What Swiggy and You Can Learn From This Company’s Use of ML to Engage Customers

9640
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:45 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
The app economy has enabled a huge range of unique business models to flourish. One such model is online food ordering and delivery services, in which apps leverage geo-location data to aggregate local food choices and offer personalized options to consumers.
A leading company in this space is Just Eat. Launched in the UK in 2001 with a vision of ‘serving the world’s greatest menu. Brilliantly.’ The company has capitalized on the popularity of online food delivery and grown its presence across 12 markets.
Just Eat acts as an intermediary between take-out food outlets and hungry customers, giving local restaurants access to a broader base of potential diners, while providing consumers with an easy and secure way to order and pay for food from their favourite restaurants.
Today the company helps 27 million customers find food from more than 112,000 restaurants—everything from homemade Italian pasta, to Chinese noodle bowls, to fish-and-chips.
Data is the fuel of Just Eat’s rapid growth, but it wasn’t always looked at that way. In its early days, Just Eat struggled with the deluge of information and faced fragmentation across its systems. In fact, the company realized its legacy data vendor wasn’t capable of ingesting 90 percent of the data produced by its food platform. This was incredibly frustrating for Just Eat’s analysts and data scientists, who had to waste time cleaning up sources instead of leveraging the data to create a better user experience.
Just Eat turned to Google Cloud, and now uses machine learning (ML) to power sophisticated consumer recommendations on both its app and website. It also makes heavy use of features offered by Google Cloud Platform, including BigQuery for running analytics on its customer data set and Cloud Pub/Sub for messaging app users with relevant offers in real-time.
Having all of Just Eat’s data in one platform has translated into real value for its customers. With Google Cloud tools, Just Eat has created its own proprietary Customer Ontology framework, which today contains 5.5 billion features that better understand consumers’ behavior and food habits, and provides insights into previous visits.
Just Eat recently created an “Adventurous Index” to map its customers according to their ordering habits, enabling them to tailor their marketing and user experiences. For example, mid-adventurous customers are shown a choice of restaurants that serve their most ordered cuisine, while adventurous customers can choose from restaurants that serve a wider variety. This not only has prompted consumers to be more adventurous with their choices, but also has led to more business at a more diverse set of restaurants.
Matt Cresswell, Director of Customer Platforms at Just Eat said that Google Cloud has become integral to its product delivery: “Consumer food choice is a hugely nuanced topic. We know that individuals have their own unique journeys when they use Just Eat. We’ve sought to create a truly one-to-one relationship with every customer. The changes we’ve made to the platform mean they can access the dishes they enjoy at the touch of a fingertip, and find inspiration to discover new dishes they’ll love. We’re grateful to Google Cloud for helping us support our customers on their culinary explorations.”
Google Introduces Cloud Career Jump Start Certification for the U.S. Underrepresented Communities

3227
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
It’s no question that the cloud computing industry is booming and cloud experts are in high demand. In 2020, 67 percent of organizations surveyed in the IDG Cloud Computing Report added new cloud roles and functions (source).
So there are plenty of cloud jobs out there, but if you don’t have years of experience, you might find it difficult to get one. This is especially true for members of underrepresented communities, who face other kinds of systemic barriers in education and employment.
To help meet this demand and democratize opportunity, Google Cloud is introducing its first virtual Certification Journey Learning program for underrepresented communities across the United States—Cloud Career Jump Start. The program is free of charge for participants, and includes technical and professional skill development and resources with an aim to provide a readiness path to certification via the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer Exam.
Google Cloud’s Certification Journey Learning Program
The program offers free access to the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer training, which provides support preparations for the Certification Exam. This industry-recognized certification helps job applicants validate their cloud expertise, elevate their career, and transform businesses with Google Cloud technology. Learn more about the exam by watching the Certification Prep: Associate Cloud Engineer webinar.
Designed specifically for Computer Science or Information Systems-related majors (or relevant experience), the 12-week program offers:
- Exclusive free access to Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer-related training to support preparations for the Certification Exam.
- Guided progress through the certification prep training on Qwiklabs.
- Office hours hosted by Google Cloud technical experts.
- Technical workshops, including sessions with Googlers who earned cloud industry certifications and have built impactful careers in cloud tech, such as Google Cloud’s Kelsey Hightower (a Principal Developer Advocate) and Jewel Langevine (a Solution Engineer).
Earn your Associate Cloud Engineer Certification
Curious if you qualify to apply for the program? We’ve put together a guide below to help:
- What does an associate cloud engineer do? Associate Cloud Engineers deploy applications, monitor operations, and manage enterprise solutions. They also use the Google Cloud Console and the command-line interface to perform common platform-based tasks, to maintain one or more deployed solutions that leverage Google-managed or self-managed services on Google Cloud.
- Who’s eligible? We are encouraging applicants from groups that have been historically underrepresented in tech including Black, Latinx, Native American & Indigenous communities. Applicants should have six or more months of hands-on experience in a Computer Information Systems-related major, and/or relevant experience through online courses, boot camps, hackathons or internships. Although the ability to program is not required, familiarity with the following IT concepts is highly recommended: virtual machines, operating systems, storage and file systems, networking, databases, programming, and working with Linux at the command line.
How do you know if you are ready for the program?
To get an idea of what the program will cover:
- Watch the Certification Prep: Associate Cloud Engineer webinar
- Complete the Skill IQ Assessment via Pluralsight
- Review the Associate Cloud Engineer Certification Exam Guide
- Take the Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exam
Jump start a career in cloud infrastructure and technology
Following the hands-on training, Google Cloud will offer an additional 9 months of career development resources and activities. This includes an online support community, mentoring with Googlers & partners including SADA, EPAM Systems Inc., and Slalom, resume and interviewing support from Google Recruiting & Staffing, and additional career workshops. We are also partnering with a number of Black-owned and -operated, nonprofit and cloud training organizations like Kura Labs.
Cloud certifications open doors
Want to hear more about this program from two Googlers who completed it? We asked Kelsey and Jewel to share more on how certifications helped them launch their careers in the cloud industry:
- “IT certifications introduced me to the game; opportunities and hard work helped me change it.” – Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform
- “Becoming certified as a cloud computing professional combined with prayer, networking, and practice has kept me moving on my purposeful and rewarding career path as an engineer.” – Jewel Langevine, Solution Engineer, Google Cloud Solutions Studio
Kelsey and Jewel’s wisdom doesn’t end there. They play a central role in the program, sharing more about how they navigated certifications and leveraged them for success.
Apply today to Cloud Career Jump Start
The program is now live in the United States, with plans to expand to other regions in the coming months. It is completely virtual, and all training is on-demand so that participants can access their coursework anytime, anywhere via the web or mobile device. To determine whether you (or someone you know) would be a great fit for the Cloud Career Jump Start, check out our guidelines and apply.
The Tech Tightrope: How the U.S. State & Local Agencies Strive to Balance between Innovation and Budget

5014
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
State and local government (SLG) agencies are reeling from a combination of unbudgeted COVID-related expenses and reduced tax revenue caused by unemployment and business closures. Any way you look at it, the situation is challenging. To understand how SLG agencies are coping, Google Cloud collaborated with MeriTalk to survey 200 SLG IT and program managers, uncovering some revealing trends in SLG technology innovation. Unsurprisingly, approximately 84% of SLG organizations report making budgetary tradeoffs to bridge funding the gaps the ongoing pandemic has created.
However, researchers discovered a silver lining: The pandemic has also been a catalyst to modernize the legacy infrastructure in states and cities. The majority of survey respondents (88%) reported that their agency made greater modernization progress this past year than in the prior 10 years.
Walking a tightrope between innovation and budget pressure
According to 89% of state and local leaders, now is the time to invest in technology modernization. But 80% are experiencing a funding gap due to unbudgeted expenses related to the pandemic and declining tax revenue, which makes finding that balance between innovation and budget a serious challenge.
Some agencies are achieving the impossible, though. For example, the City of Pittsburgh Department of Innovation and Performance is working with Google Cloud to migrate and modernize its legacy IT infrastructure. By decommissioning their data center and moving to Google Cloud, the city can build new data analytics tools to drive smart city initiatives and create entirely new applications to improve digital service delivery for its residents. As a result, the city will save costs, abandon its brittle legacy IT structure, and create a cloud-based technology platform for the future—becoming the region’s leader in cloud-native software development.
Google Cloud is enabling the city’s IT team by curating and delivering our certification training at no cost. The program includes live training sessions as well as on-demand training.
Bridging funding gaps
In their drive to modernization, many SLG leaders are turning to grants as an important source of funding. Approximately 84% of those surveyed report making tradeoffs to bridge funding gaps, such as moving resources away from operations and maintenance (37%), increasing reliance on pandemic-related funding (31%), and delaying internal modernization efforts to enable remote work for employees (29%). One way that states are dealing with this tension between budget gaps and the need for innovation is to turn to Google Cloud for cost savings and improved capabilities.
For example, Google Cloud is helping the State of West Virginia innovate and enhance IT security despite decreased state funding. The state entered a multi-year agreement to ensure full access to enterprise-level Google Workspace capabilities for 25,000 state employees, keeping the state at the forefront of technology advancements at a projected cost savings of $11.5 million.
Similarly, Google Cloud helped build the Rhode Island Virtual Career Center to help the state’s constituents get back to work. Using familiar productivity tools within Google Workspace, employees can access new career opportunities quickly, while employers can reach more candidates. Skipper, the CareerCompass RI bot, uses data and machine learning to connect Rhode Islanders with potential new career paths and reskilling opportunities.
Enhancing services
Google Cloud is also helping agencies enhance services, including working with the State of Illinois to get unemployment funding to constituents in need.The state is using Contact Center AI to rapidly deploy virtual agents that help more than 1 million out of work citizens file unemployment claims faster. Capable of engaging in human-like conversations, these intelligent agents provide constituents with 24/7 access and enable government employees to focus on more complex, mission-critical tasks—such as combating fraud. In summer 2020, the virtual agents handled more than 140,000 phone and web inquiries per day, including 40,000 after-hours calls every night. The state anticipates an estimated annual savings of $100 million from the solution, which was deployed in just two weeks.
Working with Google, Ohio also uncovered $2 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims. We will continue to partner with the state to find fraudulent claims, and prioritize the processing of legitimate claims.
Focusing on cybersecurity
Despite expanding security threats topping NASCIO’s list of 2021 State CIO priorities, more than one in three IT managers (35%) say their organization reduces security measures to expedite timelines. Partnering with Google Cloud has enabled many agencies to enhance their security measures while modernizing and staying within budget, investing in support for remote work devices, digital services for residents, and cybersecurity.
NYC Cyber Command works with city agencies to ensure systems are designed, built, and operated in a highly secure manner. NYC3 followed a cloud-first strategy using the Google Cloud Platform. The virtual operations demanded by the pandemic have increased the importance of security and compliance in SLG. Google Cloud is committed to act as a security transformation partner and be the trusted cloud for public sector agencies.
Finally, to strengthen public and private partnerships, SLG organizations told MeriTalk that they need vendor partners to support modernization efforts for flexibility and collaboration (46%), need innovation-focused leadership groups to help balance technology needs with budget constraints (41%), and they expect significant returns on investments in cloud computing (38%), and data management/analytics (33%).
Google Cloud is helping SLG customers across the country invest in innovation to walk the tech tightrope—balancing innovation and budgets—and helping to build a more resilient future. Visit the State and Local Government solutions page to learn more.
The Power of Two: Best Practices for Mergers & Acquisitions on Google Cloud

3380
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Congratulations! Your company just acquired or merged with another organization, beginning an important new chapter in its history. But like with many business deals, the devil is in the details — particularly when it comes to integrating the two companies’ cloud domains and organizations. In this blog post, we look at how to approach mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from the perspective of Google Cloud. These are the best practices that your Google Cloud Technical Account Managers follow — or that we recommend you follow if you plan to perform the integration yourself.
Although there are various M&A scenarios, here are the two most common ones we will focus on:
- Both entities engaged in the M&A have some presence on Google Cloud and are looking for some level of integration
- Only one of the entities has a presence on Google Cloud, and is looking at best ways to work together
Depending on your situation, your approach to integrating the two companies will vary substantially.
When both companies have a Google Cloud presence
In the first scenario, let’s assume company A is acquiring company B. Prior to the M&A, both companies have their own Google Cloud Organizations — the top level structures in the Google Cloud resource hierarchy — and have one or more billing accounts associated with them. There are also various Folders and Projects below each Google Cloud Organization. In this scenario, here are the key questions to ask:
- How do you plan to integrate/consolidate two distinct Google Cloud Organizations?
- How do you plan to organize the billing structure?
- How do you handle Projects under the two Organizations?
- What is the identity management strategy for the two Organizations?
For each of these key questions, go ahead and formulate a detailed plan of action. If you have access to the Technical Account Manager service through Google Cloud Premium Support, you can reach out to them to further develop this plan.
Understanding Google Cloud Organizations
From an organizational integration standpoint, when each entity in an M&A has its own Google Cloud Organization, you have various options: no integration, partial, or full.

No integration – When company B operates as an independent entity from company A, no migration is required. One caveat is if company A has negotiated better pricing terms/discounts and support packages with Google Cloud. In that case, you can sign an affiliate addendum by working with your Google Cloud account team to help unlock the same benefits for company B.

Partial integration – Some projects move over to company A from company B and others stay with Company B. There can be some shared access between the two companies and each of the organizations can continue to use their existing identity providers. This can be a self-serve or a paid services engagement with Google Cloud depending on the complexity of the two companies and how many project migrations need to take place between them.

Full integration – Company B is fully incorporated into company A. This means you go through a full billing, Google Workspace identity and project migration from company B into company A. This can be a complex process and we highly recommend engaging your Google Cloud account teams to scope out a paid services engagement to go through this transition.
Planning your project migration
No matter what you want your end state to look like, project migration requires careful planning. Again, if you have an assigned Technical Account Manager, please reach out to them to ensure that you have a conversation around best practices before starting this migration.
If you’re taking a self-service approach, at a high level, we recommend leveraging the Resource Manager API to manage your project migrations. Do keep in mind that there are several prerequisites and required permissions documented here that need to be assigned before going down this path.
In addition, please be sure to read the billing and identity management considerations below to ensure that you are covering all of the bases associated with such a migration, as your choices can fundamentally alter your Google Cloud footprint.
Billing considerations
When deciding how to structure your Organizations and billing accounts, our recommendation is to always limit the number of Organization nodes and use the Folder structure to manage departments/teams within it. Creating additional Organization nodes is only advised in cases where you require a level of isolation for certain Projects from central administration for a specific business reason, for example, if the company being acquired already has their own Organization node and there is a business justification to let it operate as a standalone entity.
Warning: If you have multiple Organization nodes, be aware that you will not have central visibility across all your organizational resources, and that policy management across different Organization nodes can be cumbersome. You will also have to manage multiple Workspace accounts and manage identities across them, which can be difficult, especially when operating at scale.
From a billing account management perspective, our recommendation is to create one central billing account that lives within the Organization node with tags and labels incorporated for additional granularity. However, there are a few business cases which warrant the creation of additional billing accounts such as:
- You need to split charges for legal or accounting purposes
- Invoices are paid in multiple currencies
- You need to segregate usage to draw down on a Google Cloud promotional credit
- Subsidiaries need their own invoice
Keep in mind that committed-use and spend-based discounts and promotional credits cannot be shared across billing accounts and are provisioned on a per-billing-account basis. As such, more billing accounts can make it harder to leverage these discounts and credits.
Identity management
As you might expect, merging two entities has identity management implications. Cloud Identity is the solution leveraged by Google Cloud to help you manage your user and group identities. Even if the acquired company only uses the productivity products that are part of Google Workspace, the identities would still be managed by Cloud Identity.
Google Workspace considerations
To move large amounts of content into a Google Workspace domain, we recommend one of three options, depending on your end goal and data complexity:
- For general migrations: Leverage Google Workspace Migrate to move data into your Workspace domain from either another Workspace domain or a third-party productivity solution
- For manual migrations: Use the Export tool to move your organization’s data to a Cloud Storage archive so you can selectively download exported data by user and service
- For complex Google Workspace scenarios: Speak with your Google Cloud Technical Account Manager about the possibility of using a custom scoped engagement to merge two Google Workspace environments without business interruption
When only one company is on Google Cloud
Now, let’s consider the scenario where only company A has a presence on Google Cloud but company B does not. The approach you take to integrate the two organizations largely depends on your desired end state — full, partial or no integration.
If the plan is to eventually integrate company B into company A, your approach here will have a lot of similarities with the ‘full integration’ option mentioned above — just at a later point in time.
You may also run into a scenario where company B has a presence on an alternative cloud platform and you need to migrate resources into or out of Google Cloud. Again, similar to the partial integration option called out above, a paid engagement or a self-service exercise would be a good fit depending on the complexity of the desired end state.
Here to help
A merger or acquisition is an exciting milestone for any company, but one that needs to be managed carefully. Once you carefully review these considerations, develop a plan of action for your organization. You can also engage Google’s Professional Services for a paid engagement or Google’s Technical Account Management Service for a self-managed process to achieve the desired results.
If you are going through or considering going through M&A at your organization and have a different scenario than what we have discussed, please feel free to reach out to your account teams for guidance or contact us at https://cloud.google.com/contact.
Custom AI Solutions, Global Delivery Centers and More Resources Dedicated for Customer Success

4885
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.
We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.
Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.
Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice
We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs.
AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing.
Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.
Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.
Launching new Global Delivery Centers
Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.
The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.
In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.
Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint
In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich.
These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation.
Adding new leadership to enable customer success
Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.
Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.
Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.
You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.
Bharat Light & Power’s CEO Says Enough! It’s Time to Leverage AI and IoT

3939
Of your peers have already read this article.
4:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
As community and business concern over global warming, sustainability, and energy security continues to rise, companies such as Bharat Light & Power (BLP) are working on answers.
Founded in 2010 and located in Bangalore and Delhi, BLP is one of the leading clean energy generation companies in India. According to Tejpreet Singh Chopra, Chief Executive Officer of BLP, the business started with the aim of delivering clean energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and hydro to the 300 million residents of India that did not have reliable access to power at that time.
However, BLP soon began experiencing problems ensuring availability of the wind turbines that powered utility-scale wind power generation across the country.
“While we were investing large amounts building wind farms, the failure of the smallest component could shut down an entire wind turbine and compromise our efficient operation,” says Chopra. “A $5,000 battery could fail and shut down a $2.5 million piece of equipment!”
BLP transformed its legacy thinking about man, machine, technology, and process, and implemented an AI and Internet of Things (IoT) project. The business used hundreds of tags from its wind turbines to capture and send machine behavior and performance data to a control center. This data triggered an 18-month project to create AI and machine learning algorithms that would enable engineers to predict component failures in wind turbines, improve generation, and adjust maintenance and replacement schedules accordingly.
This activity provided the foundation of a technology business—one of the three companies that comprise BLP—that delivers enterprise AI for industrial uses over a platform, branded Orion.
“We provide an end-to-end solution that enables businesses in industries such as transportation, logistics, ports, infrastructure, oil and gas, supply chain manufacturing, steel, and automotive to improve productivity,” says Chopra.
As the business expanded, it began to extend beyond its core “AI for industry” mission. It recruited an IoT team to help factory owners and operators enable the programmable logic controllers (PLC) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that run disparate equipment and machines—such as production line machines of different ages and countries of origin—to talk to each other and provide usable data and insights.
Agility and adaptability key
BLP’s management team realized early that the business needed to be agile and adaptable to keep pace with changes in technology.
“We knew we would have to effectively destroy and remake the business every 18–24 months to remain relevant, so we needed a service that could support our dynamic infrastructure, data, and AI needs,” says Chopra.
The business started operations on a cloud service but quickly ran into problems. “We found in the world of industry—the vast amounts of data, the variety of sources of data, and the complexity of insights required—created a very different set of challenges relative to the consumer technology environment,” says Chopra. “Our cloud provider could not provide an architecture that made sense for an industry-focused solution.”
Google Cloud to power AI and visual analytics
Within two years, BLP advanced its strategy and focused on using open source to reduce the cost of its architecture. As Orion matured and its take-up grew, the business began looking at multinational cloud services to run the forthcoming version 3.0 of the platform.
BLP found Google Cloud provided the best fit for its needs for a range of reasons, including the ease of use of Google Cloud services—likened by the BLP technology team as “the equivalent of a consumer app experience”—and its high quality database services, high availability, fast response times, and the power to run the platform’s AI and visual analytics.
BLP established as its key objective a 20% reduction in costs over its previous cloud service and availability levels exceeding 99.9%. The business completed the deployment in June 2019 following discussions and input from Google Cloud’s engineering and architecture experts prior to and during the first stage of the project.
Cloud IoT Core—a managed service that allows organizations to connect, manage, and ingest data from dispersed devices—is the cornerstone of the architecture supporting the latest latest version of the Orion platform, Orion 4.0. BLP has also created a data pipeline based on Cloud Pub/Sub event ingestion and delivery and Cloud Dataflow data processing.
Cloud Bigtable provides a high-performance NoSQL database service for the platform’s analytical workloads and BigQuery delivers a powerful analytics data warehouse. Cloud Functions enables the business’s developers to build event-driven serverless applications.
This architecture currently captures, processes, analyzes, and reports on 8 million data points in 578 turbines around the world per day and processes data from 200,000 data points in 4,000 sensors per day.
The Google Cloud architecture supports the data visualization and reporting and the AI and machine learning-powered products created by BLP. These reports and products enable users to monitor remote assets and use AI-based analytics to predict machine failures before they occur, sequence failure events, and maximize equipment uptime.
A range of benefits to customers
With Google Cloud, BLP is delivering projects with a range of benefits to customers, including increasing manufacturing productivity by at least 5% and reducing costs by about 10%.
“We’ve enabled one of the largest electrical companies in India to compare production line performance by capturing data from PLC and SCADA systems and extracting it to Google Cloud for processing, analysis, and reporting,” says Chopra. “For another customer, we’ve deployed an IoT system that has saved them about $200,000 in energy costs over six months.”
The business is also providing monitoring, reporting, and analysis to predict likely failures of gearboxes, bearings, generators, and blades in 2,000 wind turbines—that provide close over 2 GW of wind power—in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, India, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Furthermore, BLP is providing visual analytics to help one of the largest ports in the world detect when workers are not wearing helmets or safety equipment.
“We also do a lot of inventory track-and-trace work to help companies improve supply chains and help factories keep track of tooling through Bluetooth low-energy technologies,” says Chopra.
With Google Cloud, BLP is now ideally placed to execute its business strategy of helping customers improve productivity and increase growth, control and reduce costs, and enhance quality and safety.
“We are realizing this strategy by working to become the best company in the world at using AI to predict machine failure,” says Chopra. “Our underlying technology strategy entails enabling the most advanced IoT hardware used by industry to talk to software and the cloud, using the most powerful AI cloud around—which is why we chose to marry our AI algorithms with Google Cloud—and delivering insights through visualization.”
Testing Edge TPU
The business is now testing Edge TPU to run AI at the edge in high-performance, small-footprint, and low-power ASIC environments.
“We think that will be the next big revolution as TPU costs come down,” says Chopra. “It will be a considerable benefit performing AI at the edge rather than involving the full infrastructure of the cloud.”
BLP is keen to build on its existing relationship with and use of Google Cloud to further transform manufacturing worldwide.
“Manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of quality and cost through initiatives such as Lean Six Sigma, Zero Defects, poka-yoke, just in time, and other methodologies and approaches,” says Chopra.
“The next wave of manufacturing improvements are coming through industry 4.0, AI, IoT, and Google Cloud’s analytics, databases and other services. These are ideal to power this change in the industrial world.”
More Relevant Stories for Your Company

Rightmove’s Right Move to Google Cloud
In 2020, Rightmove, UK's renowned property website app saw over a billion minutes from users and clocked about 100 busy days in 2021. To continue innovating their products and improve customer experiences while achieving sustainability goals, Rightmove chose Google Cloud to migrate their infrastructure! The property search application platform already

Google Unveils Topaz, the New Subsea Cable Connecting Asia and Canada
There’s a new subsea cable in town: Topaz, the first-ever fiber cable to connect Canada and Asia. Once complete, Topaz will run from Vancouver to the small town of Port Alberni on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and across the Pacific Ocean to the prefectures of

How Cloud Networks Enable CSPs to Deliver 5G
Communication services providers (CSPs) are experiencing a period of disruption. Overall revenue growth is decelerating and is projected to remain below 1 percent per year, following a trend that started even before the pandemic.1 At the same time, driven by the pandemic, data consumption in 2020 increased by 30 percent relative

How Google Classroom Helps State of Iowa Employees Serve the Public Better
Organizations are pressed with the need to engage, retain, and upskill employees with many positions staying fully or partially remote as the pandemic continues. The Center for Digital Government (CDG) reports that 74% of state and local governments believe they will continue hybrid operations for the long-term. This transition is






