Road construction is booming in India. A recent report prepared by the India Brand Equity Foundation—a trust established by the Department of Commerce—pointed out that in FY 2019 alone, the country added 10,855 kilometers of highways to a road network that spans 5.89 million kilometers. This network is the second largest in the world and transports 90% of passenger traffic and 64.5% of all goods in the country.

The Indian Government has also earmarked road construction as key to plans to increase the nation’s GDP to $5 trillion in coming years, targeting road construction worth $212.8 billion in the two years from April 2020.

G R Infraprojects Limited is well positioned to support the government’s program. The business, which started as a contractor building roads in rural villages in India, now specializes in road engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), a model whereby private construction firms build roads funded by the government.

The business now undertakes the processing of bitumen, manufacture of thermoplastic road-marking paint and road signage, and fabrication and galvanizing road-crash barriers. Its in-house integration model includes a design and engineering team, as well as manufacturing facilities in Rajasthan, Assam, and Gujarat.

The business recently expanded into rail—another area expected to benefit from extensive government investment—with its competencies including earthworks, materials supply, track lining, and bridge construction.

In this environment—and despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic—G R Infraprojects Limited aims to substantially increase turnover and manpower over the next five years.

Best-in-class infrastructure key to success

Digital transformation is key to enabling growth while best-in-class IT infrastructure is one of the foundations on which the business seeks to build success.

G R Infraprojects Limited’s digital initiatives include deployment of a new document management system and corporate systems that enable remote monitoring, live tracking, effective real-time communication, and efficient data management.

Providing a scalable, reliable cost-effective infrastructure

But most important of all is providing a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure to support a business-critical SAP enterprise resource planning system. Over the last few years, versions of SAP have enabled the organization to digitize processes and seamlessly run business-critical functions such as inventory management and finance.

G R Infraprojects Limited initially went live with SAP ECC6.0, with a few hundred team members using the system for business-critical tasks such as tracking stock level and movement and generating financial statements and reports for review and action.

“Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Lowering maintenance costs

However, as G R Infraprojects Limited grew, projects proliferated, and new markets emerged, the business elected to move to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure. “We wanted to move because there were so many maintenance costs in on-premises solutions and cloud provided convenience to IT and the broader organization,” explains Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation at G R Infraprojects Limited.

The business also wanted to move to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of features such as AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning to transform business processes. The system runs on the HANA database, an in-memory database with fast processing speeds and a simplified data model.

G R Infraprojects Limited selected Google Cloud to run SAP S/4HANA because, Sachin says, it is “much better than any other platform,” incorporates a wide range of features, and meets uptime requirements. The cloud service could also scale to support forecast growth without a sharp increase in cost.

Furthermore, Sachin adds, “Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”

“With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day. With such a scalable and dynamic platform, we are very happy with the performance.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Successful transition with Infrabeat

G R Infraprojects Limited completed the project with assistance from partner InfraBeat over three months and SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud went live mid-2019. “Our dedicated SAP team worked closely with Infrabeat to deliver the project successfully,” says Sachin. “We needed an experienced partner to assist with the implementation process and Infrabeat performed that role admirably. Both teams supported each other and worked to plan to deliver a great result.”

SAP S/4HANA runs on an infrastructure comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud NAT to enable the secure transmission and receipt of packets to and from the internet.

G R Infraprojects Limited estimates the cost of running SAP S/4 HANA in Google Cloud is significantly lower than on alternative infrastructure options—freeing up budget for other business priorities.

In addition, moving SAP S/4 HANA to infrastructure as a service through Google Cloud has eliminated the need to assign internal team members to infrastructure management, allowing them instead to focus on higher-value activities.

Google Cloud also incorporates the security needed to protect the data and processes of SAP S/4 HANA from intrusion or disruption and ensure the uptime and continuity required of a business-critical system.

Optimized speed and availability

G R Infraprojects Limited’s decision to run SAP S/4 HANA on Google Cloud is delivering benefits on a daily basis. “With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day,” says Sachin. “We are very happy with the performance.”

Success with SAP S/4HANA has helped the business decide to move its remaining apps and data to the cloud when its on-premises servers and other equipment reach end of life. G R Infraprojects Limited is already running Active Directory in Google Cloud and Sachin says the cloud platform’s “fast and excellent services” made the decision easy.

“There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Adding value

As G R Infraprojects Limited grows, Sachin adds, the business expects Google Cloud to continue to add value. “There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”

Google Cloud is built on world-class technical infrastructure that supports services that are loved and relied on by billions of people across the globe: Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and more. A core tenet at Google Cloud is to leverage Google’s experience building and operating highly available and highly reliable planetary-scale compute, storage and networking systems and data centers. 

Google takes a workload-optimized approach to building its infrastructure, employing a combination of dedicated hardware and software components to meet its workloads’ ever-growing demands. Underpinning this infrastructure is Titanium, a system of purpose-built, custom silicon and multiple tiers of scale-out offloads that together power improvements in the performance, reliability, and security of our customers’ workloads (for example, 25% faster block storage IOPS/instance compared to the other two leading hyperscalers). Unveiled today at Google Cloud Next, you’ll find Titanium technology in many of Google Cloud’s recent infrastructure offerings.

10x demands of tomorrow 

Meeting the growing performance, reliability, and security demands of both legacy and emerging workloads is a constant challenge for cloud infrastructure providers. And now, these demands are multiplying with the heightened adoption of generative AI across almost every industry. Meanwhile, the benefits of Moore’s law have been declining in recent years. We can’t rely on silicon advances alone to meet tomorrow’s needs.

As just one example, this chart shows the exponential computing demands of large language models.

It was clear to us a long time ago that we needed to rethink our infrastructure designs to meet these demands. This is why, for several years, we’ve adopted workload-optimization and intentional design as central principles for our infrastructure platform. We engineer golden paths from silicon to the customer workload, using a combination of purpose-built infrastructure, prescriptive architectures, and an open ecosystem to deliver workload-optimized infrastructure. 

Offloads play a pivotal role

Central to this strategy are offload technologies. Traditionally, the CPU wears many hats: It runs the hypervisor, the virtualization stack to enable your workloads, and manages storage and networking I/O; it’s responsible for security isolation for virtual interfaces and physical hardware, etc. In this model, customer workloads running on the CPU contend for resources with these platform tasks.

Offloads on dedicated hardware perform behind-the-scenes security, networking, and storage functions that were previously performed by the host CPU, allowing the CPU to focus on maximizing performance for customer workloads.

A recent example of an on-host offload or accelerator is the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), a system-on-chip that we co-designed with Intel to enable better security isolation and performance on our 3rd gen compute instances. The IPU enables:

• Predictable and efficient compute
• Programmable packet processing for low latency, 200 Gbps networking with 3x the packets per second compared to our previous-generation compute instances
• In-transit encryption with the PSP protocol

Another important example of Google’s on-host hardware is Titan, a secure, low-power microcontroller that helps ensure that every machine in Google Cloud boots from a trusted state.

But we did not stop there. To meet tomorrow’s demands, we knew we needed to go past the performance that could be achieved using the host’s dedicated offload hardware.

A tiered system of offloads

A key component of Titanium is its modern offload architecture, which combines capabilities whose scale and performance are well-established within Google, as well as new capabilities tailored for cloud use cases. 

Just as modern workloads scale out horizontally in the cloud, with Titanium, we’ve extended the architecture to augment on-host offloads with an additional tier of scale-out offloads that run outside the host. This system of offloads is deployed fleet-wide and dynamically adjusts to changing workload needs to continually deliver the best performance.

Example 1: Block storage
Titanium scale-out offload enables Hyperdisk block storage to deliver stellar I/O performance. Hyperdisk’s Titanium offload on the host IPU works in tandem with the Titanium scale-out offload tier that distributes I/O across Google’s massive cluster-level filesystem, Colossus.

With traditional offload architectures, higher block storage IOPS requires purchasing larger compute instances. For example, you may need to deploy a data-intensive workload on a compute instance with many more vCPUs than the workload needs just to get sufficient storage performance. This tight coupling results in wasted resources and higher costs for customers. Further, even with large instances, storage performance in the cloud may be inadequate relative to what customers are used to with on-prem storage systems.     

With our new block storage, Hyperdisk powered by Titanium, we have decoupled compute-instance size from storage performance. Hyperdisk uses a tier of offloads in our cloud fabric to offload storage I/O from the customer hosts to achieve higher storage performance even with a general-purpose VM.   

In fact, today we are announcing that Titanium-powered C3 VMs with Hyperdisk Extreme now support 500K IOPS per compute instance in preview to meet the needs of the most demanding workloads. This is 25% faster IOPS/instance compared to the other two leading hyperscalers, courtesy of the Titanium system. 

Example 2: Network routing
Virtual network routing is another example of using a second tier of scale-out offloads (“hoverboards”). With Titanium, Google’s Andromeda virtual networking stack on the IPU offload device sends all packets for which it does not have a route to Hoverboard gateways, which have forwarding information for all virtual networks. Hoverboards are standalone software switches that act as default routers for some flows.

Unlike the traditional gateway model, the control plane dynamically detects flows that exceed a specified usage threshold and programs them to be direct host-to-host flows, bypassing the hoverboards allowing hoverboards to focus on the long tail of less frequent flows. Typically, only a small subset of possible VM pairs in a network communicate with one another, so the VMs only have to store and process a small fraction of the usual network configuration on an individual VM host, improving per-server memory utilization and control-plane CPU scalability.

Titanium already powers your workloads

The Titanium journey began years ago with the component technologies described above. Many of our products already benefit from this architecture, and the newest elements of this architecture are now available with our 3rd gen Compute Engine instances such as C3 and the new Hyperdisk block storage. 

Going forward, look for the Titanium architecture to underpin all future generations of our infrastructure offerings, in the process enabling new classes of infrastructure capabilities that move well beyond the confines of a single server.

Do you want to fire up a bunch of techies? Talk about multicloud! There is no shortage of opinions. I figured we should tackle this hot topic head-on, so I recently talked to four smart folks—Corey Quinn of Duckbill Group, Armon Dadgar of Hashicorp, Tammy Bryant Butow of Gremlin, and James Watters of VMware—about what multicloud is all about, key considerations, and why you should (or shouldn’t!) do it.

Five important insights came out of these discussions. If you’re on a multicloud journey or considering one, keep reading.

Do: Choose to do multicloud for the right reasons

Don’t do multicloud because Gartner says so, implores Corey Quinn. Before embarking on a multicloud, define a “why” focused on business value journey, says Armon Dadger. For example, you might want to use services from each public cloud because of their differentiated services, according to Tammy Bryant Butow. Armon also calls out regulatory reasons, existing business relationships, and accommodating mergers and acquisitions. On the topic of M&A, Corey points out that if you acquire a company that uses another cloud, it’s usually expensive and difficult to consolidate. It can be smarter to stay put.

Don’t: Over-engineer for workload or data portability

Thinking that you’ll build a system that moves seamlessly among the various cloud providers? Hold up, says our group of experts. Armon points out that aspects of your toolchain or architecture may be multicloud—think of some of your workflows or global network routing—but that shifting workloads or data is far from simple. Corey says that trying to engineer for “write once, run anywhere” can slow you down, and ignores the inherent uniqueness that’s part of each platform. Specifically, Corey calls out the per-cloud stickiness of identity management, security features, and even network functionality. And data gravity is still a thing, says James, that causes some to dismiss multicloud outright.

If you’re using multiple public clouds, you take advantage of the distinct value each offers, Armon says. Use native cloud services where possible so that you see the benefits from useful innovations, built-in resilience, and baked-in best practices. The value from that cloud-infused workload may outweigh the benefits of seamless portability.

Do: Recognize different stakeholder interests and needs

James smartly points out that many multicloud debates happen because people are arguing from different perspectives. Context matters. If you’re an infrastructure engineer who invests heavily in a given cloud’s identity and access management model, multicloud looks tricky. Or if you’re a data engineer with petabytes of data homed in a particular cloud, multicloud may look unrealistic. James highlights that many developers default to multicloud because their local tools—where all the work happens—are multicloud. A developer’s IDE and preferred code framework(s) aren’t tied to any given cloud. Be aware that groups within your organization will come at multicloud from distinct directions. And this may impact your approach!

Don’t: Go it alone

Corey talks about the importance of asking others what worked, and what didn’t. Tammy offers her best practices around sharing results from experiments. It’s about sharing knowledge and tapping into it for community benefit. Others have probably tried what you’re trying, and can help you avoid common pitfalls. If you’ve just made an architectural choice that didn’t work out, share it, and help others avoid the pain. 

Read research from analysts, go to conferences or watch videos to observe case studies, and join online communities that offer a safe place to share mistakes and learn from others.

Do: Experiment first using techniques like multi-region deployments

If you think you can operate systems across clouds, how about you first try doing it across regions in a specific cloud, suggests Corey. Getting a system to properly work across cloud regions isn’t trivial, he says, and that experience can help you uncover where you have architectural or operational constraints that will be even worse across cloud providers.

This is great guidance if your multicloud aspirations involve using multiple clouds to power one application—versus the more standard definition of multicloud where you use different clouds for different applications—but can also surface issues in your support process or toolchain that fail when faced with distributed systems. Start with muti-region deployments and chaos engineering experiments before aggressively jumping into multicloud architectures.

The Google Cloud take

Do the things above. It’s great advice. I’ll add three more things that we’ve learned from our customers.

1. Don’t fear multicloud. You’re already doing it. You don’t single-source everything. As Corey mentioned, you probably already have one cloud for productivity tools, another for source code, another for cloud infrastructure. You’ll use software and application services from a mix of providers for a single app. You have that experience in your team and have been doing that for decades. What people do rightly worry about is using more than one infrastructure service beneath an application, as that can introduce latency, security, and logistical hurdles. Make sure you know which model your team is considering.
2. Embrace the right foundational components, including Kubernetes. Will everything run on Kubernetes? Of course not. Don’t try to do that. But it also represents the closest thing we have to a multicloud API. Companies are using Kubernetes to stripe a consistent experience across clouds. And this isn’t just to orchestrate containers, but also to manage infrastructure and cloud-native services. Also, consider where you need other fundamental consistency across clouds, including areas like provisioning and identity federation.
3. Use Google Cloud as your anchor. Here’s a fundamental question you have to decide for yourself: Are you going to bring your on-premises technology and practices to the cloud, or bring cloud technology and practices on-prem? We sincerely believe in the latter. Anchor to where you’re trying to get to. We offer Anthos as a way to build and run distributed Kubernetes fleets in Google Cloud and across clouds. By using a cloud-based backplane instead of an on-prem one, you’re offloading toil, leveraging managed services for scale and security, and introducing modern practices to the rest of your team.

We learned a lot about multicloud through these discussions, and it seems like others did too. That’s why we’re going to do a second round of interviews with a new crop of experts so that we can keep digging deeper into this topic. Stay tuned!

Google Cloud Results

• Improves performance and reliability, enabling Pantheon to serve larger customers
• Supports 99.95% uptime across 200,000+ websites
• Reduces cloud infrastructure costs by 40%
• Enables future analytics offerings based on machine learning and big data analytics

Nearly every business needs a web presence—but the vast majority of companies don’t want to be involved in the technical aspects of coding, deployment, hosting, security, and scaling websites. To stay focused on the business value and creative aspects of their websites and avoid managing infrastructure, thousands of companies turn to Pantheon, a website operations and hosting platform that powers over 200,000 websites.

Pantheon promises its customers speed, reliability, and scalability plus world-class collaboration and workflow tools. For five years, the company was able to deliver high service levels in all three areas running its platform on bare-metal virtual cloud servers. However, as its business grew, network links began to saturate under heavy load, risking instability. As Pantheon’s business evolved to focus on servicing some of the largest websites in the world, the company wanted to partner with a more innovative cloud services provider.

“We wanted a partner that could give us what we offer to our own customers: the flexibility to scale smoothly and consume services without building them from scratch,” says David Strauss, CTO, Pantheon. “It was time to move beyond custom containers on managed VMs and extend our cloud strategy to include next-generation technologies for container management and analytics.”

Pantheon evaluated several leading cloud providers and determined that Google Cloud Platform would be the best fit for its business and customers. Engineering had the final say, running a battery of functionality and performance tests at the storage, database, and web server layers.

“In every test our engineers did, Google Cloud Platform came in as better, faster, and more cost effective than the competition,” says Niall Hayes, COO, Pantheon. “We compared MariaDB to Google Cloud SQL and Cassandra to Google Bigtable, and container density improved from 250 to 400 containers per server.”

Migrating 200,000+ sites in 2 weeks

Pantheon wanted to make the transition transparent to its customers, so a fast and smooth migration to Google Cloud Platform was essential. With help from Google, Pantheon completed the migration quickly and moved 500TB of databases, code, and files with zero customer impact.

“We migrated over 200,000 websites to Google Cloud Platform in 2 weeks, including 50,000 that are heavily trafficked and actively developed, and nobody noticed,” says Josh Koenig, Co-founder and Head of Products at Pantheon. “The speed was incredible. There was no downtime, and we filed no additional support tickets with Google during the entire process.”

The platform for platforms

For its content management system runtime environment, Pantheon runs its own homegrown container management technology on Google Compute Engine. To automate scaling for other core services such as its routing layer and distributed file system, it uses Google Kubernetes Engine for cluster management and orchestration.

“Google is the clear leader in Kubernetes and container management, which aligns very well with our open source values and our vision for the future,” says Niall. “With Google Kubernetes Engine we get better resource efficiency, and automated operations and autoscaling take a lot of administration off our plate.”

In addition to smooth scaling, Pantheon and its customers benefit from improved performance and reliability thanks to the high-quality private network offered by Google.

Further, the Google partnership with Fastly enables direct connectivity to Google Cloud Platform to improve performance for edge caching. As a result of these improvements, Pantheon raised its availability service level agreement (SLA) from 99.9% to 99.95% and can now take on even larger customers.

“Google’s network topology, both locally and globally, performs better and more reliably than competing solutions, making Google Cloud Platform the best choice for us and for our customers,” says David. “Google beats any other cloud provider as the best platform-for-platforms.”

Adds Josh: “Google has unbelievable technology around persistence and replication between zones and regions, and that is not something we could find anywhere else. This allows us to offer advanced disaster recovery and failover services to our customers.”

Strengthening customer relationships

Pantheon uses Google BigQuery, a fully managed, cloud-based data warehouse, to integrate with Fastly and analyze website traffic on behalf of its customers. Previously, Pantheon was unable to ingest edge data quickly enough from Fastly, limiting its ability to identify issues and provide the best customer service. Today, Fastly streams logs in real time into Google BigQuery for analysis, giving Pantheon a wealth of insights.

“We use Google BigQuery to identify customers that have outgrown their infrastructure or need to right-size for business growth,” says David. “We can have proactive conversations and add a lot of value to the relationships. Soon, we plan to make Google BigQuery available to our customers so they can better understand their own traffic.”

Adds Niall: “Google Cloud Platform is more data-oriented than other cloud providers, making it a better match for our needs and our customers’ strategic initiatives.”

Integrated, granular security

Pantheon appreciates that Google Cloud services are built for public cloud, with granular security as a core design and development requirement. Employees simply use their G Suite credentials to gain access to Google Cloud Platform infrastructure and services.

“We’ve been a G Suite shop for years because of the paperless collaboration benefits,” says Josh. “G Suite connects our distributed company, and it was very natural to use those same logins for Google Cloud Platform.”

Staying competitive and productive

Moving to Google Cloud Platform opens up new possibilities for services Pantheon can offer to customers in the future, including machine learning and big data analytics, to give them a more complete view of how digital experiences are driving their businesses. Internally, engineers can move faster, do more effective capacity planning, and provide better service as Pantheon moves its products upmarket.

Pantheon expected to save 20% on cloud infrastructure costs by moving to Google Cloud Platform, but was able to double that savings with resource optimization and managed services.

“Since moving to Google Cloud Platform, our platform is more secure, reliable, and scalable than ever. We reduced our cloud infrastructure costs by 40%, and our customers’ sites run 45% faster than industry benchmarks,” says Niall. “Our engineers are Google fans for a reason—they’re happier, more efficient, and more productive on Google Cloud Platform.”

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.