Pierogies might just be the ultimate comfort food. But when Mrs. T’s Pierogies — the leading manufacturer of frozen pierogies in the US — learned it needed to transition its existing on-premises SAP ECC to S/4HANA, the company sought a little comfort for itself. 

Founded in 1952, Mrs. T’s Pierogies now produces more than 650 million pierogies a year. Moving that many pierogies requires a powerful ERP system — and an equally powerful IT infrastructure on which to run it. Mrs. T’s realized that the SAP-mandated transition of its ERP solution to SAP S/4HANA was an opportunity to move its SAP systems to Google Cloud and gain real-time analytics capabilities for faster sales forecasting, more effective trade promotions, and more sophisticated planning.

From necessity to opportunity

Mrs. T’s successfully ran its SAP ECC solution on its own on-premises servers for years. But after SAP decided to sunset the product, Mrs. T’s realized that it faced multiple challenges, including: 

• Migrating its SAP ECC 6.0 system from an on-premises leagcy OS to a cloud-based Linux environment
• Moving data from its SAP DB2 database to HANA
• Transitioning from ECC to SAP S/4HANA

That complex transition needed to take place with little or no downtime, since nearly all of the company’s invoices, warehouse movements, and transfer orders used the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) protocol. Missing even a few hours of EDI transactions would put significant revenue at stake. Adding to the challenge: Some Mrs. T’s customers would not accept an invoice past five days, which left little room for error. Mrs. T’s chose Rackspace Technology, a longtime Google Cloud partner, to oversee the move. 

Mrs. T’s could have chosen to run S/4HANA on its legacy hardware but saw migration to Google Cloud as an opportunity to improve key aspects of its business, in particular data analytics. Historically, sales planning and forecasting involved time-consuming manual processes. But the speed, availability, and scalability of Google Cloud meant that Mrs. T’s could take advantage of S/4HANA’s embedded analytics capabilities. Migrating could also open the door to leveraging Google Cloud’s native integration of SAP data to power Google tools such as BigQuery, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks, and more. 

The move to Google Cloud also gave Mrs. T’s an opportunity to update its disaster recovery process. Previously, the company backed up to tape. So, if its SAP systems went down, a member of the IT department would have to drive the most recent tape backups an hour to its cold site, where the disaster recovery partner would load the SAP backup tape, boot the system up, switch network connections to that site, and cross their fingers. Not only would downtime be significant, but restored data would be limited to the periodic tape backup. 

“Everything just worked”

Once Mrs. T’s decided to migrate to Google Cloud, the company worked with Rackspace Technology to implement the system. The first phase focused on moving the SAP production environment from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud and updating its database to HANA, which took place over 12 weeks. The switchover occurred over a weekend and was all but invisible to users. “We came in on Monday and everything just worked,” recalls Timothy Coyle, Director of Information Systems & Technology. In a second four-month phase, the company transitioned from ECC to S/4. 

The move to Google Cloud paid dividends immediately. Batch transactions occurred twice as fast and on-screen end-user transactions rendered instantly. The upgrade also gave the finance team access to embedded analytics and monitoring for the first time. With everything now in the cloud, disaster recovery could be dynamic and nearly instantaneous, with a worst-case scenario of just 5 to 10 minutes of downtime. 

“Mrs. T’s needed a skilled and experienced partner that could move its SAP environment to Google Cloud with no negative impacts to its business. We knew this migration was a key initiative in Mrs. T’s digital transformation journey,” says Chuck Britton, Google Partner Development Manager at Rackspace. “We also knew that running SAP on Google Cloud would give the business the fast and flexible analytical capabilities it needed for its SAP data.” 

From ideation to production, Mrs. T’s migrated from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to a modern SAP S/4HANA solution on Google Cloud in only seven months, with minimal downtime and zero disruptions. Now that the migration is complete, Mrs. T’s has a flexible, highly scalable environment to run the SAP applications and data that fuel the business. Says Coyle, “Our strategic intent for IT is to make processes simpler, people more productive, and infrastructure more secure. This project fits right square in the middle of that strategic philosophy.”

Learn more about ways in which Google Cloud can transform your SAP experience and about Rackspace Google Cloud solutions for SAP customers.

The digital media and entertainment industry is experiencing dramatic growth, as audiences migrate to online experiences and content providers seek to deliver new and innovative content. According to The Global Internet Phenomena Report, streaming video accounted for 53.7% of internet bandwidth traffic, up by 4.8% from a year ago. This rapid growth of over-the-top content is straining existing infrastructure, fueling media companies’ shift to the public clouds with their global presence and greater distribution capacities. In addition, other use cases such as gaming, social networks, AR/VR experiences, and education continue to fuel the need for intelligent media services and operations.

Today, at the 2022 NAB Show Streaming Summit, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Media CDN — a modern, extensible platform for delivering immersive experiences with unparalleled scale and intelligence. Media CDN will enable media and entertainment customers to efficiently and intelligently deliver streaming experiences to viewers anywhere in the world. The same infrastructure that Google has built over the last decade to serve YouTube content to over 2 billion users is now being leveraged to deliver media at scale to Google Cloud customers with Media CDN.

Unparalleled planet-scale reach and scale

Media CDN’s foundational advantage is the Google network. We have invested decades of resources to build tremendous capacity and reach in over 200 countries and more than 1,300 cities around the globe. Modern video applications are sensitive to fluctuations in latency, so getting content closer to users enables higher bitrates and reduces rebuffers, resulting in a superior experience for the end user. Media CDN builds on the success of the existing Cloud CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration and complements it by enabling delivery of immersive media experiences.

In addition to running on planet-scale infrastructure, Media CDN tailors delivery protocols to individual users and network conditions. Media CDN includes out-of-the-box support for QUIC (HTTP/3), TLS 1.3, and BBR, optimizing for last-mile delivery . When the Chrome team rolled out widespread support for QUIC, video rebuffer time decreased by more than 9% and mobile throughput increased by over 7%.

Media CDN also achieves industry-leading offload rates. With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin — even for infrequently accessed content. This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs. These features are built into the product and seamlessly support customer content hosted on Google Cloud, on-premises, or on a third-party cloud.

“We are excited to leverage Media CDN to continue to deliver an exceptional streaming experience for Stan users across Australia. With Google’s massive network, and a deep reach into the ISPs, we are able to deliver the highest quality video for our users, no matter where they are”—John Hogan, Chief Technology Officer, Stan

“Our mission at U-NEXT is to deliver the highest quality and most entertaining content to our users. Google Cloud’s Media CDN helps us efficiently scale our infrastructure, which is challenging with a vast library of content. Media CDN offloaded 98.3% of requests from our origin server while delivering consistent great quality.”—Rutong Li, Chief Technology Officer, U-NEXT

Broader platform for monetization and immersive experiences

While global distribution is critical for a high-quality end-user experience, it’s only one piece of delivering a world-class platform for immersive experiences. Media CDN offers additional capabilities to enable this transformation — ad insertion, ecosystem integrations and platform extensibility, and powerful AI/ML analytics for interactive experiences.

Streaming providers can improve monetization through integrated ad serving via the Video Stitcher API, which allows manipulation of video content to dynamically insert ads.

Through extensible ecosystem integrations, Media CDN connects customers to key capabilities to simplify their operations. For example, the Transcoder API supports custom streaming formats, while the Live Stream API transcodes mezzanine live signals into direct-to-consumer streaming formats, for multiple device platforms.

Media CDN is built with AI/ML that will give viewers more control over how they see, experience, and even interact with content. For example, sports fans watching a game can obtain real-time stats and analytics, viewers can purchase items from virtual billboards, etc.

Cloud-native and developer-friendly operations

Media companies are under pressure to develop and deploy innovative experiences at a furious pace. Media CDN was built by developers, for developers, with automation and observability built in, giving media providers the speed and flexibility they need to integrate delivery provisioning and management into their content release processes.

Media CDN offers comprehensive APIs and automation tools such as Terraform. Detailed, pre-aggregated metrics and playback tracing make it easy to diagnose performance across the entire infrastructure stack. Real-time visibility is provided via Google Cloud’s operations suite, and integrates with tools that developers already use such as Grafana and ElasticSearch.

“Leveraging the same infrastructure as YouTube, Google Cloud’s Media CDN combines geographic reach, API-first architecture and integration with the Cloud operations suite. This is a transformative move that is aligned with the future of the CDN industry.”— Ghassan Abdo, Research Vice President, WW Telecom, Virtualization and CDN, IDC

“Viewers around the world are demanding best-in-class video quality and performance across modes of consumption. A video-first delivery network can be a game changer in this space. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud and to leverage Media CDN to enable premium video experiences and customer engagements.”—Juan Martin, Founder and CTO, Firstlight Media

Planet-scale advanced security

Media CDN lets streaming media providers take advantage of Google’s decades-long experience delivering video safely, securely, and reliably. The platform includes deep integration with Google Cloud Armor for planet-scale DDoS protection and a rich set of capabilities to detect and mitigate attacks, prevent abuse, manage risk, and comply with regulatory or licensing requirements.

If you want to deliver rich, immersive experiences to global audiences with an extensible, modern delivery platform, we’d love to hear from you. For more information, including technical specifications and platform architecture, please visit cloud.google.com/media-cdn. To get started with Media CDN, contact your sales team.

According to a National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, social determinants of health (SDoH) account for upwards of 80% of a population’s health outcomes. Breaking this down further, 50% come just from socioeconomic and physical environment factors such as education, employment, income, family and social support, community safety, air and water quality, and access to housing and transit. SDoH determine access to and quality of healthcare, and are contributors to a system of disparate access to care.

We believe that to more efficiently provide comprehensive healthcare access to more people, providers will leverage technology to blend in-person and virtual modes of care delivery.

In this article, Amwell and Google Cloud examine five ways telehealth – as part of a provider’s overall care model – can help democratize access to healthcare. (graphic url) 

Remove distance as a barrier to care

8.6 million Americans live more than 30 minutes from their nearest hospital. Long drives can deter patients from seeking care or maintaining routine visits. On the flip side, 92% of Americans nationwide have access to wired broadband in the home or through mobile broadband. Therefore, having a virtual visit just a click away can help remove barriers to care, like distance.

Eliminate the risk of unnecessary exposure

Virtual care means that patients don’t have to worry about potential exposure in transit, while sitting in waiting rooms, or from direct interactions during in-person health visits. This is particularly relevant when it comes to those with chronic diseases or underlying conditions. Telehealth provides patients who may be more susceptible to diseases with access to continuous healthcare without putting them at higher risk for developing more severe symptoms. Virtual visits can occur in the comfort –and safety– of patients’ homes.

Extend access to specialized care

55% of preventable hospitalization or mortality in rural settings is due to lack of access to specialty care. With telehealth, physical proximity to specialized services–typically in urban areas–can be reduced as a limiting factor. Virtual solutions grant everyone access to top specialists, regardless of location.

Save time and money

By augmenting in-person visits with telehealth applications, providers can benefit from greater efficiencies in scheduling, helping to improve their bottom line, and add more flexibility to their workday. Meanwhile, patients can spend less on travel and childcare, limit time taken off work, and save on other costs associated with in-person visits — for a savings of $35 to $690 per visit. In a survey by the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, 76% of the 2,000+ patients surveyed across the US responded that transportation was removed as a barrier, 65% reported they no longer had to take time off from work for an appointment, and 67 percent reporting lower costs than an in-person visit.

Combat physician shortage and fatigue

Research shows there will be a shortage of more than 100,000 doctors by 2030. In the midst of a physician shortage, telehealth can help improve care delivery and make it more efficient, ensuring more people can still have their healthcare needs addressed. Additionally, by integrating intelligence such as case triaging along with telehealth into a virtual care model, providers can help reduce clinician burnout.

Amwell and Google Cloud are partnering to deliver transformative telehealth solutions that will make it easier for more patients to receive care and improve patient and clinician experiences across the continuum of care. One example includes embedding real-time captioning and translation services powered by Google Cloud’s AI and NLP technologies within the Amwell platform to increase health access and understanding for more people.

As physicians, we are excited that the future of healthcare will continue to blend cloud technologies like EHR-integrated telehealth platforms, AI, healthcare-trained virtual agents along with in-person care to create an integrated hybrid care model that will improve patient outcomes and unburden providers, all while expanding access to broader patient populations.

To learn more, download the whitepaper “Healthcare’s Virtual Transformation,” written in conjunction with Becker’s Hospital Review.

^{1: “Social Determinants of Health 101 for Health Care: Five Plus Five,” National Academy of Medicine, October 2017}