About DB Corp

DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 6 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.

Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices.

However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.

Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues.

These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT-enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day.

DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services.

Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.

Expertise in Managing Large Data Volumes Behind GCP Selection

However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery.

In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform-as-a-service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp.

“We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”

DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services.

The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.

The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business.

“As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar.

“For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.”

DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.

Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly.

Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.

Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers.

Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.

There were several reasons why Suddora and CustomOnIt shouldn’t have been successes. My friend Adam and I were working in a Michigan video store and knew next to nothing about running a business. We started with an idea to sell sweatbands, like the ones I used to wear in my band, and over several months managed to launch it legitimately. This led us to bail on the video store and move to Vegas—smack in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. We lived on ramen noodles and little else for two years while we got the company going. Our friends took bets on how long we’d stay in business. 

But 11 years later, we have not one but several successful sports apparel businesses, I’m running a bunch of other e-commerce companies (including SweatBands.com), and we’re selling in the United Kingdom and soon in Asia Pacific. 

How did two broke-but-determined guys working in a video store get this far? We always believed in moving ahead, no matter what obstacles came our way—and we learned a lot about how technology like G Suite can make a small business look and operate like a bigger one, and how searching Google for business resources can pay off.

Starting with an idea, a domain and…ramen noodles
In my band days in Michigan, we tried to think of ways to get our name out there. Instead of the usual T-shirts or stickers, I pitched the idea of custom sweatbands since I wore sweatbands when I played guitar. I figured other people might like sweatbands with the names of their bands.

We knew we needed a web domain and email addresses so we could sell online. We found out about G Suite during a Google search, and it seemed like the most pain-free way to get started by buying the domains Customonit.com and Suddora.com (Adam made up that name. “Sudor” is Spanish for “sweat,” which is what the businesses were about, and we added the “d” and the “a” to make the name stand out.).

Even though the company was just me and Adam, we needed to look professional (and also a bit bigger than we actually were). With G Suite, we set up email aliases for various business functions, like help@suddora.com and sales@suddora.com, and arranged to route email from these addresses into our regular Gmail inboxes; that way, customers could easily reach us.

Scaling our business in the Las Vegas heat
Next, we decided to move to Las Vegas because, in the aftermath of the recession, we could live cheaply there. When we got our first big sweatband order from a major NCAA football team,  the momentum started. Now we had to scale up the business so we could handle more orders and deal with suppliers, even though we were still working out of our living room.

We grew to a five-person team, including a customer service person and a designer, and G Suite made it easy to onboard everyone quickly. In addition to giving new employees their own email addresses with the Suddora.com or STbands.com domain names, we routed emails to various people from the “help” and “sales” email aliases we had set up. We also made sure that all of our employees were set up on G Suite, too.

Once orders started to roll in from major fast-food restaurants, football teams, and sports apparel companies, our roles constantly changed. G Suite helped us shave off precious time by helping us manage email less manually—we automatically re-routed emails depending on who’s working on what. If I wanted to take on more sales work, I forwarded emails from sales@suddora.com to my inbox with one click. Same thing with customer service: We never want to lose track of customer service inquiries, which are a high priority.

In 2009, a year after starting the business, Adam and I left our part-time jobs at a local department store to run the business full-time. We promised ourselves that when we hit a revenue target of $15,000 in one month we’d buy a TV for the apartment—and we got that TV!

Going international (without leaving our office)
The business was taking off. We decided to split STbands.com into two websites: Suddora.com for sports sweatbands and CustomOnIt.com for custom apparel and party goods. We recognized that half our customers wanted athletic wear and accessories, while the other half wanted custom items like T-shirts and wristbands. It was a move that would allow each business to thrive.

Creating products and managing suppliers was getting more complicated. Once again, G Suite helped us move our business forward. We used Google search to find suppliers in China, and were able to set up supplier relationships and talk one-on-one with the people making our products—without extensive and time-consuming travel to China. You can accomplish so much with video meetings and chat.

With more suppliers and more customers, we needed to constantly up our game in terms of product design. When we create new designs it generates a ton of files and iterations, which get shared back and forth between pattern designers, photo editors, writers, and marketing professionals. To help centralize these files, we store everything in Google Drive so they can be shared and accessed anytime, from anywhere. For example, we use Sheets to house updated data on our products across all of our e-commerce platforms. 

Lessons learned
Eleven years on, I’m still learning every day about what it takes to run and grow a business. I think what helps is finding tools like G Suite that are so easy to use, you don’t need much ramp-up time to get started—nor do your employees. That means we’re all productive much faster. 

Also, you might be thinking about a million ideas for starting a business. But the truth is, you only need one—an opportunity that makes you think, “Okay, this is going to be big.” So go for it. You can’t afford not to.

A picture is worth a thousand words–especially at work. The data we present every day is what helps us drive decision-making in the workplace. But understanding how to visualize a story can be difficult if you’re left staring at numbers sitting stagnant in rows or columns within a spreadsheet. 

This is where visualization with charts and reports becomes critical. Let’s say your team needs to understand global sales trends. If you have a waterfall chart that shows regional contribution to total revenue or a scatter plot that shows individual salesperson performance, it’s much easier to spot patterns, draw insights, and make informed recommendations. The same goes for analyzing travel expenses.

In Google Sheets, we have several built-in tools that make it easy to create and share useful charts and reports so that you can quickly visualize data (without having to leave the spreadsheet). Follow these tips to showcase your data in Sheets and influence decisions.

1. Pick the most compelling way to visualize your data.
Perhaps just as important as the data you reference is the way in which you present it. Charts are the basic building blocks for data visualization and can take many forms–from bar charts to line graphs to scatter plots. There are more than 30 chart types to choose from in Sheets, and we’re constantly adding more ways to express your data. Here are a few we recommend:

• To draw attention to a key metric or KPI, try the brand new scorecard chart. For example, you can show the total sales number for your organization’s top-selling product, and even call out percentage increase or decrease over time. 
• To illustrate how values add to or subtract from a starting value, try a waterfall chart. For example, show how your product sales and restocking efforts led to a net decrease in inventory from last quarter to this quarter.
• To represent different data series using lines and bars, try a combo chart. For example, you can show revenue in bars and profit margins in a line across the same chart, giving you a more complete picture of your organization’s financial health.

If you’re unsure how to best present your data, Google’s built-in machine learning can help you choose the right visualization—Sheets intelligently suggests charts for you. Simply highlight data you would like to visualize, click the chart button, and then select one of the suggested charts. According to our internal data, more than 1.5 million charts are inserted into Sheets each week based on intelligent recommendations.

Note: Once you have a chart inserted into Sheets, you may want to control the look and feel. We recently made it possible to click directly on data labels, chart titles, or legends and drag to reposition them. You can also easily delete these elements using the delete or backspace keys, if you want to make other data points stand out. We’re exploring even more ways to customize charts—stay tuned.

2. Be sure to tell a complete story. 
Data really comes to life when you put several charts and tables together into a report or dashboard. Going back to our sales data example, an individual line graph showing revenue over time gives you quick insight into the general sales trend for your organization (hopefully, up and to the right!). But when you surround that line graph with other charts and tables–like a pie chart showing total revenue breakdown by-product, or a stacked bar chart comparing revenue driven by each sales team–you can tell a more complete story. 

If you do build reports featuring multiple charts, there are ways that Sheets can help you organize and format them more quickly. Earlier this year, we made it easier to align, size, and position objects within your spreadsheets so you can quickly put several charts together. We also recently added themes, which let you alter the look and feel of an entire spreadsheet—including charts, pivot tables, and cells—to ensure a consistent look and feel across the elements in your report. To apply a preset theme, select Format > Theme and choose the right option. Faster formatting can mean faster reporting.

Whether it’s getting rid of pests, cleaning up a crime scene or tending to office plants, Rentokil Initial is a service business whose primary aim is to offer customers the best possible standard. This can only be achieved if teams work closely together, sharing expertise and ideas and communicating constantly.

We used to have 180 email domains and 40 mail systems in place, so finding contact details and responding quickly to colleagues was a challenge. To tackle this, in 2009, we moved 0 business users, including our ‘on the road’ service technicians and salespeople onto a single communications platform, G Suite.

Since switching to G Suite, we’ve saved millions of pounds (£) on IT maintenance and several hundred thousand pounds by cutting the time spent on administrative tasks through using tools such as Google Docs, Sites and Forms. For senior management, Google Hangouts Meet has also proved its worth, saving roughly 54 hours of the senior management’s time a week – that’s over 2,000 hours a year. In addition to maximizing productivity, online sharing through G Suite products has enabled us to spread knowledge and ideas organically across countries and divisions.

Individual teams have fully embraced the opportunity to share knowledge, using the group intranet, powered by Google Sites, to post training videos and access technical images. But it’s not all about official documents and meetings: online sharing is helping us to become a more personal, sociable organization, which is important for staff retention and working culture. Colleagues use our intranet to share personal achievements, from sleeping on the streets for a homeless charity to boxing in international championships, giving a true flavor of the diversity within the company.

Employees at all levels are embracing G Suite to connect with colleagues. For example, our UK Managing Director uses Google+ to post updates and pictures of his ‘road trips’ across the UK and his encounters with colleagues, from the CFO to our longest standing pest control technicians, providing new insight into his role in the business. The ability to connect directly with our executives and create communities amongst our new employees is radically changing and modernizing the culture of our company.

All in all, we’ve been amazed by the journey which G Suite has taken us on, connecting our teams no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing and making a difference in almost every corner of our business. Thanks to Google we see ourselves as better connected, able to offer a better service to customers and more competitive on a global scale.