisees operating more than 600 restaurants of their own.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important. That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

Previously a subsidiary of the U.S. business, BURGER KING® Germany became an independent company in 2015. As a result, it needed to develop its own IT infrastructure, and the changeover needed to happen fast. “We had to put in place systems that would work for the entire network of franchisees and enable us to easily roll out campaigns,” explains Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager at BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH.

With the help of Google Cloud Premier partner Cloudwürdig, BURGER KING® Germany chose Google Cloud and G Suite as the right combination to suit its needs.

“In the fast food industry, being able to move quickly is very important,” says Oliver. “That means delivering the right promotion to our app or launching a viral campaign within days. To do that across more than 700 restaurants, we need the support of the right technology.”

Building a franchisee platform in just three months

When a business has multiple franchisees, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page, especially in the fast-paced fast food environment. “We have to collate data from all our franchisees and produce reports quickly in order to react to changes in customer behavior,” explains Oliver. “That means processing every transaction that takes place in our restaurants.” Following the restructure, BURGER KING® Germany also needed to build a secure invoicing system with data storage and optimize its communication channels.

“Using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

With support from Witter-IT, BURGER KING® Germany chose Cloudwürdig to build its BKD Connect internal platform on Google Cloud. Thanks to the ready-to-go tools on Google Cloud, it was able to put its invoicing system and data warehouse in place in just three months.

For the BURGER KING® Germany data warehouse, Cloudwürdig built an ETL pipeline that channels ticket data for every sale into BigQuery. “Data is gathered from the restaurants,” says Oliver, “and using Tableau with BigQuery, we’re able to produce reports very quickly. Previously, it took much longer, as data had to be fetched manually. Our reaction time is now almost a business day faster.”

As the ticket data for every transaction is stored in BigQuery, the marketing team can easily see exactly which products are selling well. That’s crucial for tweaking promotions as well as monitoring the supply chain to make sure enough produce is delivered to restaurants in response to changes in demand.

“Thanks to BigQuery, we have a speedy data pipeline that enables us to react on the same day to changes in the market and eliminate bottlenecks in production,” says Oliver.

Switching to G Suite to improve communication

To enable franchisees to sign in to its BKD Connect Platform, BURGER KING® Germany needed a secure authentication system. To solve that problem, it chose to provide franchisees with G Suite accounts. “It’s really easy to set up a new franchisee on the platform. I just create a new G Suite account and Drive folder for it, and it’s ready to go,” says Oliver. G Suite also helps the franchise network to run efficiently, as daily reports are automatically saved to Drive and shared to the appropriate regional network. “Thanks to that system, it’s much easier for any team at headquarters to access the information it needs,” Oliver explains.

BURGER KING® Germany also recently extended its use of G Suite across the whole company. “Following an evaluation of our previous email and productivity software, I made the decision to switch solely to G Suite,” says Oliver. BURGER KING® Germany employees now use Gmail, Calendar, and Drive for their day-to-day productivity needs. “We only just completed the migration, but already, everyone’s happy,” says Oliver. “It’s so easy to share a file using Drive or set up a meeting on Calendar.”

“We’re big fans of Hangouts Meet, and we have two rooms here at our Hanover headquarters equipped with Hangouts Meet hardware,” Oliver adds. “The speech quality is good, and it’s helpful to be able to see every participant, especially when you’re running a meeting with multiple franchisees.”

Optimizing infrastructure to power innovative campaigns

The BURGER KING® app, available for iOS and Android, helps the company to deliver a great customer experience. Through their MyBK accounts, guests can access coupons and special promotions. “We had a really interesting campaign for Easter: guests used the app to hunt for virtual Easter eggs,” explains Oliver. “We knew it was going to be big, and our previous back end wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic.”

To enable the marketing campaign to go ahead, BURGER KING® Germany moved the back end of the app, along with its website, to Google Cloud. For developing and running its web and app back ends, it now uses App Engine and virtual machines on Compute Engine, as well as Memorystore and Cloud Functions. For monitoring and logging, it uses Stackdriver, and Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS to easily handle its traffic.

“We ran the campaign without any performance issues, even though we were receiving several million hits a day,” says Oliver. Since migrating the back end to Google Cloud, the marketing team also launched the popular “Escape the Clown” campaign. “That campaign blew our minds!” says Oliver. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Google Cloud, because it required a lot of back end capacity.”

To develop the app infrastructure it needs, BURGER KING® Germany relies on Cloudwürdig. “Working with Cloudwürdig is great because the team has the same agile mindset as us,” says Oliver. “When we have a new idea, we just set up a meeting, and in a couple of days the new infrastructure is in place. For Escape the Clown, it only took a few weeks to get everything ready to launch.”

Leveraging integrated tools to grow the business

Using Google Cloud together with G Suite enables BURGER KING® Germany to run its franchise network efficiently, while keeping its IT team lean. “Google Cloud and G Suite are the perfect fit for the way of working at BURGER KING® Germany,” says Oliver. “Many of the company’s operatives are often on the road, visiting restaurants and franchisees. With these tools, they can work flexibly and react quickly to the situation on the ground.”

“In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants. With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

—Oliver Mielentz, IT Manager, BURGER KING® Deutschland GmbH

It also helps to keep infrastructure costs under control. “With Google Cloud, we only pay for what we use, which is really important for us,” Oliver explains. “It means we can scale up quickly if we see an opportunity to react to a trend in customer behavior and launch a new marketing campaign that resonates with the moment. When it’s finished, we can then scale down again, and that definitely saves us money.”

BURGER KING® is now working with Cloudwürdig to add more functionality to the BURGER KING® app using Google Kubernetes Engine. “We like to work with customers long-term to support their digital transformation. BURGER KING® Germany is a great example of how one project can develop into a great collaboration,” says Benny Woletz, Managing Director of Cloudwürdig.

BURGER KING® also plans to expand its presence in Germany and gain a greater market share by further tailoring both its marketing and the way it runs its restaurants to answer its guests’ needs. “In order to grow the business, we need to use the data we receive every day to understand exactly what is happening in our restaurants,” says Oliver. “With the tools provided by Google Cloud, we can get more guests through the door and offer them a better experience.”

Like countless other industries, farming is going digital and undergoing big changes—driven by access to more actionable information. The agriculture business can now gather and analyze georeferenced data from satellites, combined with data from IoT sensors in fields, crop rotation and yield histories, weather patterns, seed genotypes and soil composition to help increase the quantity and quality of crops.

This is essential for businesses in the agriculture industry, but it’s also critical to address growing food shortages around the world. 

At S4, we create technology to de-risk crop production. We provide customers seeking agricultural risk management solutions with the tools to make better, data-driven decisions for their crop planning, based on machine learning and proprietary algorithms.

We interpret plant evolution on a global scale with predictive modeling and analytics, and offer super-efficient risk-transferring solutions. Our multi-cloud platform includes a petabyte-scale database, an open source stack, and—after 50 proof-of-concept evaluations—BigQuery for our data warehouse and the Cloud SQL database service to handle OLTP queries to our PostgreSQL database.

These PoCs included, among others, Microsoft Azure Data Lake Analytics, IBM Netezza, Postgres/PostGIS running on IBM bare-metal servers with SATA SSDs and on Google’s Compute Engine with NVMe disks, and on-premises memSQL, CitusData and Yandex ClickHouse. 

Weeding out risk in an uncertain market

According to recent research, climate extreme events like drought, heat waves, and heavy precipitation are responsible for 18-43% of global variation in crop yields for maize, spring wheat, rice, and soybeans. This is a clear trend for other crops as well. Such variation poses risks of food shortages as well as large financial risks to farmers, insurers, and regions dependent on successful crop yields. Also, it creates vast humanitarian difficulties.

Our mission at S4 is to help de-risk crop production by matching the right data with analytics tools so farmers and other participants in the agricultural value chain can plan better, resulting in more reliable food supplies.

In a nutshell, we create indices out of biological assets. These indices measure yield losses on crops that are caused by the effects of weather and other factors, which are then used as underlying assets for products, such as swap/derivative contracts and parametric insurance policies, to transfer risk to the financial markets.

We enable insurers and lenders to buy and sell agricultural risks through the futures market. Also, our other products help farmers and seed and fertilizer companies provide customized genotype recommendations and fertilization requirements. This helps to optimize planting by geography, resources, and crop species, monitor phenological, pests and humidity evolution throughout the crop season, and estimate yields.

Local communities benefit from S4’s technology, as the ability to manage weather risks allows farmers to stabilize their cash flows, invest more to produce more with fewer risks, and develop in a more sustainable manner.

Growing data sources, reducing costs, accelerating performance

With the volume of diverse data sources and analytical complexity both growing at a very fast pace, we decided that using a major cloud services provider with a broad roadmap and global partnerships would be beneficial to S4’s future evolution.

At the same time, we wanted to bring our services to users faster and cut costs by consolidating our on-premises technology stack. When we started evaluating providers, our leading criteria included a powerful geospatial database and data analytics tools along with excellent support, all at a competitive price. GCP prevailed in nearly all criteria categories among the 50 companies we measured. 

Our previous platform architecture included a hybrid relational database that used Compute Engine for virtual machines and Cloud Storage for database backup. The RDBMS was slow. Maintaining our own data warehouse was complex and expensive.

We wanted to use machine learning and neural networks, but couldn’t do so easily and affordably. The complexity of that system meant that products or services requiring small changes or additions to the data model translated to expensive expansions of infrastructure or project time.

Also, agronomical or product teams couldn’t test these changes by themselves, always requiring the intervention on no small part of the IT team, which led to further delays.

We added GCP services like BigQuery as S4’s cloud data warehouse and use BigQuery GIS for geospatial analysis, Cloud Dataflow for simplified stream and batch data processing, and Cloud SQL for queries to the S4 database platform, which have all made a huge impact on our services and bottom line.

Database and analytics costs have decreased by 40% and customers are receiving our analytical results 25% faster. In addition, we’ve eliminated the time-consuming downloading of images, reducing storage and processing costs by 80%, because we no longer need expensive tools licenses, and have greatly reduced classification processing times.

Our customers working in the agriculture industry are also benefiting from this infrastructure change. They are now able to speed up their data analytics using our GCP-based platform.

“S4 products and technologies unlock the full potential of satellite imagery for crop prescriptions, monitoring and yield estimates,” says Nicolás Loria, Manager of Marketing Services, Southern Cone, Corteva Agriscience.

“We’ve worked with S4 for the last three (and starting year number four) crop seasons as its team capabilities, data integration capacities, and analytics insights have allowed Corteva to perform an entire new solution. Thanks to S4’s customized 360° approach, fast response and delivery times, we have safely outsourced our remote crop analytic technical needs.”

Also, this new architecture has allowed us to scale our models and databases with almost no limits, at a fraction of the cost vs. the previous models.

We’ve saved a lot of time on executing processes and reduced work needed by our internal teams to do certain tasks, like preparing images, converting them, validating results, and more. Using Google Earth Engine has decreased the execution time of daily tasks anywhere from 50% to 90% of the previous time, going from an average time of 30 minutes to between four and 15 minutes, depending on the task.

In addition to saving money and time, we are able to focus on innovation with the GCP performance and features we’re using. We’re able to seamlessly add satellite data to analytics using both public datasets and our own private data, and deliver GIS data management, analytics, crop classification and monitoring in real time.

We can do semi-automatic crop classification and classification using spectral signatures with Google Earth Engine. Later this year, we’ll be using neural networks for pattern recognition and machine learning in new applications to improve crop yields and fine-tune risk models. And using GCP and Google Earth Engine infrastructure means we can run models for customers in South America and around the world, since Google Earth Engine has global satellite imagery available. 

We’ve heard from our customer Indigo Argentina that they’re able to bring customers data insights faster.

“We are working with S4 in the development of two different applications for satellite crop monitoring and yield assessment,” says Carlos Becco, CEO, Indigo Argentina. “S4’s technology allowed us to manage and analyze multiple sources and layers of information in real time, letting us uncover valuable insights in Indigo’s own microbiome technologies, and at a very competitive cost.” 

Analytical products and app development thrive with GCP

With GCP, we are updating and improving algorithms that we built manually with machine learning processes to develop drought indices for upcoming crop seasons. Algorithms can recognize specific phases of crop phenology (e.g., bud burst, flowering, fruiting, leaf fall) and correlate them with photosynthetic activity, light, water, temperature, radiation, and plant genetics factors. Other analytical products like crop monitoring, pre-planting recommendations, financial scoring, and yield estimation can now do a lot more for users by offering multiple layers and datasets, faster image processing, and real-time access via APIs.

We also replaced our bare-metal S4 app deployment with the App Engine serverless application platform. It provides tighter integration between the S4 platform and our BigQuery data warehouse for integration with marketplaces and third-party solutions.

We get all of these Google Cloud features with all the benefits of managed cloud services, from multiversioning and security to automatic backups and high availability.

At S4, we trust technology to decode plant growth and help protect farmers and their communities from climate change. With growing food shortages due to increasing populations and intensifying weather, data and analytics can have a huge impact in lowering financial risks and improving agricultural yields. It’s one sector where cloud, database, analytics, and other technologies are combining to improve business outcomes and affect the lives of billions of people. Learn more about S4’s work and learn more about data analytics on Google Cloud.