If you’re looking to migrate and modernize your Microsoft and Windows workloads, Google Cloud is your premiere destination. No matter what migration strategy you’ve selected or what value you’re looking to achieve, with Google Cloud you’re able to:

• simplify your migration and modernization journey
• reduce your on-prem footprint and increase agility
• optimize license usage to reduce costs
• modernize to reduce single-vendor dependencies
• rely on enterprise-class support backed by Microsoft

Whether you’re looking to migrate applications running on Windows virtual machines, adopt Windows containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), convert SQL databases to Cloud SQL, or something else, Google Cloud offers you the first-class experience you need. 

But we don’t want you to take our word for it. Try it out yourself with our new online Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud Demo Center without any commitment or friction.

The demo center uses hands-on guided simulations to walk you through several scenarios for solving business critical challenges with Google Cloud’s Microsoft and Windows solutions. Because these are all simulated, you’ll see how it works without any deployment, configuration, or commitment. It’s a seamless way for you to see exactly how Google Cloud can help you.

Run dedicated hardware and optimize with sole tenant

Sometimes you might want to run your workloads on dedicated hardware (with oversubscription options) for compliance, licensing, and management. Google Cloud provides sole-tenant nodes that allow you to easily deploy your virtual machines onto dedicated machines to avoid “noisy neighbor” issues, address regulatory or licensing constraints, and optimize inter-VM communications.

Plus, the CPU Overcommit option allows oversubscribing sole-tenant node resources by up to 2x, therefore helping save on per-physical core licensing for many licensed workloads like SQL Server.

Learn how to set up a sole tenant group and node.

Optimize license costs with premium images & custom VMs

One of the easiest ways to optimize your cloud experience with virtual machines (VM) is to pick the right VM image. Google Cloud provides premium license-included VM images that are thoroughly tested and optimized, including SQL Server options with pay-as-you-go licensing. These are great for workloads that don’t need to run all the time or when you do not have spare licenses for bring your own license (BYOL). 

Explore some Windows & SQL images and learn how CPU/Memory options can help optimize deployment and save on licensing.

Modernize your databases with Managed SQL Server

Sometimes you need to manage your SQL Server instance to achieve certain business or operational goals. But more often, managing SQL Server deployments can be undifferentiated: backups, high-availability, updates, and patching are just some of the many things you have to take care of when going the do-it-yourself route. One way to modernize your database tier is to migrate to a managed service like Cloud SQL, which is a fully managed Relational Database service for SQL. 

Explore the process of creating an instance in just a few clicks!

Extract apps from VMs and move to containers in GKE with Migrate for Anthos

Many Windows workloads running on virtual machines such as Internet Information Services (IIS) are ideal candidates for migrating to containers without major changes like rewriting or rearchitecting. However, doing this migration manually can be tedious, which is why Migrate for Anthos can help easily re-platform a .NET app running on IIS into a container-based app. 

Simulate intelligently extracting, migrating, and modernizing applications to run natively on containers in GKE and Anthos clusters.

Move .NET applications to GKE on Windows without code changes

When you’re looking to go fully cloud native, you can leverage Windows containers in GKE without rewriting your .NET applications. Simply create clusters with Windows nodes and deploy containerized Windows workloads in a few clicks, even alongside Linux containers. These deployments reduce operational overhead with features such as auto-upgrade, auto-repair, and release channels. 

Learn  how easy it is to build a GKE cluster with a Windows node and deploy an app. 

Now that you’ve gotten a feel for what’s available, go check out the Demo Center. You can also visit us at Windows and Microsoft on Google Cloud to learn more.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month —a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of Asian and Pacific Island heritage. This feature highlights three AAPI founders from the Google For Startups community.

Read on to learn how these three founders built their businesses, leverage Google tech, and suggestion they have for aspiring entrepreneurs.

CultivatePeople 

Founder: Lola Han

Description: CultivatePeople’s compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market pay rate data and helps companies make data-driven salary decisions so they can attract and retain their most valuable asset: employees. 

Why GCP: “CultivatePeople began using GCP when integrating SSO/SAML authentication after  our SaaS product became a high priority. We were able to exceed our clients’ expectations and increase their level of trust in our platform’s capabilities. We’re currently investigating additional machine learning products, such as Cloud AutoML, that will allow us to quickly deliver exciting features.” 

Note from the Founder: “I grew up with immigrant parents who value stability and are risk-averse. My parents discouraged me from starting my own company because they didn’t want to see me struggle financially or see my health suffer (due to stress). I felt strongly about what CultivatePeople could do, so I started the company as a sole founder in 2017 and watched it double in size year over year since. While the ones I love most may not have cheered me on initially, it was important for me to hang on to the encouraging words of former bosses, executives, and founders to keep me focused on my mission. 

My advice for other AAPI founders is to be a “silent assassin” and believe in the mission and values of your organization. Always remember to stop along the way and: 

 1) Enjoy the journey by celebrating wins and giving yourself credit;

2) Follow your intuition—it’s (almost) always right; 

3) Recognize and invest in your people regularly (ie. give increases more than once a year, if warranted);

4) Give regular words of affirmation to employees on even small achievements.”

Swit

Founder: Josh Lee and Max Lim

Description: Swit is a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management by allowing teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

Why GCP: “Swit is a cross-category hybrid work tool for chat and tasks. This functionality requires more complicated and heavier architecture for performance. So, configuring and managing virtual machines was really challenging to scale up our systems, while handling occasional unexpected traffic surges and frequent updates. Eventually we divided our monolithic architecture into 35 microservices when we launched our official product. The migration to GKE took around one month, and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems became able to offer high scalability and enough resilience to keep its uptime no matter what happened. Now we’re operating 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability with remarkably low downtime – less than 0.00001%/year.”

Note from the Founder: “As an AAPI founder based in Silicon Valley, I feel proud of the work ethics and diligence fellow Korean American entrepreneurs and professionals have long demonstrated here. Especially with K-pop breaking into the mainstream, I feel even more proud of our culture that strives toward an absolute perfection molded through years of training and dedication. The mission-driven culture of Silicon Valley coupled with Google’s edging technology and creativity really helped us build a product that not only encompasses verticals but also transcends cultures. Swit is growing at an unprecedented rate, and we hope  to join the long list of successful AAPI entrepreneurs here. Swit’s close network with the AAPI community wouldn’t have been possible without Google support. We are grateful for this collaborative environment, and we hope to become the next-generation ambassador for collaboration after Google.” 

Check out more from Swit in their founder story.

WISY 

Founder: Min Chen

Description: Wisy develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy. All of us have a bad experience when we can’t find the product we want to buy. That is a $1.9T problem in the consumer-packaged goods industry that Wisy is solving with AI and analytics to help manufacturers and retailers sell more by reducing out-of-stocks and waste at a global scale.

Why GCP: “GCP has an intuitive, easy to use interface, was lower cost, and offered preemptible instances with flexible compute options. Some of the reasons why Wisy decided to use GCP include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.

Wisy has been able to advance quickly with product development, as well as collaborate better and iterate faster in the creation of our AI models, while reducing costs by 40%. At Wisy, we are solving a problem that affects everyone who shops at a store.“

Note from the Founder: “Two years ago, I moved to San Francisco to expand my second startup, Wisy. This is when I learned that my name ‘Min’ stands for ‘minority.’ I was born in China, raised in a Black community in Panama, received scholarships to attend both Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. I worked for 20 years in several countries, but I have never felt so discriminated against due to my race, ethnicity, gender and age than during my time in Silicon Valley. However, this is also the place I learned that my diverse life experience is my competitive advantage. My background enables me to recruit and relate to people in different countries, create scalable and flexible products for multinational customers, and run global operations efficiently.

My recommendation to AAPI founders is to find strength in their multicultural background. Don’t hide what makes you unique, do not limit yourselves, and do not let others limit you. You will lose your edge when trading authenticity for validation. Be proud and own your story.”

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.To learn more about how you can help #StopAsianHate during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, visit their website here.

Editor’s note: Today we hear from Jon White and Angela Donohoe from BPAY Group. BPAY Group is best known for BPAY, the leading electronic bill payment system in Australia, handling one-third of the market. Learn how BPAY Group is positioning the organization for the future by using APIs to streamline workflows for existing customers and new businesses.

BPAY has been a leader in the bill payment industry in Australia for 22 years and provides a secure, fast, and convenient way to connect individuals, businesses, and banks to help people stay on top of their bills.

One of the reasons that BPAY is the preferred bill payment service for so many Australians is our commitment to human-centered design. We’re continuously talking with customers and looking at ways that we can deliver better experiences, products, and services, such as peer-to-peer payments. During these conversations, we noticed some ways that our processes were causing friction for existing or potential customers.

For example, we traditionally used a batch processing system to handle requests between billing companies and banks. But that could cause headaches for some customers, as an error in even one request could cause the whole batch to be rejected. Plus, many “neobanks” (new types of digital-only banks) wanted to work with real-time transactions instead of batch processes, which take longer to complete.

We realized that APIs had the potential to solve many of the challenges impacting customers while opening the doors for future product and business development. We developed a few customer-facing APIs and tested them in closed betas. This experiment went far better than we expected, and we realized that there was a huge appetite for APIs among our biller customers.

While we had developed many APIs for internal systems, developing APIs that were easy to consume by our customers was a new challenge. We needed to move away from our home-grown API development approach and make our API environment more powerful, versatile, and easier to use. The API experts at The Singularity worked with us to develop a strong API strategy. We decided that we would need to support our new strategy with a scalable API management platform.

After a rigorous search, we landed on the Apigee API Management Platform. Apigee was the only solution that met all our technology and business requirements. With Apigee, we have a solid foundation for APIs that will help us deliver more value for all customers.

Creating a custom development environment

BPAY is a trusted brand in Australia, so it was very important to us that we maintain our reputation for excellent customer experiences. When setting up our developer portal, we started with a closed pilot and used developer feedback to make the portal as convenient and simple to use as possible. The Apigee developer portal has many built-in features to help us customize experiences, and if we run into roadblocks, the Apigee team at Google listens and helps us create the custom experience we want.

The developer portal has already proven to be extremely popular. In its first month live, we registered 104 developers in the sandbox environment and 10 developers in the production environment. That was before we even started marketing our developer portal, so we expect those numbers to rise quickly.

Breaking new ground with APIs

We’ve already released four foundational APIs, with a goal of eventually releasing dozens. Our APIs are helping us create smoother experiences for customers. We mentioned that when processing a batch of payment files, one mistake could cause the entire batch to get rejected. Our APIs now enable businesses to validate all payment information before submitting a batch file, dramatically reducing the chances of errors. They can even use our APIs to automatically generate batch files in the right format for different banks.

While APIs improve service for current customers, they also open the doors for new areas of business. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) services, which enable customers to spread out payments across weeks or months, are already popular in retail spaces. After releasing our first APIs, we connected with two BNPL billing services. These companies use our APIs to validate customers’ bill payment information and then pay the bill in full on behalf of customers. This was a completely new use case for us, one that could not have been implemented without our APIs.

The payment service NoahPay also adopted our APIs to validate payment information and let customers pay bills using funds from their WeChat accounts. This is an exciting new market for us, as it’s one of the first examples of how we can connect to international digital wallets through our new APIs. It’s also a great way to introduce users of WeChat, a messaging app used by more than 1 billion people in China, to the BPAY brand.

Planning for the future of bill pay

We have big plans for APIs in the future, and Apigee helps make these plans a reality. We plan to establish a generous freemium monetization model that will allow customers to make up to 200,000 API calls for free each month with tiered payment plans above that. This will enable us to open the doors for smaller organizations while providing optimal support for larger businesses and banks that might need to make millions of calls. Having powerful end-to-end monetization features built in to Apigee means that we can process monetized transactions with ease.

Built-in reporting functionality will also help us make sure that we’re understanding the market’s need for APIs and always providing our customers with valuable services and support.

Apigee greatly streamlines creating self-service API environments. Even as we grow our business, our internal teams will be able to continue providing excellent customer service without needing extra staff to answer questions, help with integration support, and constantly check API security. APIs are the way of the future, and Apigee prepares us meet the challenges that come along with it.

Faced with changing customer behaviors and demands, tightening margins, and increasing threat from digital competitors, financial services institutions (FSIs) will need to meet customers where they are, open up their services, and establish new ways to monetize their products. Doing so will also enable them to build a better profile of their customers, and deliver more personalized user experiences and fast, convenient banking and payment services. Cloud technology plays a big role in this shift toward digital FSIs. 

In Asia, bank branches now account for just 12% to 21% of monthly transactions in the region, with customers turning to digital channels for routine transactions such as peer-to-peer transfers and bill payments, according to McKinsey&Company. Overall customer engagement has climbed from an average 12.7 to 14.9 transactions a month in Asia’s developed markets, and from 6 to 8.1 in emerging markets.¹

Fueled by growing smartphone adoption, the evolving customer behavior and momentum toward digital platforms have enabled digital-first players to snag a growing piece of the banking pie. 

McKinsey estimates that digital banking penetration has grown an average of 97% in Asia’s developed markets, and 52% in emerging markets, with between 30% and 50% of those that have yet to use digital banking likely to do so.

Consumers now are more than ready to make the switch to neobanks, or digital banks. In Singapore, 63% are open to banking with digital-only players, according to a Visa study. On what will entice them to do so, 63% point to bill payments while 56% will use neobank services to make payments at retail outlets. Furthermore, 54% prefer digital banks for the convenience they offer while 52% like the faster service.

Among those who are open to digital banks, 60% will move some services from their current bank to these new players even if the latter have no prior banking experience. One in five of respondents say they are willing to switch all services to a neobank.

The same is true for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in Singapore. According to a separate survey by Visa, 88% of these companies will consider moving some services to digital banks.

Driven to do so by their frustration over a lack of quality corporate products and control of their banking experience, 55% of SMBs believe neobanks will help bring down overall banking costs. Another 54% say digital banks offer greater convenience, while 53% point to greater ease in paying bills online.

These stats should worry even established FSIs, especially those that have not done quite enough to open up their service ecosystems and drive innovation through APIs.

An API toward new revenue

While most banks have active APIs, the services that some of them currently provide are just functional; they’re the means to an end for partners to obtain their targeted products and services. Without knowing, consumers use these types of APIs indirectly by using their favorite applications every day—a payment processing API will enable them to purchase their lunch, while a loan application API will get them that dream home.

But while banks do not always own the customer journey, they still can find opportunities to sell their products via partners. Many leading banks are leveraging key technologies, such as API management, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics to embed digital banking into consumers’ everyday lives, including groceries, travel, entertainment, healthcare, and food delivery. 

When traditional banks open up their APIs to third parties offering broader services that pull in unique services into their own apps, they then become plugged into the broader customer journey. This helps boost usage of their services and embeds them in the overall customer experience. It also provides aggregated data that will help banks build richer consumer profiles, and deliver more personalized products and services.

APIs also create equal opportunities for smaller participants to be involved in the financial services ecosystem, potentially creating micro-segments that previously may not have existed. With insufficient demand within a closed system, to justify the provision of such services, some customers in these micro-segments have previously been left unserved. The APIs, which facilitate collaboration between the different micro-segments so they can be commercially viable, help assuage this problem. 

Some banks are also opening up APIs to allow access to datasets that enable businesses to trigger automated workflows and enhance their operational efficiencies. Others, such as Bank Rakyat Indonesia (Bank BRI) have generated new revenue by leveraging Google Cloud’s Apigee to manage their API lifecycle and identify new revenue opportunities.

Apigee’s monetization feature has helped Bank BRI realize $50 million in revenue and enabled the bank to define its pricing based on API calls and automatically bill based on usage.

In addition, the Indonesian bank uses the data analysis alongside Google Maps Platform to score its customer base of 75.5 million, and identify those who can be recruited as BRILink agents for underbanked areas. These agents are customers who maintain a minimum balance of $800 USD and score high on reliability.

The appointment of branchless agents via the Agent BRILink app has pushed the loan volume from the bank’s branchless business to $26 billion in 2018, up from $15 billion the year before.

How banks can get started with APIs

Clearly, there are new revenue opportunities for banks to leverage the data they already have. Here are some tips to help FSIs kickstart their API journey:

• Align with internal leadership growth initiatives. Leverage executive key performance indicators around growth and cost savings to foster a culture that offers APIs to micro-segmented markets with an eye on cultivating a healthy financial services ecosystem.
• Productize APIs with a strong value proposition. Starting with an API-first approach, stock the shelves of your API shop with new services and a strong inventory of APIs that will entice third parties (i.e., retailers, telcos, etc.) to start using them. This customer-first, outside-in approach will serve as a strong base to build on and enable the addition of more APIs as adoption grows.
• Actively nurture a developer community. A properly trained API manager will ensure constant contact with the developer community, and that partners are provided with case studies to help them identify viable use cases for your APIs.
• Leverage security as a strategic enabler. Security is a key enabler of the API economy, and most API security postures are defensive. By leveraging deep security tooling together with strong identification of developers, banks can better track information and data usage offensively. 

FSIs also need to avoid some common pitfalls, such as overlooking the need to continuously improve their APIs. If no one is using it, the API clearly is failing to provide any real value to third-party developers.

In addition, efforts should be made to market the APIs and let developers know what is available. A common mistake FSIs make is assuming their work is done once their APIs are released and neglecting the need to carry out community outreach and marketing to generate awareness about the APIs.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, don’t miss our session at the Google Cloud Financial Services Summit on Embedded Finance: The Future of Banking.

^{1. McKinsey & Company. “Asia’s digital banking race: Giving customers what they want.” Global Banking Practice. April 2018.}

Editor’s note: In this blog post we learn how TapClicks migrated to Google Cloud to offer their marketing customers a unified platform for data management, operations, insights, and analysis.

TapClicks is a smart marketing cloud, powered by data, that unifies our customer’s marketing. By choosing to migrate our core applications last year to Google Cloud, we cut costs, solved data-sharing concerns for our customers, and opened our stack up to a new ecosystem of possibilities. 

The core problem that we’re solving for our customers is how to manage their marketing infrastructures data and operations. Life isn’t easy for marketers now. There are 7,000 different vendors servicing this space today – creating much complexity between digital agencies, media, and brands. Marketers face challenges in navigating all of these systems, logging in and out, understanding pacing goals, and managing the flow of marketing data so they can analyze and report internally as well as to their clients at scale.

We unify omnichannel campaign data (250 API connectors and 6000 Smart Connectors ™ ) from a plethora of marketing sources on an automated data warehousing solution, creating simplicity for organizations. Over 4,000 agencies, media companies, and brands use our Marketing Operations and Data Management Platform, which imports data at scale and creates an automatic data warehouse on Google Cloud. Teams can also leverage TapClicks, like our world class Facebook connector, to import data directly into Google Data Studios.  Beyond importing and storing, we also provide data exporting to other Google solutions like Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.  We also create interactive dashboards that let stakeholders and clients analyze their data, as well as automated, multi-channel reports that go out to clients at specified times. So channel comparisons, optimizations, attribution, and calculations are easily performed.  Some of our customers are able to generate hundreds of thousands of individual reports and dashboards for their clients.

Although we may be best known for our reporting and analytics, we also empower teams managing the marketing operations workflow from customers and internal stakeholders, especially at scale. Our user-friendly, configurable system helps manage their orders and campaigns. Through automation of this process, we deliver tremendous amounts of efficiency, time saving, cost savings, and reduction of errors. The combination of these solutions makes up our unified platform, with additional capabilities like marketing intelligence that offers competitive and brand-level analysis. This is a disruptive solution in use by all leading media companies, agencies and many brands.

Partnering for possibilities

We faced a few challenges with our original tech stack, which included a mix of the leader in web services revenue, leaders in high performance data warehousing, as well as vendors on bare metal servers. 

• One challenge was around costs, which were growing. 
• Second, many of our customers work with multiple brands, and are very hesitant to share their data with the leader in web services, who’s often viewed as their competitor. 
• Third, these vendors are more focused on their own revenue rather than a true long term partnership that would enable their customers to enjoy similar success as they have experienced.

When looking at other cloud providers, Google Cloud emerged for us as the front runner. They were competitive on costs, and their native Kubernetes support was superior— a big selling point for our DevOps team. There’s also a movement in the marketing and advertising industry away from AWS toward Google Cloud because of the data-sharing concern. Finally, most of our customers are already using Google Cloud tools, so there’s brand recognition and familiarity there, and easier integrations with their own systems.

Migrating to Google Cloud

Our migration, which took about five months, involved moving a significant chunk of our infrastructure, including our core applications, using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). In our legacy architecture, each of our clients was assigned to one of our virtual machines (VMs), and there was a lot of unused capacity because we had to provision for the max usage. We appreciated GKE’s cloud native capabilities, especially autoscaling, a huge benefit for our web application. We have varying usage patterns during the day, and though our application is mostly used during business hours, there are also days in the month of higher usage, and autoscaling saves us time and costs. GKE also makes deployments much easier, and we anticipate a lot of benefits there for our developer environments. We’ve moved some of our microservices into GKE and plan to move more in the future. All in all, we were able to migrate our core products and the bulk of our AWS spend successfully to Google Cloud. 

We also moved from our other vendors Relational Database Service (RDS) to running MySQL on our own VMs on Google Cloud, which gives us more flexibility in terms of settings and fine tuning. We’re still trying to find the best mix as we’re modernizing our infrastructure, and we took this opportunity to migrate from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0.  

Our next stage is exploring more of the capabilities and services of Google Cloud, including BigQuery, which we’re considering for our own data warehouse. The fact that we could also run Snowflake on Google Cloud, if needed, was another selling point for our migration. 

We’re especially interested in BigQuery ML’s machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, which enabled better predictive insights. Our customers want insights from their campaigns— which are working, which are paying off, where should they invest next? Using our platform, they’re looking not only to generate reporting, but also identify opportunities to improve campaign performance. We plan to use AI and ML to improve those capabilities, so that our customers can seamlessly unlock insight and intelligence from their marketing data and campaigns.

Double-clicking on Google Cloud

For us, being able to deeply leverage and partner with Google Cloud to deliver those solutions on a single stack is critical, and we think our customers will love it. We see TapClicks and Google Cloud partnering at a level beyond what you typically see in a cloud provider relationship. Already, fifty percent of our company is working with various Google Cloud solutions, and we envision TapClicks and Google Cloud as extensions of each other, providing a single, powerful platform solution. 

Google Cloud understands the partnership concept, and their team was able to shine a light on their services and what they could bring to the table. Compared to our previous experiences, dealing with the Google Cloud team has been a true pleasure. Now that we’ve migrated, we’re ready to take our next steps into the services available to us in the Google Cloud ecosystem, and the problems we’ll continue to solve for our customers. Learn more about TapClicks and BigQuery ML.