Editor’s note: Google Cloud partner commercetools shares how modern technologies like composable commerce, cloud-native infrastructure and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) will lead the way in business-to-business (B2B) digital commerce this year.

Digital commerce in B2B has been predicted as the next big thing for years; yet, at the start of COVID-19, 60% of B2B companies had zero or limited eCommerce capabilities. The pandemic accelerated digitization and eCommerce has finally taken off: As of February 2022, 65% of B2B companies offered eCommerce capabilities.

The behavior of B2B buyers is also changing: Consumer-like expectations are at the heart of successful B2B commerce, and this is how manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers will shape their customer experiences. Today, 73% of B2B buyers want a personalized business-to-consumer or B2C-like experience. 83% prefer ordering or paying through digital commerce and 72% are eager to purchase across channels.

With digital commerce dictating how B2Bs will grow in 2023 and beyond, what trends will spur digital transformations across this business model? Here’s what the team at commercetools expects to unfold in B2B eCommerce this year.

#1 B2B firms are switching to cloud-native, composable commerce

B2B players still plagued with manual processes and siloed backend systems will move away from monolithic platforms and choose composable commerce. In a nutshell, composability enables businesses to select best-of-breed components, such as search, cart or checkout, and “compose” them into a custom application.

B2B firms will modernize their commerce backend, interoperating siloed systems like Configure Price Quote solutions (CPQs) for sales and enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs) for order entry with an API-first and composable commerce stack. They will also pivot from on-premise deployments to cloud-native architectures as the baseline for auto-scaling capabilities instead of pre-provisioning online capacity during traffic peaks. That way, B2Bs can customize customer-centric experiences to boost revenue while reducing the complexity and cost of in-house IT infrastructure, as well as gaining operational efficiencies

B2Bs will maximize the cross-section of composable commerce and cloud-native infrastructure by leveraging a commerce backend like commercetools Composable Commerce hosted on Google Cloud. This combined solution provides commercetools’ ready-to-use components built as microservices and exposed as APIs, such as product information management (PIM) and unified cart, integrated through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

#2 Strong focus on data quality and personalization

Focusing on data quality continues to be a big trend in 2023. B2B buyers expect product, pricing, inventory and shipping data points to be accurate across every touchpoint so they can make better purchasing decisions, such as when to order products and calculate quantities.

With so many data points to capture throughout the customer journey — product, inventory, pricing and customer data — we’ll see more B2B companies reorganizing their vast information pools to elevate customer experiences. They will pivot to modular and API-first solutions, plus flexible data models, so they can break data silos from legacy monolithic platforms and access such data when needed.

We also expect to see more customer analytics to unlock data on buyer behavior. By understanding what customers see, click and add to their shopping lists, B2B businesses get valuable insights into how buyers behave, using this data in the shopping journey according to product interests. That way, it’s possible to offer personalized experiences across touchpoints without hassle.

“It is important for B2B companies to look at their data as if it is one of their products; invest in its upkeep and integrity while finding ways to continuously improve it. Using advanced analytics powered by AI and ML to identify patterns from large amounts of data, B2B companies can activate insights into customer decision journeys to maintain loyalty, personalize experiences to improve satisfaction and boost revenue, while also finding ways to optimize costs. For example, with analytics, enterprises can streamline spend to focus on the highest-performing channels and reduce waste.” — Carrie Tharp, Google Cloud VP of Retail and Consumer

With data-driven tools coming into play like Google Cloud’s Discovery AI, Recommendations AI and Vision Product Search connected with composable commerce, B2B players can boost customer analytics to personalize experiences, improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

#3 The B2B customer experience will be redesigned

B2B players are taking a page out of the B2C playbook to elevate experiences throughout the customer journey. While intense work needs to happen in the backend commerce engine, B2B players will also redesign their digital frontends. That means boosting website performance, while mobile responsiveness and personalization will be at the forefront of these advanced digital initiatives.

More than ever, B2B companies are looking for digital storefronts delivered as progressive web applications (PWAs) for optimized performance and responsiveness across devices, as well as fast-loading and responsive experiences to boost your digital presence, SEO rankings and conversion rate. B2Bs can further streamline frontend development with solutions natively connecting to Google Cloud Marketplace, which supports a variety of storefront providers, including commercetools Frontend.

Leveraging Google Cloud’s unique capabilities, such as PWA web app development, Google Cloud Discovery AI solutions that include Retail Search and Vision API Product Search, among many others, B2B companies are well positioned to boost digital commerce in the years to come.

What’s next in 2023?

2022 was already a turbulent year; for better or worse, 2023 is expected to have a similar fate. For B2Bs, even the ones with tight budgets, investing in digital commerce can help future-proof businesses for whatever’s happening this year. To dive deeper into all predictions and insights by commercetools in collaboration with Google Cloud, read the guide Pivotal Trends and Predictions in B2B Digital Commerce in 2023.

For more than 10 years, NMK Textile Mills has manufactured bed linens for major retailers in the United States and Canada. As e-commerce exploded, the company’s co-founder saw an opportunity to grow the business. So, in addition to manufacturing bed linens wholesale for retail customers, NMK Textile Mills reworked its complete supply chain to manufacture products for California Design Den, which became an e-commerce retailer selling its own fashion-forward products directly to consumers online.

With California Design Den’s push into e-commerce, it became apparent the SMB company (with about 250 global employees) faced the same tough supply chain questions as large retail customers, including maintaining enough inventory to meet customer demand in a timely, efficient way.

California Design Den depended upon a myriad of systems to track its complex forecasting and reordering processes. Team members typically planned inventory manually using desktop spreadsheet software, which could lead to excess inventory. Accurately forecasting demand and supply was essential to the company’s financial success—but it was also a challenge.

A couple years ago, California Design Den partnered with Pluto7, a technology solutions provider that offers a software as a service (SaaS) called Planning In A Box. Leveraging Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, Planning In A Box intelligently helps predict demand and balances it with supply.

But that was just the beginning. “Along the way, we realized that to compete with larger retailers, make quicker decisions, and move faster, we needed to go further,” says Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer at California Design Den.

With guidance from Pluto7, California Design Den began migrating its database to Google Cloud Platform. Using Google BigQuery, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud SQL, and Google Cloud Storage, and experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, the company is reducing inventory carryovers by more than 50%, improving the accuracy of demand planning quarter over quarter, and gaining granular insights into how individual SKUs are performing.

“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels. With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

No need for army of data scientists

“Using Google Cloud Platform machine learning and AI was essential for California Design Den if it was to compete successfully with larger retailers,” Deepak says.

For example, tastes and fashions in bed linens can change quickly and consumer prices fluctuate. With more than 2,500 SKUs, it wasn’t possible for California Design Den’s team to continuously monitor product demand and experiment with competitive pricing in real time.

“We would need an army of data scientists to make faster decisions on pricing and inventory levels,” says Deepak. “With Google Cloud Platform machine learning and artificial intelligence, we don’t need that. We can make much faster pricing decisions to optimize profitability and move inventory.”

By integrating all its data onto Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den’s team gains deeper insights into product sales over time, which in turn helps the company improve demand planning by better determining which styles to manufacture and sell in the future.

“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge leaves with them. By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

Merging visuals with data

Before Google Cloud Platform, team members had to dig through spreadsheets and run scenarios to get a sense of how particular products had sold. The next step was to perform keyword searches across the company’s photo library in the cloud to find each product’s image. From there, a team member would insert the product images into a presentation, along with relevant data points, to provide a report for stakeholders on how particular styles performed.

Today, California Design Den, with the help of Pluto7, is integrating its entire product image library with its database on Google Cloud Platform. Experimenting with Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud AutoML, California Design Den is moving towards a day when team members can run sales scenarios and get deep background data on individual product performance while viewing images of the relevant products.

Merging product visuals with data will help designers and team members better understand sales patterns over time and in context. In the past, making correlations between things like which sheet colors sold well in California, compared to how the same sheet colors performed on the East Coast, was something that California Design Den employees primarily did in their heads.

“When experienced employees leave, their knowledge goes with them,” says Manjunath Devadas, Founder and CEO at Pluto7. “By having all data in one place, and with machine learning and AI, California Design Den can go back in its history, look at products made or sold years ago, and analyze product performance.”

“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

Reimagining supply-demand balancing

Pluto7’s mission statement is to democratize supply demand balancing with machine learning and AI. California Design Den is a case in point, as the combination of Planning In A Box and Google Cloud Platform gives the company greater control over its destiny.

“Big retailers used to tell us what to manufacture and how much they would pay for it,” says Deepak. “That was our primary business, and if we didn’t accept the terms, a competitor would.” Today, in addition to continuing to make products for retailers, California Design Den can design, make, and sell a variety of designs for itself, including custom and limited-edition products, thanks to Google Cloud Platform and Pluto7 software offerings. The payoff is not only in having a more diversified business. California Design Den also receives more favorable profit margins by selling its own products.

“We are literally growing the complexity of our business on all levels, including designing, manufacturing, selling, reordering, inventory holding—everything,” Deepak says. “We can make smaller batches. We can connect directly with consumers. We can identify the missing pieces—what should we produce next, when, and how much? We otherwise couldn’t afford the level of talent it would take to do this.”

Cutting through the noise

Google and Pluto7 software helped California Design Den reduce inventory carryovers by more than 50%. Inventory tracking and distribution, along with insights and visibility into product sales, are faster, more efficient, and accurate. Google Cloud Platform flexible pricing, speed, reliability, security, and scalability enable California Design Den to stay relevant and be more competitive.

In addition to benefiting from Google Cloud Platform, California Design Den relies on G Suite—also part of Google Cloud—to enhance collaboration among its global teams. Previously, the company’s email server would sometimes crash, due to the heavy load of sharing product photos and other data. “Gmail and Google Drive handle the everyday demands on the business effortlessly and reliably,” Deepak says.

“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important. We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”

—Deepak Mehrotra, Co-founder and Chief Adventurer, California Design Den

The company is exploring additional ways to leverage Google Cloud Platform in the near future. For example, one possibility is to import customer reviews from sites where products are sold into Google BigQuery, and to use that data to perform sentiment analysis via Google Cloud Natural Language. It could provide another valuable data source to help California Design Den’s team decide where to focus future designs.

“Google machine learning and AI enable us to cut through all the noise from raw data, so we can see what’s important,” Deepak says. “We can focus on analytics to guide us to success today and in the future.”

Reliably executing tasks on a schedule is critical for everything from data engineering, to infrastructure management, and application maintenance. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Google Cloud Scheduler, our enterprise-grade scheduling service, is now available in more GCP regions and multiple regions can now be used from a single project removing the prior limit of a single region per project.

With many enterprise customers deploying complex distributed cloud systems, Cloud Scheduler has helped solve the problem of single-server cron scheduling being a single point of failure. With this update you are now able to create Scheduler jobs across distinct cloud regions that can help satisfy cross-regional availability and fail-over scenarios. 

Furthermore, you are no longer required to create an AppEngine application in order to use Cloud Scheduler. For existing Cloud Scheduler jobs, it is safe to disable the AppEngine application within the project. Jobs will continue to function without an AppEngine application. 

Creating jobs in different regions is easy. You simply pick the location where you would like your job to run. For example you can specify a location when creating a job through the gcloud command line :

HTTP Targets

  gcloud scheduler jobs create http <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule> 
--uri <target-uri>

Pub/Sub Topics

  gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule>
--topic <topic-name>
(--message-body <message-body> | --message-body-from-file <file-path>)

AppEngine Services

  gcloud scheduler jobs create app-engine <job-name>
--location <cloud-region> 
--schedule <cron-schedule>

Or you can pick a location when creating a job through the Cloud Console:

Google Cloud Scheduler is now available in 23 GCP Regions,  and this number is expected to grow in the future. You can always find an up-to-date list of available regions by running:

  gcloud scheduler locations list

We hope you are as excited about this launch as we are. Please reach out to us with any suggestions or questions in our public issue tracker.

More and more startups are choosing to build their business on Google Cloud, and if yours is one of them — welcome! And even though Google Cloud is easy to use, there’s still a lot to learn, starting with how to create and activate your account, and how to create projects, folders, and organizations as part of Google Cloud’s resource hierarchy. If you prefer, you can also watch our video on how to get started with Google Cloud.

Once you’ve mastered those concepts, you’re ready to learn how to get the most out of your investment in Google Cloud. In this blog, we’ll show you how to manage and monitor your cloud resources with Google Cloud’s  operations suite, administer your billing with Cloud Billing, and improve the support you receive with Google Cloud Customer Care. Whether you’re new to Google Cloud or an experienced user, these services will help improve your experience. 

Let’s get started!

Improve the performance and reliability of your applications with the operations suite

Sometimes you want to check how your deployment is behaving, or if there is something happening with your server, database, or application that is affecting your customers. With so many tools to check, finding and solving the issue can become overwhelming very quickly. This is where Google Cloud’s operations suite comes in. 

This suite of products for integrated monitoring, logging, and tracing managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond. It can help you visualize and monitor incidents with dashboards and Metrics Explorer, manage and analyze log data in real-time all in one place with Cloud Logging, visualize metrics at scale with Cloud Monitoring, manage latency with Cloud Trace, and perform performance and cost management with Cloud Profiler.

Learn more about the operations suite in the video below:

Manage budgets and alerts with Cloud Billing

Google Cloud billing management is easier than you might think. Google Cloud charges for compute resources monthly on a consumption basis, which is different from the traditional upfront purchase model. With the right tools and resources, you can more easily manage your costs and optimize your use of Google Cloud resources.

One of the most important things to do is to set up billing and alerts. This will help you avoid unexpected charges and ensure that you are only paying for the resources you use. You can also use budgets and alerts to track your costs and help ensure that you are staying within your budget.

You can also view your costs through console billing reports, monthly invoices or build customized dashboards on BigQuery, Google Data Studio, or a BI tool of your preference. This allows you to see where your costs come from and identify areas where you can save money. You can also use cost management to optimize your use of Google Cloud resources and get the most out of your investment.

Finally, Google Cloud offers a variety of discounts and optimization options. These can help you save money on your overall costs. For example, you can get a discount if you commit to using Google Cloud for a certain period of time. You can also save money by using preemptible VMs, which are VMs that are available at a lower price but can be terminated at any time.

Google Cloud Customer Care

To meet customer needs and deliver a better experience, we’ve reenvisioned our Customer Care portfolio, a scalable set of offerings built with your needs at the center, so you can simplify and streamline your support experience. 

Choose from the core offerings:

• Basic – the support tier you receive when you sign up on Google Cloud. You can use this at no cost but support is offered for billing issues only.
• Standard – simple, flexible way to ensure that your workloads run smoothly on Google Cloud. Standard enables you to receive technical help from Google experts with a four hour response time and 8 hours response time during 5 days a week availability.
• Enhanced – rapid response times and additional services to boost your productivity and help you run in Google Cloud efficiently. There is both case and phone support for technical issues, with a one-hour response time. There is 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues. You can also have add-ons or value-add services like Technical Account Adviser Service and Event management.
• Premium – the highest value support offering, supplying incredibly fast response times, a named Technical Account Manager, Customer Aware support and additional services. There is case and phone support for technical issues and also third-party technology support, with a 15-minute response time and a 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues.

Watch the video to find out how to purchase support, create support cases and learn more about support.

Supercharge your growth with the Google for Startups Cloud Program

Growing a startup requires technology that can keep up with and enhance your ideas. The Google for Startups Cloud Program provides the tech you need to help develop better software and deliver innovative experiences with confidence. At the same time, you’ll help boost your team’s capabilities with expert cloud guidance, Google Cloud credits, training opportunities, and more.

The program has two tiers:

• Start: for pre-seed startups that have not yet received equity funding. Get up to $2,000 USD in Google Cloud credit that’s valid for two years toward Google Cloud services and even toward a Cloud Customer Care plan with unlimited access to technical support, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, and more.
• Scale: for seed to series A startups with verified equity funding. Get Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $100,000 USD a year for your first two years, unlimited access to technical support when credits are applied to a Cloud Customer Care plan, partnerships with Google Cloud Startup Customer Engineers and a dedicated Startup Success Manager, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, co-marketing for select startups, and more. 

Once enrolled, Google startup experts will recommend Google products and services that can help your startup grow in the cloud. Learn more about the Google for Startups program, eligibility criteria, credit usage and migration incentives in the our Startup Programs video linked down below.

That’s a wrap!

Let’s recap: The operations suite includes tools to monitor incidents, analyze log data in real-time, manage latency, and more. Cloud Billing offers billing management tools and resources to help you save costs and make the most of your resources. If you need help, Cloud Customer Care services are available to streamline your support experience. Also, if you’re a startup, don’t forget to check the Google for Startups Cloud Program!

The Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups series has many detailed videos and handbooks to support you on all steps of your startup growth journey. Check out our full playlist on the Google Cloud Tech channel and website. Don’t forget to subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

As organizations expand their use of cloud computing services, more of their sensitive data inevitably moves to and lives in the cloud. Much of this sensitive data is unstructured and can be challenging to secure. Despite this potential challenge, the usefulness of cloud for data storage and processing is too big for most organizations to ignore and has in turn led to data sprawl, where their sensitive data is spread over many resources, both in the cloud and on-premise. Addressing data sprawl requires solutions that can discover, manage, and secure sensitive data, especially unstructured data, as it spreads.

To help organizations confidently move their sensitive data to the cloud, Google Cloud works diligently to earn and maintain customer trust. Control and transparency are pillars of our approach to offering a trusted cloud. Therefore, we’ve been expanding our capabilities to act on unstructured data as sprawl increases.

Given the importance of these capabilities to our strategy, we are happy to announce today that Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report, and rated Google Cloud highest in the current offering category among the providers evaluated.

The report evaluates the 11 most significant providers with platform solutions to secure and protect unstructured data, spanning from cloud providers to data security-focused vendors. The report notes that “Google offers breadth and depth with built-in data security in the cloud. Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and BeyondCorp Enterprise have underlying data security products and features for protecting customer data.”

Google Cloud tools focused on protecting unstructured data were developed and battle-tested internally at Google to alleviate some of our own data security challenges. This brings the best of Google security to the organizations utilizing Google Cloud and our security tools. The report highlights that “Google productizes capabilities originally developed to secure its own business, and brings a disciplined approach to product enhancements for enterprise requirements. It serves a wide range of enterprise and mid-market, with a focus on emphasizing data protection needs by industry. ”

Google Cloud’s data security strategy focuses on meeting customers wherever they are in their cloud migration journey. The report highlights that “Google further enables a Zero Trust approach with third-party integrations through its BeyondCorp Alliance of partners in device management, endpoint security and gateways.”

Google Cloud received the highest possible score in sixteen criteria, in total receiving the most 5 out of 5 ratings among all vendors assessed. These criteria include: Data Intelligence, Access Control, Deletion, Obfuscation-Scope, Obfuscation-Key Management, Deployment, Security and Risk, APIs and Integration, Data Security Platform Vision, Data Security Execution Roadmap, Performance, Planned Enhancements, Zero Trust Enabling Partner Ecosystem, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Installed Base, and Revenue. 

Notably, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the Obfuscation criteria. Obfuscation can help protect sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), which is critical to many enterprise workflows. Cloud DLP helps customers inspect and mask this sensitive data with techniques like redaction, bucketing, and tokenization, which help strike the balance between risk and utility. This is especially crucial when dealing with unstructured or free-text workloads, in which it can be challenging to know what data to redact. More than 150 detectors combine to power Cloud DLP’s masking, which can be deployed in data migrations and business workloads like real-time data collection and processing. For Obfuscation specifically, the report mentioned that Google “takes a broad view of DLP, which includes in-line redaction of sensitive elements in unstructured data and DLP APIs that extend support to additional data types like images or other media.”

We are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ Unstructured Data Security Platforms Q2 2021 report, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on ways to make your digital transformation journey safer as we work to become your most trusted Cloud.

A copy of the full report can be viewed here.