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.

In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

Responding to multiple, simultaneous disruptive forces has become a daily routine for most demand planners. To effectively forecast demand, they need to be able to predict the unpredictable while accounting for diverse and sometimes competing factors, including:

• Labor and materials shortages
• Global health crises
• Shifting cross-border restrictions
• Unprecedented weather impacts
• A deepening focus on sustainability
• Rising inflation

Innovators are looking to improve demand forecast accuracy by incorporating advanced capabilities for AI and data analytics, which also speed up demand planning. According to a McKinsey survey of dozens of supply chain executives, 90% expect to overhaul planning IT within the next five years, and 80% expect to or already use AI and machine learning in planning.

Google Cloud and SAP have partnered to help customers navigate these challenges and supply chain disruptions starting with the upstream demand planning process, focusing on improving forecast accuracy and speed through integrated, engineered solutions. The partnership is enabling demand planners who use SAP IBP for Supply Chain in conjunction with Google Cloud services to access a growing repository of third-party contextual data for their forecasting, as well use an AI-driven methodology that streamlines workflows and improves forecast accuracy. Let’s take a closer look at these capabilities.

Unify data from SAP software with unique Google data signals

When it comes to demand forecasting and planning, the more high-quality and relevant contextual data you use, the better, because it helps you understand the influencing factors of your product sales to sense trends and react to disruptions or capitalize on market opportunities more timely and accurately.

The expanded Google Cloud and SAP partnership helps customers who use SAP® Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP for Supply Chain) bring public and commercial data sets that Google Cloud offers into their own instances of SAP IBP and include them in their demand planning models in SAP IBP. So, in addition to sales history, promotions, stakeholder inputs and customer data that are typically in SAP IBP, a demand planner can incorporate their advertising performance, online search, consumer trends, community health data, and many more data signals from Google Cloud when working through demand scenarios.

More data enables more robust and accurate planning, so Google continues to build an ecosystem of data providers and grow the number of available data sets on Google Cloud. Some current providers include the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Google Earth, and partnerships are underway with Crux, Climate Engine, Craft, and Dun & Bradstreet to help companies identify and mitigate risk and build resilient supply chains.

Augmenting demand planning with additional external causal factor data is a starting point to drive more accurate forecasting. For example, knowing what regional events may be happening, or the weather patterns that may impact sales of your products, allows you to react faster to these changes by making sure adequate supply is being provided. The result is a more accurate overall plan that reduces resource waste and out-of-stock events. Planners can respond with more accurate and granular daily predictions about sales, pricing, sourcing, production, inventory, logistics, marketing, advertising, and more based on the expanded data.

Get more accurate forecasts with Google AI inside

Extending the already expansive algorithm selection available in SAP IBP, the release of version 2205 allows SAP IBP customers to access Google Cloud’s supply chain forecasting engine, which is built on Vertex AI — Google Cloud’s AI-as-a-platform offering — from within SAP IBP as part of their forecasting process.

The benefit of using an AI-driven engine for demand forecasting is that it meaningfully improves forecast accuracy. Most demand forecasting today is done through a manually set, rules-based model versus an AI-driven model that is smarter and gets better at predicting demand as it works.

Take the fastest path from data to value with streamlined workflows

Vertex AI can include relevant contextual data sets for demand planning, and the results can be shown in SAP IBP for planners to incorporate when building their workflows.

In addition to more accurate forecasts, planners can work faster and more efficiently as they build potential scenarios, meaning they can do more simulations than they do now so that a wider range of disruptions can be modeled. Customers of SAP IBP don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting. They just have to share their data from SAP IBP with Google, then access the process workflow capabilities to set up automated workflows that use the combined data. Google makes the data available so that planners can use it as they’re setting up their workflows in Vertex AI.

Users of the Google Supply Chain twin and SAP IBP can combine the rich planning data from IBP with additional SAP data and other Google data sources to provide better supply chain visibility. The Google Supply Chain twin is a real-time digital representation of your supply chain based on sales history, open customer orders, past and future promotions, pricing and competitor insights, consumer history signals, external data signals and Google data.

Leverage Google data signals with SAP IBP for more accurate forecasts

It’s not difficult to access these new capabilities, and the benefits are more accurate near-term forecasts and more return on your investments in SAP IBP and Google Cloud. If you happen to be at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium from June 6-8th in Orlando, Florida, stop by our booth to say hello. Or, get started now