Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.

Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.

With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.

As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for  local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app. 

Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.

Providing reliable service, 24/7

From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.

On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.

Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.

Improving the user experience

At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us. 

As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

2020 brought many challenges, especially as in-person operations were shut down, and many were left vulnerable to unemployment.

The State of Rhode Island responded to these challenges, by modernizing their workforce development operations and moving completely to a custom online platform called the Virtual Career Center, also nicknamed “the VCC.”

It was developed in partnership with Google Cloud and a nonprofit called “Research Improving People’s Lives” (RIPL), and was fully built by Google Cloud partner Maven Wave, which helps a wide array of organizations, including public sector customers, with many types of cloud initiatives.

In this episode of Architecting with Google Cloud, we interviewed Joel Osman, head of Digital Experience & Custom Applications at MavenWave who shared a lot of insights such as:

“We looked at how we can apply leading edge emerging technologies to help people get back to work and use them as tools in such a way that we can augment the personal one to one interactions that agencies had been using with job seekers, to help them get back to work.”

One of those key benefits is enabling job seekers to find coaches that are specialized in their respective community. During the in-person walk-in model, applicants were paired on a first come first serve basis with any available coach on site. Meanwhile online scheduling has enabled a greater opportunity to match veterans, college graduates, non-English speakers, etc with coaches with prior experience in that specific area.

How the VCC was built

This VCC web app was built on Angular. It has a custom frontend built on top of 2 key Google Cloud products. The first is Workspace, which includes functionality such as video conferencing, documents, slides, chat, file storage, etc. And the other is Google Cloud computing resources. Here’s a view of the architecture:

There are 3 main types of users at this time, and that’s job coaches, job seekers, and employers.

• 👩‍🔧 Job Coaches all have Google IDs in the Google Workspace domain, and therefore authenticate against the Google identity repository.
• 🕵️‍♂️ Job Seekers are authenticated through a Cognito-based process maintained by the nonprofit I mentioned earlier (RIPL), the Rhode Island infrastructure team, and the Department of Information Technology (DoIT). Cognito was an identity repository setup prior to this project for users interacting with the State, and remained as their form of authentication.
• 🧭 Employers participate directly with Google Meet, and, to an extent, Google Calendar; but not the Angular app. There’s also a focus on building a future dashboard to see how the center has helped employers with applicants.

The specific Google Cloud components used are the following:

• Firestore: realtime Database that keeps data in sync across client apps.
• BigQuery: serverless warehouse for data.
• Data Studio: is used to build filterable dashboards over BigQuery
• Cloud Functions: which serve as triggers to keep scheduling and data workflows in sync.
• Kubernetes cluster: runs & autoscales the server-side code in a single-region deployment, with a minimum of four nodes per zone across three zones of the US East region.
• Cloud Armor: protects applications and websites from attacks, and sets NIST-compliant policies.
• Google’s Content Distribution Network (CDN): content is accessed and cached.

To manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure, a Terraform script is used, which is an open source tool, and is structured into 5 folder environments:

• Admin
• Dev
• QA & UAT
• Networks
• Prod
• Shared Services (for CI/CD pipelines between Dev & Prod).

Adoption outcomes

A universal fear we technical practitioners may have is:

“Will our tool be loved and adopted by our intended audiences?”

 Joel mentioned Job Coaches at the time were not used to working from home, and the team was concerned that they would potentially feel overwhelmed with a lot of new technology.

 As a rewarding surprise, when Job Coaches were presented the proof of concept, it was received with positivity.

“95% of Job Coaches rated the VCC as a valuable solution and 87% reported to find it very or extremely effective.”

This alignment was thanks to designing the tool with the users in mind, and performing user research since the beginning of the journey, which helped address their day to day needs.

Additional innovation for the future

After creating a centralized hub and moving operations to a digital format, many more benefits also arise. For example, there can now be an integrated data analytics view which enables meaningful dashboards that can be customized for different audiences such as job applicants, coaches, program stakeholders, or state agencies.

There can be improved job searchability by integrating machine learning, helping with resume building and parsing that take keywords out of a resume and match them to a variety of relevant job clusters, rather than just performing raw keyword searches.

Embedding chat bots can also help reduce the load of call centers in states, as they utilize natural language processing as well to help guide job seekers with prompt answers.

Conclusion

The State of Rhode Island’s Virtual Career Center is an amazing success story. By having worked with an experienced partner to move their operations to a digital format, they were able to respond to their citizen’s needs in a time where in-person operations were not possible. They also unlocked opportunities such as better matching and reporting along that journey.

For any organization whether they are in the public sector, university, private sector, etc; anyone can take advantage of this platform and customize it to their needs as Maven Wave shared that they offer a menu of options, where you can pick and choose functionality based on your requirements, IT resources, and budget.

Editor’s note: To launch a new mobile payment platform, Mercari needed a database solution strong on scalability, availability, and performance. Here’s how Cloud Spanner delivered those results. 

E-commerce companies need to connect customers to their services securely, reliably, with zero downtime. When Mercari, Inc. launched a new mobile payment platform, we chose Cloud Spanner as part of our data portfolio, which provided us with easy scalability to handle millions of new users, a fully managed service that minimized overhead costs, and deep integration with other Google Cloud services. 

Mercari, Inc., Japan’s largest C2C marketplace, launched its app in 2013, which allows 18.2million monthly users to easily and securely buy new and used items. Mercari expanded into the United States and in 2014 and launched Merpay, a mobile payment service that can be used through Mercari in Japan in 2017. With more than 85 million users, Merpay is now accepted at 1.8 million merchants and e-commerce sites in Japan, supporting payments via the DOCOMO ID contactless system and QR code.

Prioritizing availability and scalability

When we started building Merpay, we were looking for a new database. In the past, Mercari had used MySQL with bare metal hardware. Because of the amount of data, we required additional expertise to manage and maintain the hardware, software and MySQL implementation. Having built much of the microservices architecture for our Mercari app using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), it was natural to look at Google Cloud’s managed services when deciding upon our new database infrastructure for Merpay. 

For the database, we were focusing especially on requirements around availability, scalability, and performance. To do a single payment transaction, there were multiple steps each with writes, requiring high-write-throughput and low-latency from the database. Needing a solution that would support reliable payment processing 24/7/365, we chose Spanner, which offers up to 99.999% availability with zero downtime for planned maintenance and schema changes. 

We worked closely with Google Cloud’s Premium Support, Technical Account Management (TAM), and Strategic Cloud Engineer and Cloud Consultant teams to implement Spanner, including separating the payment processing— originally one of the functions in Mercari—as a microservice.

A nod to easier nodes and better scale

After launch, the number of Merpay users reached 2 million in only a few months. We had 45 Spanner nodes at the time of launch of Merpay and about 50 nodes four months later. Because we’d optimized the application side during those four months, we didn’t have to add many nodes to keep up with the growing traffic. 

Whenever we needed to scale up the serving and storage resources in our instances, Spanner made it easy to increase nodes as needed in the Cloud Console. To optimize costs, it’s easy to add nodes during a marketing campaign and remove them afterward. Even if the traffic count is different from expected, we can change the number of nodes immediately. That’s one incredible convenience of Cloud Spanner.

Building powerful pipelines

Our data pipelines are used for KPI analytics, fraud detection, credit scoring, and customer support use cases. Because Cloud Spanner integrates so easily with other Google Cloud data services, the data in Spanner is easily accessible for analytics. From the Spanner database for each microservice, we create both batch and streaming data pipelines using Pub/Sub and Dataflow, as well as Apache Flink, and load the data into BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. We’re able to quickly aggregate the data required for data platforms such as BigQuery and Cloud Storage. The original data is stored in Spanner and managed by microservices, but analysis through BigQuery is centrally managed by the Data Platform team. This team determines the confidentiality level of data and centrally manages BigQuery permissions using Terraform. By centrally managing data access permissions on the data platform rather than on individual microservices, we’re able to set appropriate security for individual users.

Our full data portfolio also includes Looker, which we use for product analysis, accounting analysis, test performance visualization, operation monitoring, development efficiency analysis, and HR analysis. We also use Dataproc, Cloud Composer, Data Catalog, and Data Studio. The Dataflow template created for the pipeline is also published as OSS. 

With Spanner and other Google Cloud services, our Merpay platform is flexible, secure, scalable and highly available. As Spanner eliminates overhead, we can devote engineering resources to developing new tools and solutions for our customers. We’re looking ahead at providing cryptocurrency service, for example, and are now working on a project to migrate Mercari’s monolithic system that is still on premises entirely over to Google Cloud.

Read more about Mercari and Merpay. Or check out our recent blog: three reasons to consider Cloud Spanner for your next project.

Vodafone India had a manual, labor-intensive process for determining network capabilities and reach. The company sent field operatives to every customer location to conduct a feasibility study. These feasibility studies help Vodafone determine whether they can provide connectivity and services to customers based on the infrastructure at that location.

Everyone from the IT team and end users to the field operatives doing the work recognized the need to adopt a new solution to automate the measurements. They needed a technology that was easy to use and maintain.

“Vodafone used to manually perform physical surveys for each feasibility, which is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Often, feasibility studies were delayed, and we missed out on opportunities to serve additional customers. With SmartFeasibility, we’ve increased our capacity 15 fold, which positively impacts our bottom line and allows us to provide better and smarter customer service.”

—Rajneesh Asthana, IT Planning and Delivery, Vodafone India

Partnering with Lepton Software (a leading global provider of location-based analytics solution) Vodafone introduced SmartFeasibility—a solution that changed the feasibility testing from a manual to an automated process. This involved a full Google geo platform solution – leveraging world class technology like maps, roads and directions.

Google Maps Platform Results

• Employees are able to access information faster with SmartFeasibility—they have data at their fingertips, rather than waiting for an employee to collect it
• Field operatives have increased their conversion rates by providing more accurate readings on feasibilities and closing more customer business
• Addresses are now easy to find with a click of a button. The Vodafone India team can search feasibilities that have been loaded into the database, so if there’s an issue or if they need to reference a past action, they have that information at their fingertips
• 2 day turnaround versus 5 before the solution was implemented
• 400+ new customers added per day

With the new solution, Vodafone India no longer needs field operatives to manually calculate these measurements. With Google Maps, users can search customers’ addresses, calculate the distance between Vodafone’s location and the customer’s location and research building data such as height.

The old system of having field operatives collect data was unreliable. With Google Maps Platform, the Vodafone India team knows that the measurements are accurate and reliable.

Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.

That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud. 

Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.

Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.

Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth. 

Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.

“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”

To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.