Over the past year, RISE with SAP has emerged as a valuable solution for SAP customers seeking a faster, simpler, and more affordable path to the cloud. RISE with SAP is a subscription-based offering that typically includes a number of fully managed cloud application options, including SAP S/4HANA Cloud and elements of the SAP Business Technology Platform. It’s a great way to migrate your business to modern cloud ERP applications, while handing off the implementation and management to SAP and freeing your own IT staff to focus on other projects.

As a strategic partner for RISE with SAP, Google Cloud works closely with SAP to ensure reliable, secure, high-performance connectivity between your SAP managed applications and your other Google Cloud applications and services. Today, we’re focusing on a Google Cloud capability that plays a big part in achieving this goal: VPC network peering. If your company uses Google Cloud to host its RISE with SAP managed applications (or any other SAP-managed offering, such as SAP Enterprise Cloud Services), it’s worth learning more about why VPC network peering is an important capability and how your network admin can implement it.

VPC network peering: The critical link for your SAP managed applications

We recently co-authored a white paper with SAP that goes into technical detail about how VPC network peering works and includes step-by-step configuration instructions. But it is useful to understand, at a higher level, why it matters for RISE with SAP subscribers.

When SAP implements your RISE with SAP managed applications on Google Cloud, it also provisions a virtual private cloud (VPC) — a virtualized network that provides the same functionality, performance, and security benefits as a dedicated physical network — for this SAP environment. In fact, a VPC actually gives you some capabilities that a physical network can’t match, such as the ability to increase IP space without downtime.

Using VPC network peering to connect your SAP managed environment with your Google Cloud applications and services gives you three key benefits: 

• Network latency: Traffic that remains inside Google’s network enjoys lower latency than connectivity that uses external addresses.
• Network security: Service owners do not need to have their services exposed to the public internet and deal with its associated risks.
• Network cost: Rather than pay egress bandwidth costs for networks using external IPs to communicate, peered networks can use internal IPs to communicate, saving you money on those egress costs. Regular network pricing still applies to all traffic.

Many customers also appreciate the flexibility they get from VPC network peering: It supports the ability to peer your own VPC networks with other VPC networks that reside in different projects and even in different organizations.  

Using VPC network peering to strengthen your SAP security posture

Most Google Cloud customers find VPC network peering most useful to ensure seamless connectivity between their SAP managed applications and the rest of their Google Cloud environment. But some companies also rely on VPC network peering to gain greater control over the security of their cloud environments. This can include:

• Implementing additional network security capabilities, such as advanced firewalls, intrusion detection, and network package inspection, that go above and beyond standard SAP security measures.
• Leveraging Google Cloud Interconnect to link your on-premises and Google Cloud environments, including your RISE with SAP managed applications, without sending traffic across the public internet.

Once your company has configured VPC network peering, things get even more interesting. Google Cloud offers plenty of ways to complement and enhance the value of your SAP applications: using Google BigQuery to consolidate and enrich your SAP application data; relying on Google AI/ML capabilities to sharpen your predictive analytics and real-time decision-making; or leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine to jump-start your own cloud-native application development efforts, among many other examples. 

Some of the world’s biggest SAP customers, including The Home Depot, and Cardinal Health,  have chosen Google Cloud to migrate their business-critical SAP applications. And we’ve seen how useful VPC network peering can be for SAP customers to unlock the full value and potential of Google Cloud. Be sure to download our white paper so you can get VPC network peering configured for your RISE with SAP managed applications, and discover for yourself just what’s possible when you run SAP applications on Google Cloud.

Introduction

The Google Cloud Professional Services Organization’s (PSO) mission is to help our customers get the most out of Google products. PSO is responsible for customer success by sharing our technical expertise in order to unlock business value from the cloud by providing cloud strategy and best practice advice, implementation guidance, and training using our proven methodology. 

In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on Operational Health Reviews and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure the overall success and health of a customer engagement while ensuring we are meeting customer expectations and objectives, managing risk, and ultimately delivering value during or after the Google Cloud migration. We will discuss the assets, methodology, and tools that we leverage to ensure this success.

What is an Operational Health Review and what purpose does it serve?

Operational Health Reviews (OHR) are regular reviews to proactively address the below topics: 

• A customer’s support experience
• Analysis of trends in key operational metrics
• Analysis of trends in Google Cloud usage
• Status reports for high-priority cloud projects
• Discussion of upcoming events
• Discussion of potential opportunities for training
• Review of feature requests

The core aim of an OHR is to measure progress and advise customers on the overall health of the account and migration progress while providing recommendations as a team on what adjustments should be considered to ensure continued success. During the OHR, we will address any pain points as well as identify and remediate any negative trends in support interfaces and usage metrics. 

The intention of the activity is to also perform a blameless reflection for continuous improvement. This supports the effort to maintain common ground and obtain mutual optimism for the next phase of the customer’s journey on Google Cloud. 

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the activities that go into an OHR. 

Support experience

One of the Google Cloud’s Support Organization’s goals is to simplify and streamline our customer’s support experience with a scalable and flexible set of offerings built with the customer needs at the center. This includes supporting an ongoing partnership model, with a proactive and collaborative approach. Premium Support is our top-tier support model which is a paid support offering designed for enterprises that run mission critical workloads and require fast response times, platform stability, and increased operational efficiencies. As part of this offering, customers are provided with a Technical Account Manager (TAM) who is in charge of delivering frequent touchpoints, including OHRs. 

During the support experience section of an OHR, some of the following topics may be reviewed:

• Case volume by priority
• Case volume by product
• Cases linked to Google Cloud incidents
• Escalated cases or incidents
• Case initial response time (IRT)
• Case IRT SLO Met Rate
• Case total resolution time (TRT) hours

The purpose of this activity is to better understand the efficiency of both the customer’s and Google’s cloud operations from a support trend perspective. The goal is to celebrate any positive trends, but also to identify potential negative trends and proactively determine a remediation strategy. 

Status reports for high-priority cloud projects

The purpose of this part of the OHR is to ensure the senior management stakeholders have continued visibility into the status of all their high-priority cloud initiatives with an easy-to-read, sometimes color-coded assessment on the status of each project. The assessment [Figure 1] may include, but is not limited to potential identified risks, key next steps, key stakeholders, and a mitigation plan for any high priority issues that may occur during their migration engagement. Additionally, the TAM may also cover any upcoming milestones or events, as well as any potential anticipated future blockers [Figure 2]. 

Review trends in Google Cloud usage

This part of the OHR is meant to provide the customer with a holistic view of their overall Google Cloud usage. The purpose is to provide understanding around what products are being used on Google Cloud and also where cost is generally being allocated for overall cost management and budget tracking purposes. This can help customers with their overall cost optimization efforts. Some of the metrics we may cover in this section are:

• Current Google Cloud usage by service
• Google Cloud growth trends
• Google Cloud growth trends by service
• Google Cloud growth trends by project
• Review of used and available service credits

Feature request review and advocacy

TAMs will work with customers to help identify product needs and advocate for feature requests with Google Product Management and Engineering teams. While feature request advocacy is an ongoing activity, during the OHR, the TAM will review any high priority feature requests that have previously been submitted, providing updates on status including potential release dates. 

When a feature is coming up for the release, the TAM can help the customer prepare for implementation (providing early Preview access, coordinating a meeting with the Product Manager to review the feature, etc.) and then continue to provide support until the feature is successfully implemented in the customer environment. Similarly, if a high priority or technical blocking feature is not yet coming available, the TAM can help offer an alternative solution that can unblock the customer in the short term. 

The OHR is also a great time for the TAM to work with the customer to ensure they have early access to new and exciting features that are in Alpha or Beta, and that would be beneficial to the customer and their environment. 

Training strategy

Training is a primary component to ensuring the overall success in adopting Google Cloud. During the OHR, a review of training metrics will be provided. This may include tracking metrics to determine how the customer is tracking towards an initially agreed upon learning plan or coming up with additional upskilling strategies as necessary. Additionally, throughout an engagement, the customer’s TAM will provide opportunities for both free and paid Google Cloud training. 

Conclusion 

PSO is the voice of customer health, maintaining priority to proactively and strategically guide large enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud, both during and after the migration process. The OHR is an efficient and effective way to maintain alignment, ensure expectations and objectives are being met, manage risk, and overall ensure the success of the customer.

Learn more about our methodology and get started with Google Cloud by completing a free discovery and assessment of your migration. Alternatively, if you’d like to engage directly with our PSO team on your migration, contact us!

Commercial trucks often travel partially empty because many shippers don’t have enough cargo to fill an entire container or trailer. Although offering available space to other shippers helps minimize carbon emissions and reduce operating costs, most trucking companies can’t efficiently schedule, track, or deliver multiple freight loads.

Companies have always struggled to ship over-the-road freight efficiently. However,recent economic events have created an unprecedented logistics and transportation crisis that continues to disrupt supply chains, delay deliveries, and significantly raise the price of basic goods. Since some stores can’t keep their shelves fully stocked, many people across the country are finding it more difficult than ever to buy the things they need at an affordable price.

Although exacerbated by the pandemic, many of these supply chain issues have existed for decades. That’s why, in 2015, Flock Freight was started with the mission of reducing waste and inefficiency from the supply chain by reimagining the way freight moves. First to market with advanced algorithms that enable pooling shipments at scale, we create a new standard of service for shippers, increase revenue for carriers and reduce the impact of carbon emissions through shared truckload (STL) service.

Our technology helps lower prices compared to full truckload (FTL) by enabling shippers to only pay for the space they need—and maintain full control over pickup and delivery dates. Flock Freight also optimizes travel routes to speed up deliveries compared to traditional less than truckload (LTL), while eliminating unnecessary shipping hub transfers to minimize damage to cargo.

Today, thousands of shippers and trucking companies across the U.S. use Flock Freight to schedule shared truckloads, lower shipping costs, quickly deliver and track goods, and reduce their carbon footprint by up to 40%. Flock Freight further offsets carbon emissions by buying carbon credits for every FlockDirect™ guaranteed shared truckload shipment—at no extra cost to shippers.

Moving Flock Freight to Google Cloud

We founded Flock Freight with a small team based in southern California. We soon realized we needed a more scalable and affordable technology stack to support our rapidly growing platform and team. After joining the Google for Startups Cloud Program and consulting with dedicated Google startup experts, we decided to move all our data and applications to Google Cloud.

The highly secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud now enables thousands of Flock Freight customers to move their freight faster, cheaper, and with less damage than traditional shipping methods. Specifically, we rely on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to support the combinatorial optimization and machine learning (ML) algorithms and services that identify, pool, and schedule shared truckloads. We also leverage GKE to rapidly develop, deploy, and manage new applications and services.

In addition, we leverage Cloud SQL to automate database provisioning, storage capacity management, and other time-consuming tasks. Cloud SQL easily integrates with existing apps and Google Cloud services such as GKE and Pub/Sub. Lastly, we use Compute Engine to create and run virtual machines, optimize resource utilization, and lower computing costs by up to 91%. These cost savings allow us to shift more resources to R&D and rapidly develop new solutions and services for our customers.

Building a greener, more resilient, and responsive supply chain

The Google for Startups Cloud Program and dedicated Google startup experts were instrumental in helping us manage cloud infrastructure cost and maintaining very high SLAs, helping Flock Freight to focus on developing a comprehensive shipping platform that powers shared truckloads and drives positive industry change.

We especially want to highlight the Google Cloud research credits we relied on to launch Flock Freight and make rapid progress toward transforming the shipping industry. To this day, we continue to work with Google Cloud Managed Services partner DoiT International International to further scale and optimize operations on Google Cloud.

We’re proud of the results we’re delivering for our customers. For example, a home improvement importer now enjoys faster, safer, and easier shipping with 99.9% damage-free service and a 97.5% on-time delivery rate. A packaging supplier continues to maintain a 99% on-time delivery streak and decrease carbon emissions by 37%, while a mineral water company consistently reduces delivery expenses upwards of 50%.

Nationwide demand for shared truckloads continues to increase as the shipping industry works to lower costs and alleviate supply chain disruptions. With the Flock Freight platform, companies are building a more sustainable and resilient supply chain by efficiently combining multiple shipments into shared truckloads.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.