Organizations are currently modernizing their businesses in order to meet the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape. In effect, business leaders must evaluate the best way to mitigate the challenges which plague their cloud operations, all while meeting customers’ growing expectations around digital experience (DX) through agility, automation, and proactive incident avoidance. 

In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing. 

Within this July 2021 study, you’ll see that AIOps systems and principles are here to help. It covers how AIOps increases efficiency and productivity across day-to-day operations, and how businesses are taking note. In fact, 91% of respondents have implemented AIOps to address at least one cloud operations issue, and expansion is set to skyrocket. Those that wait to act, risk losing out on the efficacy of their cloud investment and falling behind their more efficient competitors.

As you can see in the image above, there is a plethora of great information in this complimentary study. So, if you’re looking to enhance your cloud operations and/or adopt AIOps within your organization, be sure to download this free study today.

The software development process requires complex, cross-functional collaboration while continuously improving products and services. Our customers who build software say that they value Google Workspace for its ability to drive innovation and collaboration throughout the entire software development life cycle. Developers can hold standups and scrums in Google Chat, Meet, and Spaces, create and collaborate on requirements documentation in Google Docs and Sheets, build team presentations in Google Slides, and manage their focus time and availability with Google Calendar.

Development teams also use many other tools to get work done, like tracking issues and tasks in Atlassian’s Jira, managing workloads with Asana, and incident management in PagerDuty. One of the benefits of Google Workspace is that it’s an open platform tailored to improve the performance of your tools by seamlessly integrating them together. We’re constantly expanding our ecosystem and improving Google Workspace, giving you the power to push your software development even further.

Make software development more agile

Google Workspace gives you real-time visibility into project progress and decisions to help you ship quality code fast and stay connected with your stakeholders, all without switching tools and tabs. By leveraging applications from our partners, you can pull valuable information out of silos, making collaborating on requirements, code reviews, bug triage, deployment updates, and monitoring operations easy for the whole team. This allows your teams to stay focused on their priorities while keeping everyone aligned, ensuring collaborators are always in the loop.

Plan and execute together

When combined with integrations, Google Workspace makes the software development planning process more collaborative and efficient. For example, many organizations use Asana—a leading work management platform—to coordinate and manage everything from daily tasks to cross-functional strategic initiatives. To make the experience more seamless, Asana built integrations so users can always have access to their tasks and projects with Google Drive, Gmail, and Chat. With these integrations for Google Workspace, you can turn your conversations into action and create new tasks in Asana—all without leaving Google Workspace.

“We’ve seen exceptional, heavy adoption of tasks being created from within the Gmail add-on. Our customers and community have also shown very strong interest in future development work, which is something we’ll continue to prioritize.” Strand Sylvester, Product Manager, Asana

To date, users have installed the Asana for Gmail add-on over 2.5 million times, as well as over 3.8 million installs of the Asana for Google Workspace add-on for Google Drive.

Start coding quickly

Google Workspace makes it easy for product managers, UX designers, and engineers to agree on what they’re building and why. By bringing all stakeholders, decisions, and requirements into one place—whether it’s a Gmail or Google Chat conversation, or a document in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides—Google Workspace removes friction, helping your teams finalize product specifications and get started right away.

Integrations like GitHub for Google Chat make the entire development process fit easily into a developer’s workflow. With this integration, teams can quickly push new commits, make pull requests, do code reviews, and provide real-time feedback that improves the quality of their code—all from Google Chat.

Speed up testing

Integrations like Jira for Google Chat accelerate the entire QA process in the development workflow. The app acts as a team member in the conversation, sending new issues and contextual updates as they are reported to improve the quality of your code and keep everyone informed on your Jira projects.

Ship code faster

Developers use Jenkins—a popular open-source continuous integration and continuous delivery tool—to build and test products continuously. Along with other cloud-native tools, Jenkins supports strong DevOps practices by letting you continuously integrate changes into the software build.

With Jenkins for Google Chat, development and operations teams can connect into their Jenkins pipeline and stay up to date by receiving software build notifications directly in Google Chat.

Proactively monitor your services

Improving the customer experience requires capturing and monitoring data sources to improve application and infrastructure observability. Google Workspace supports DevOps teams and organizations by helping stakeholders collaborate and troubleshoot more effectively. When you integrate Datadog with Google Chat, monitoring data becomes part of your team’s discussion, and you can efficiently collaborate to resolve issues as soon as they arise.

The integration makes it easy to start a discussion with all the relevant teams by sharing a snapshot of a graph in any of your Chat spaces. When an alert notification is triggered, it allows you to notify each Chat space independently, precisely targeting your communication to the right teams.

Improve service reliability

Orchestrating business-wide responses to interruptions is a cross-functional effort. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, it’s important to proactively manage service-impacting events. Google Workspace supports response teams by ensuring that urgent alerts reach the right people by providing teams with a central space to discover incidents, find the root cause, and resolve them quickly.

PagerDuty for Google Chat empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations, and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for an exceptional customer experience—all from Google Chat. See and share details with link previews, and perform actions by creating or updating incidents. By keeping all conversations in a central space, new responders can get up to speed and solve issues faster without interrupting others.

Accelerate developer productivity

Integrating your DevOps tools with Google Workspace allows your development teams to centralize their work, stay focused on what’s important—like managing their work—build code quickly, ship quality products, and communicate better during service impacting incidents. For more apps and solutions that help centralize your work so you and your teams can connect, create, and get things done, check out Google Workspace Marketplace, where you’ll find more than 5,300 public applications that integrate directly into Google Workspace.

By offering customers a choice of 30,000 shoe styles at reasonable prices with a straightforward returns policy, Footway has become one of the largest online shoe retailers in Europe. Founded in 2011 and based in Kista, Sweden, the company has grown to become a market leader and four years ago acquired the Heppo and Brandos brands.

In 2017, Footway expanded from the Nordic market to seven other European countries: Poland, Holland, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

To build the business, Footway has had to prove to its customers that buying shoes online is quick and easy. That means, at the backend, processing returns and queries efficiently to provide a seamless consumer experience. However, as the company’s IT infrastructure grew organically, its data storage procedures were not clearly systematized, which made it difficult to implement the efficient, time-saving processes that enable Footway to provide its excellent customer service.

The company needed to move its team onto a system that would resolve this issue, and make compliance to ever-changing data regulations easier. Implementing G Suite was the answer.

“One of our strategic objectives is to automate processes and increase efficiency in our organization,” says Louise Liljedahl, HR Manager and Co-founder at Footway. “We want to work more efficiently every day. One of our main goals with the G Suite project was to get everyone working in the same platform with good structure.”

Systematizing data storage

In order for a relatively small team to run a big retail operation, good organization and process automation are key. Before working with Google Cloud, Footway’s communications and data storage processes were not systematized, making it difficult to work effectively. “Our internal IT had many different places to save files, and, for example, no structure for where to save pictures or graphic elements or where to archive agreements,” explains Louise. “Another trigger for change was the GDPR. To be compliant, we needed to see who has access to what information, and looked for good audit systems to control those permissions”. To do that, Footway implemented G Suite.

With support from implementation partner Avalon Solutions, the migration of the company’s calendar, contacts, and email data using CloudMigrator was swift and seamless. “The transformation process was very lean and quick,” says Louise. “We had a small test group of six people working with G Suite for two weeks to see how to move over to Google Sheets from Excel, for example. Everyone was very enthusiastic.”

To systematize its storage and make day-to-day working easier, Footway moved its document and images to Google Drive. This means Footway can control access both internally and externally. “Google Drive helps us keep everything in the right place. And it is definitely an easier way to share things when it comes to working with external partners, as we know exactly who we’re sharing documents and information with.”

Increasing automation

Following the move to G Suite, Footway automated communications with influencers and bloggers using Gmail and Google Forms. This saves time and means more bloggers can be contacted.

“We send automatic emails through G Suite to different influencers to set up cooperative agreements and partnerships,” says Louise. “Using Gmail and Forms has helped us to go from having contact with 4 bloggers a day, to 200 a day. The person responsible saves two hours a day from his or her workload with this new process.”

Achieving stable growth

Thanks to G Suite, Footway’s data is now organized in a way that is easily accessible and highly secure. “It’s much easier to find company and client information because it’s structured,” says Louise. “That saves a lot of time when searching for something.” The ways people can collaborate have also been transformed, as Footway made the switch to using Google Chromebook, encouraging more flexible working and spontaneous collaboration. “Before, people would take notes on paper and come back to their computer to write everything down. Now they use their Chromebooks instead and have more small, spontaneous meetings.”

Now, Footway plans to extend the use of Chromebooks and to use the functions G Suite offers to further automate the company’s daily processes and grow the business. “People tend to be fearful of change, but this one has been very positive for the whole organization,” says Louise. “We’re excited about how G Suite can help us as a company to grow in a stable way. We can automate processes and use Google products to work more efficiently.”