Cloud

Digital skills training is critical to the future of work and economic mobility in America—82% of jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree while paying a living wage are described as “digitally intensive,” (Burning Glass) but almost one-third of U.S. workers lack digital skills (National Skills Coalition). This growing divide between demand for digital skills and the supply of trained workers has encouraged states like Ohio to consider new approaches to closing the skills gap. 

Like many states, Ohio has a large number of open jobs that require digital skills—there have been over 12,0001 new cloud, IT Support, user experience (UX) design, data analyst, and project management jobs posted in the state of Ohio in the past 12 months (Burning Glass). These new jobs need trained technical workers, and local employers across the government, health, retail, and financial sectors are searching for talent with the skills needed to fill them.To help address this growing challenge, Google is partnering with Ohio to provide fundamentaldigital skills, Google Career Certificates, professional Google Cloud certifications, and more. 

Google is enabling Ohio’s workforce system to support jobseekers in five key ways:

Google Cloud Skills Boost is open to anyone and free to start

State employees and residents of Ohio alike are successfully using Google Cloud Skills Boost to grow their cloud skills. Hundreds of Ohio learners have successfully accessed Google Cloud Skills Boost, Google Cloud’s library of 700+ labs and courses to help simplify cloud skills. Right now, Google has made this library free for the first 30 days, enabling residents to start working toward certifications they need to fill cloud-based roles without added cost.

Learners in Google Cloud Skills Boost can earn certifications or simply brush up on skills they need professionally. Entirely online, the pace of learning is up to the user and covers everything from cloud basics to more advanced skills. 

Accessible Career Certificates and job opportunities for residents

We’re making Google Career Certificates more accessible to Ohioans and the public and private sector community partners that serve and employ them. Thousands of Ohio-based learners are using Google Career Certificates to gain the skills they need to start careers in the career fields of data analytics, IT support, and project management, and user experience (UX) design. These are in-demand, well-paying career fields that employers and workforce development institutions across the public and private sectors are hiring for. The Certificates do not require prior experience or a degree, and 75% of graduates nationally report a positive career impact in their career trajectory (e.g., new job, raise or promotion) within six months of completion.2

Google has partnered with non-profit organizations and local education partners to increase awareness of Google Career Certificates and help Ohio residents take advantage of the courses, which are free for Community College and Career and Technical Education (CTE) high schools. Additionally,  through our Employer Consortium, which includes Expedient, Pep Promotions, and many employers that hire within Ohio, we’re connecting Google Career Certificate program graduates who have job-ready skills with more than 150 employers across a diverse range of industries.

Partnerships with schools

In Ohio, colleges and universities offer training and certifications through our Google Cloud Career Readiness Program and free Google Cloud Computing Foundations curriculum. By bringing Google Cloud into the classroom, we’re helping expose students to the cloud technology they’ll encounter in the workforce. We’ve also enabled faculty at 17 Ohio institutions to help their students access Google Cloud by issuing more than $225,000 of Google Cloud teaching credits.

Additionally, Google Career Certificates are free for all community colleges and career and technical (CTE) high schools to include in their curriculum. The American Council on Education (ACE) has recommended each certificate for up to 12 college credits, which gives Ohioans who have some post-secondary education but no college degree an affordable on-ramp to earning their diploma.

Tech skills don’t have to start at the university level, either. We’ve partnered with Ohio and several other states to help build digital skills for the future by bringing programs like Google Workspace into K-12 classrooms and helping teachers build lessons around digital literacy, coding, and more.

Government employee training

With the move to remote work becoming permanent for some, employers need to go beyond ensuring new hires have the skills needed to manage a digitally connected workplace. Agencies also want to be sure that their current employees have the skills they need to manage and make the most of cloud capabilities. One example: the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services secured licenses for their staff to get full access to on-demand Google Cloud training for 12 months, enabling their staff to build cloud skills on a flexible timeline. And anyone–State of Ohio employee or otherwise–can access Google Cloud Skills Boost for free for the first 30 days to build their own cloud skills.

Investing in a talent ecosystem

In 2019, Governor Mike DeWine and Lt. Governor Jon Husted launched the State of Ohio’s TechCred program. This program gives Ohio employers the chance to upskill current and future employees, and two pathways already available through TechCred are Google’s Cloud certifications and the Google IT Support Certificate. Ohio employers who enroll their eligible employees in Google Cloud training or Google Career Certificates can be reimbursed up to $2,000 per credential once employees complete a Google Cloud certification or the Google IT Support Certificate. What’s great about TechCred is that employers can continually apply for funding. Funding rounds are typically held every other month and employers can receive up to $30,000 per round and up to $180,000 per year.

“Innovation and technology are changing what skills we need to start and lead a successful career, and we must help people efficiently earn the skills they need to succeed,” said Ohio Lt. Governor Jon Husted, Director of the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation. “This requires new ways to deliver education and skill development, and TechCred has proven to be an effective way to up-skill tens of thousands of Ohioans.”

Google is also investing in expanding its data center and Google Cloud region presence in central Ohio. These investments bring job opportunities as well as skilled workers to the state and help grow the local talent pipeline further.

See how we’re helping build an empowered workforce

What is happening in Ohio can happen in other states, too.  As Ohio builds new training pathways to grow the local labor pool, other states can pick up their playbook. To learn more about how we’re helping create a more skilled workforce, visit the Google Learning page.

1 Source: Burning Glass Data
2 Based on program graduate survey responses, United States 2021

Digital technology promises transformative results. Yet, it’s not uncommon to encounter potholes and speed bumps along the way. One area that frequently trips up businesses is putting data into action. It can be extraordinarily difficult to take advantage of the right data at exactly the right time — in real time — to drive decision-making. For SAP customers wanting to maximize the value of their data, Google Cloud offers a number of capabilities. 

BigQuery is a fully managed serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse designed for business agility. BigQuery integrates, aggregates, and analyzes petabytes of structured and unstructured data.According to IDC, for SAP customers it delivers productivity benefits, IT staff efficiency gains, and IT infrastructure cost reductions that can together result in an ROI of 320% or more. With the release of our BigQuery Connector for SAP we’re adding to this offering with a quick, easy, and inexpensive solution where customers can now replicate SAP application data changes directly, in real-time, with low-latency into BigQuery. 

Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a further enabler for SAP customers working to maximize the value of their data. It allows customers to kickstart insights and reduce time-to-value with reference architectures, packaged services, and deployment accelerators that guide you from planning to delivery, so you can get up and running quickly. Google Cloud Cortex Framework accelerator content can be utilized as a templatized solution from Google Cloud or one of our trusted partners for specific use cases and business scenarios.

SAP customers driving extended value with Google Cloud and BigQuery

Here’s a look at how six SAP companies tapped the power of BigQuery to transform their business operations and drive improved customer experiences: 

ATB Financial. The Canadian financial institution turned to BigQuery to aid in a major data center modernization initiative. The company was looking to migrate from an on-premises data center to a more flexible and agile cloud framework that would support core SAP-based banking applications.

BigQuery introduced several sophisticated features, including the ability to acquire and ingest legacy data from a variety of internal and external sources at scale and in real-time, enrich data through advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and enable self-service analytics and machine learning models. This is enabling ATB Financial to drive business insights from multiple data sources 117 times faster than its previous approach.

Breuninger. The luxury department store is among the most successful fashion and lifestyle retailers in Germany. It provides 15 premium services, including personal shopping assistance and a shuttle service. In order to support its high-touch, high-value business model, the company required informed and lightning-fast decision-making across the organization, including its 5,500 employees. 

Google Cloud helped take Breuninger’s business model to the next level. With BigQuery and SAP, the retailer harnesses the full value of Google’s Kubernetes Engine to extract data from disparate sources in real-time. This includes loyalty card data along with delivery information. For example, sales managers know exactly when specific products reach key customers — and they can follow up with a personalized call or email. 

Carrefour Belgium. A few years back, grocery retailer Carrefour Belgium, part of global Grocery giant Carrefour Group, found itself coping with an aging and increasingly outdated data center. It had systems divided into two separate clouds and, as a result, the company found it increasingly difficult to fully leverage data for advanced analytics across its 700 plus Belgian stores. 

After migrating critical enterprise applications to an SAP S/4HANA application stack on Google Cloud, the company immediately gained visibility into everything from customer behavior and supply chain efficiency to financial metrics. Moving data into a single data lake also has driven significant value. This enables better assortment planning and price setting, ensures a seamless user experience, and helps the retailer offer exceptional digital experiences for its shoppers. 

Herfy. Among Saudi Arabia’s largest and most successful food service companies, Herfy wanted to track 390 outlets scattered across the country along with franchises in Kuwait and Bangladesh. In the past, visibility and reporting functions were desperately lacking. As a result, the ability to react to changing business conditions lagged, while IT help-desk inquiries devoured precious time and resources.

After migrating its SAP S/4HANA system to Google Cloud, Herfy witnessed key benefits, including improved reliability, better security, and reduced costs. Herfy is now equipped to glean data insights from more than 2 billion records. This makes it possible to generate year-on-year reports that weren’t possible in the past, including on devices like Chromebooks. All told, Herfy has achieved a 50% reduction in the time needed to run material ledger for month-end financial closing and slashed IT helpdesk queries by 48%.

Lixil. Established in 2011 through a merger of five of Japan’s most successful building materials and housing companies, Lixil today is a global maker of water and housing products in more than 150 countries worldwide. The company had outgrown its on premises data center, and was looking to get more value out of its ballooning stores data, which was siloed among numerous in-house systems.

Lixil opted to migrate its SAP infrastructure (S/4 HANA) to Google Cloud, in part, to take advantage of BigQuery’s computing power, scalability, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. The transition has paid immediate dividends for Lixil, which has been able to quickly utilize its data to contribute company value. 

The Home Depot. The world’s largest home improvement retailer, with 2,300 stores and more than 500,000 associates, recognized a need to innovate and push high-quality information out to frontline employees and customers. Among other things, The Home Depot wanted to introduce an “interconnected retail” platform that would allow customers to start a transaction online and then complete it in a store.

The company chose Google Cloud and SAP to maximize speed, scale and flexibility. It migrated S/4HANA, a customer activity repository, general ledger, BusinessObjects, and several other applications to the platform. With BigQuery, The Home Depot now has sophisticated analytics capabilities and a single source of truth for supply chain data.

BigQuery + SAP = Data Driven Success

A growing number of organizations are recognizing the value that Google Cloud and BigQuery deliver for SAP customers. Google Cloud Cortex Framework further supports this journey with a foundation of endorsed solution reference templates and content for customers to accelerate business outcomes with less risk, complexity, and cost.

Can leveraging BigQuery drive value for your company? Download your copy of the IDC report now.

Digital technology promises transformative results. Yet, it’s not uncommon to encounter potholes and speed bumps along the way. One area that frequently trips up businesses is putting data into action. It can be extraordinarily difficult to take advantage of the right data at exactly the right time — in real time — to drive decision-making. For SAP customers wanting to maximize the value of their data, Google Cloud offers a number of capabilities. 

BigQuery is a fully managed serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse designed for business agility. BigQuery integrates, aggregates, and analyzes petabytes of structured and unstructured data.According to IDC, for SAP customers it delivers productivity benefits, IT staff efficiency gains, and IT infrastructure cost reductions that can together result in an ROI of 320% or more. With the release of our BigQuery Connector for SAP we’re adding to this offering with a quick, easy, and inexpensive solution where customers can now replicate SAP application data changes directly, in real-time, with low-latency into BigQuery. 

Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a further enabler for SAP customers working to maximize the value of their data. It allows customers to kickstart insights and reduce time-to-value with reference architectures, packaged services, and deployment accelerators that guide you from planning to delivery, so you can get up and running quickly. Google Cloud Cortex Framework accelerator content can be utilized as a templatized solution from Google Cloud or one of our trusted partners for specific use cases and business scenarios.

SAP customers driving extended value with Google Cloud and BigQuery

Here’s a look at how six SAP companies tapped the power of BigQuery to transform their business operations and drive improved customer experiences: 

ATB Financial. The Canadian financial institution turned to BigQuery to aid in a major data center modernization initiative. The company was looking to migrate from an on-premises data center to a more flexible and agile cloud framework that would support core SAP-based banking applications.

BigQuery introduced several sophisticated features, including the ability to acquire and ingest legacy data from a variety of internal and external sources at scale and in real-time, enrich data through advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and enable self-service analytics and machine learning models. This is enabling ATB Financial to drive business insights from multiple data sources 117 times faster than its previous approach.

Breuninger. The luxury department store is among the most successful fashion and lifestyle retailers in Germany. It provides 15 premium services, including personal shopping assistance and a shuttle service. In order to support its high-touch, high-value business model, the company required informed and lightning-fast decision-making across the organization, including its 5,500 employees. 

Google Cloud helped take Breuninger’s business model to the next level. With BigQuery and SAP, the retailer harnesses the full value of Google’s Kubernetes Engine to extract data from disparate sources in real-time. This includes loyalty card data along with delivery information. For example, sales managers know exactly when specific products reach key customers — and they can follow up with a personalized call or email. 

Carrefour Belgium. A few years back, grocery retailer Carrefour Belgium, part of global Grocery giant Carrefour Group, found itself coping with an aging and increasingly outdated data center. It had systems divided into two separate clouds and, as a result, the company found it increasingly difficult to fully leverage data for advanced analytics across its 700 plus Belgian stores. 

After migrating critical enterprise applications to an SAP S/4HANA application stack on Google Cloud, the company immediately gained visibility into everything from customer behavior and supply chain efficiency to financial metrics. Moving data into a single data lake also has driven significant value. This enables better assortment planning and price setting, ensures a seamless user experience, and helps the retailer offer exceptional digital experiences for its shoppers. 

Herfy. Among Saudi Arabia’s largest and most successful food service companies, Herfy wanted to track 390 outlets scattered across the country along with franchises in Kuwait and Bangladesh. In the past, visibility and reporting functions were desperately lacking. As a result, the ability to react to changing business conditions lagged, while IT help-desk inquiries devoured precious time and resources.

After migrating its SAP S/4HANA system to Google Cloud, Herfy witnessed key benefits, including improved reliability, better security, and reduced costs. Herfy is now equipped to glean data insights from more than 2 billion records. This makes it possible to generate year-on-year reports that weren’t possible in the past, including on devices like Chromebooks. All told, Herfy has achieved a 50% reduction in the time needed to run material ledger for month-end financial closing and slashed IT helpdesk queries by 48%.

Lixil. Established in 2011 through a merger of five of Japan’s most successful building materials and housing companies, Lixil today is a global maker of water and housing products in more than 150 countries worldwide. The company had outgrown its on premises data center, and was looking to get more value out of its ballooning stores data, which was siloed among numerous in-house systems.

Lixil opted to migrate its SAP infrastructure (S/4 HANA) to Google Cloud, in part, to take advantage of BigQuery’s computing power, scalability, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. The transition has paid immediate dividends for Lixil, which has been able to quickly utilize its data to contribute company value. 

The Home Depot. The world’s largest home improvement retailer, with 2,300 stores and more than 500,000 associates, recognized a need to innovate and push high-quality information out to frontline employees and customers. Among other things, The Home Depot wanted to introduce an “interconnected retail” platform that would allow customers to start a transaction online and then complete it in a store.

The company chose Google Cloud and SAP to maximize speed, scale and flexibility. It migrated S/4HANA, a customer activity repository, general ledger, BusinessObjects, and several other applications to the platform. With BigQuery, The Home Depot now has sophisticated analytics capabilities and a single source of truth for supply chain data.

BigQuery + SAP = Data Driven Success

A growing number of organizations are recognizing the value that Google Cloud and BigQuery deliver for SAP customers. Google Cloud Cortex Framework further supports this journey with a foundation of endorsed solution reference templates and content for customers to accelerate business outcomes with less risk, complexity, and cost.

Can leveraging BigQuery drive value for your company? Download your copy of the IDC report now.

As Google Cloud has become a choice for more startups, I’ve experienced an increase in founders asking how they should think about cloud services. Though each startup is different and requirements may vary across industries and regions, I’ve seen a few core best practices that help startups to succeed—as well as several traps to avoid. 

For example, If you go with a public cloud provider, you’re ideally not starting from ground zero like you would running your own data center, but it’s important not to introduce similar complexity in a virtualized environment. Just because you’re using public cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean you want to manage it.

Instead, you want to leverage platforms that abstract away complexity so your team can focus on delivering value to customers. That’s where serverless comes in. Serverless platforms are fully managed by the provider, offering automatic scaling for workloads, as well as provisioning, configuring, patching, and management of servers and clusters. Freed from these resource-intensive tasks, your technical talent can focus on the things that differentiate your business, not on IT curation. 

This applies to not only running stateless applications, but also managing and analyzing data. You should be collecting data points about which features are most popular on your platform, what people are buying, the types of activities that help your customers get their jobs done, and so on. This information is essential to building and executing on a product roadmap that will serve your customers. However, it’s not enough to collect this data, you need to make your data accessible, secure, and easy for your team to analyze—so where do you run and host it? 

On Google Cloud, this is where options like Spanner and Cloud SQL can play a large role, as can BigQuery for analysis. You won’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure or patching servers—you can just stream your data to our data management platforms, where it’s available whenever someone needs to run a query. By leveraging a serverless architecture, your startup can be data-driven without having to invest in the traditional complexity of database administration and management—and that can significantly change your playing field. 

Serverless is just one of the factors you should consider as you build out your tech stack. To hear my thoughts on a range of other topics relevant to startups — such as security, cloud credits, and the differences among managed services — check out the below video or visit our Build and Grow page.

Corner office or not, everyone seemed to need a break after 2021. Just like everyone else who spent the last two years juggling work-life balance, CIOs are among those deciding to call it quits.

Q. How did you get your start in IT? 

Patrick Moroney: My first IT role was as a programmer analyst, but I quickly realized that wasn’t for me. I am more comfortable leading and supervising a team. That role came at Monsanto, where I helped grow this tiny unit called NutraSweet from a $50m to $2bn business, helping them implement Digital’s all-in-one integrated email, calendaring and word processing environment across the organization. That was before email was really a thing and it was revolutionary for the company — how everybody could talk to each other — it picked up the speed of everything we were doing in a wonderful way. It got me known as the guy who could do these integrated suites.

Q. There’s a lot of talk of transformation these days. Looking back, are there any lessons you learned from past transformations you’ve been involved with that could be useful in today’s cloud era? 

Patrick Moroney:  At Monsanto, we had numerous solitary, unintegrated applications on mainframes like McCormack & Dodge and we put them on the ERP pathway so that all business functions could talk to each other. NutraSweet chose SAP … then Monsanto saw what we were doing and said how are you doing that in nine months? That was fast back then! And they took our model. They sucked senior leadership out of the business segments and made them part of a corporate shared service. I became part of the leadership group that led SAP implementations across the rest of the world for 35 Monsanto business units in 70 countries.

That SAP integration work aligned nicely with the then CEO Bob Shapiro’s vision to combine food, health and agriculture into a global life sciences powerhouse. I think today, the cloud gives us similar opportunities to leverage a shared service that we don’t have to micromanage or find and manage all the talents needed to accelerate complex integrations.

Then, when I joined Central States Funds, they had just won United Parcel Service as a customer and suddenly their business was looking at massive hockey stick growth. But on my first day I opened the drawer in my desk and found a deck of computer cards and the green IBM flowcharting template. My first thought was “oh my god” what have I done? The technology in place in 2013 was like The Land That Time Forgot — two water-cooled mainframes in a 12,000 square-foot data center. Just WordPerfect on the desktop, no Microsoft Office apps, no cybersecurity, no web. Many other modern company apps and systems needed to be built. My boss knew that to be able to handle a beast the size of UPS we needed to do something quickly.

So the 40 IT people that were there when I started are now about 200 with contractors. We got rid of the mainframes. We got rid of the datacenter. We moved into a couple of colos with an active-active network architecture; we’re in our fifth or sixth iteration of web services, we built the cyber environment. We added business continuity planning and disaster recovery, which didn’t exist before. Basically [we] started a brand new company because what was needed was to go from 1981 to 2013 — matching everything peers like United, Aetna, Cigna, Anthem, Blue Cross were doing. Our customer, UPS, had lots of young drivers who were very mobile-friendly and very comfortable with technology and we had to meet their expectations. We needed to be that company overnight. And so I dragged all my business partners in the pool with me and said, this is what we need to do, and it’s going to be crazy and wild and for the first couple of years, it absolutely was but everyone was on board for modernizing so it worked great.

Q. What a ride. Thanks for sharing that. In the spirit of learning from failures as well as successes, can you share one or two lowlights from your career, or transformations that didn’t play out as you anticipated? 

Patrick Moroney: After Monsanto I went to ServiceMaster [a facilities services provider]. I was brought on to be the corporate shared service consolidator for all this cost — it was JD Edwards at the time that they were trying to consolidate everything on, but they started the process too late and the business financials basically said, it’s not going to work. We ran out of time. We sold our core business and the need for a corporate consolidator became moot.

Fortunately, I had a network of contacts in the industry and that network shortened the time from when my job at ServiceMaster ended and I got the next job as CIO at Health Care Services Corporation [a consolidator of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans]. 

Networking — having an active, viable network — is both a professional necessity and a personal joy for me. I have become a nag for networking because I have benefited so many times from it. I couldn’t have done what I did at Central States if I didn’t know the people that I had to convince to be on the ground in a month. 

It is a skill that most people don’t prioritize because they think they’re taking time away from their job when actually your job will benefit from your network. You will have access to knowledge and people who know things that you don’t when you need it. You can access other people’s experience and go to town on their experience rather than having to reinvent the wheel all the time. You will have access to talent that you need and you will be able to walk into a room of people that you know, and who know you. You can count on them. They trust you, you trust them and that becomes a karmic circle that keeps giving. And you know, things are changing fast.

Q. How would you describe the role of the CIO today and what other advice would you give to people who want that job someday? 

Patrick Moroney: You are a teller of the future and a preparer for tomorrow. You must be a lifelong learner. You need to be the person who sees around future corners. If you are not passionate about consuming information you’re in the wrong job. The CIO needs to be valued by their partners. You need to understand enough about your business partners’ business areas to be useful and credible. You need to be credible to your CEO, who’s got similar enterprise-wide responsibility. You need to be credible to your team. You need to know enough about the technology, how it works and where it’s going to be viewed as a credible leader. When you become a CIO, your job shifts from being more internally focused to externally focused. The external becomes even more important in my opinion, to be an effective leader in these times of exponential change. 

Q. Why walk away now and how does it feel to be retired? 

Patrick Moroney: I did stay an extra two years in the job to help the company through the pandemic. I had “the lunch” with my boss, we planned an eight month transition which I started, then the pandemic hit. As far as retirement goes, I’m not using that word. I’m not that person sitting on the park bench feeding the pigeons. 

Q. Okay. What’s wrong with chilling out “feeding the pigeons”?

Patrick Moroney: Oh, nothing. It’s just not me and there’s plenty of people doing that. The pigeons are probably getting fat these days … with everyone quitting.

Editor’s note: The video platform Vimeo leverages managed database services from Google Cloud to serve up billions of views around the world each day. Here’s how they deliver a consistent user experience across all their content.

Vimeo is the world’s leading video software solution, powering hundreds of thousands of new uploads every day and billions of views. At our scale, it’s paramount that we retain a seamless user experience across all of the videos hosted, shared, and viewed on our platform. With managed database services from Google Cloud, we’ve been able to deliver a consistent and reliable user experience no matter where our users and their audiences are.

Outgrowing the data center and gaining more scale

Our first exposure to Google Cloud was the excellent performance between Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Cloud Storage (GCS), which we used to design a really high quality playback and upload environment for our customers’ videos. At first we were simply creating cloud-based packaging and delivery of their content, but the bulk of our application ran on an on-premises MySQL database. Seeing the gains from our initial investment in GCE and GCS, we decided to fully migrate to Google Cloud. 

We started by lifting and shifting our workloads from our on-premises deployments to GCE. But we quickly realized we had to redesign our application to deliver higher availability and responsiveness for an exceptional user experience, which led us to Cloud Spanner, a distributed SQL database management and storage service. With Spanner, we found all the benefits of a relational semantics database with global scale, allowing us to add more nodes with the push of a button. 

Today we have a multi-region instance with 99.999% uptime, so we’re confident it can handle our video workloads. We use about 16 Spanner nodes to cover approximately 50.8 billion rows and about 4.5 terabytes of storage/disk space. And with the launch of Video Library, we have the scale we need to fundamentally change the way organizations handle content. 

Using Spanner as a time machine during migration

During the initial migration, we wanted to ensure an accurate data transfer with as few errors or bugs as possible. When we moved data from MySQL tables into Spanner, we ran spot analyses to check for potential problems. If the data didn’t match, Spanner allowed us to revert to the original in a single click. Through Spanner we could check stale timestamps or past users. It almost functioned like a time machine by offering point-in-time recovery functionality.

Serving up any video at any time

We work with a long tail of content. Depending on how popular a video is, we take a different approach to storing it. We cache the most popular material so it’s immediately accessible and useCloud Spanner to ensure it’s highly available across multiple regions. On the flip side, we useCloud SQL for some lower volume satellite services that support other components of the application that don’t require the same guarantees or performance that Cloud Spanner provides.  

As our millions of users continue to upload their own videos, Spanner also acts as a video metadata indexing and cataloging service. When we need to play back a particular video, we can quickly and easily find it in a sea of content. It’s crucial that our database is highly available and reliable so the playback experience is seamless for our users. 

To learn more about Vimeo, visitour site.

Learn more about how your organization can use Cloud Spanner.

The broadcasting industry has gone through many evolutions since its inception. From linear over-the-air (OTA) to digital & personalized, to standard to ultra high definition, these evolutions were driven by increased demand from viewers who want more choices. The next evolution is happening now, driven by the emergence in cloud computing in a globally connected world. Broadcasters are understanding that the key for long-term success is embracing technical agility while they innovate their business models. Google Cloud technologies can provide a path for continual transformation, empowering broadcasters a multitude of ways to chart their own growth.

As broadcasters evolve their business models and operations for a digital future, evaluating both financial alongside operational benefits will lead to the best outcome. Legacy and siloed media supply chains restrict the ability to deliver content quickly across multiple consumption platforms. By understanding how cloud capabilities can provide cost savings, allow for more efficiency and scale, and open new revenue streams, broadcasters can harness flexible cloud technologies while achieving cost savings and increasing revenue. 

Media workflows in the cloud

Over the last few years we have seen tremendous growth from media companies migrating their supply chains to the cloud. Today, there exists a whole ecosystem of media technologies that are built to take advantage of the cloud. “Does it work on the cloud?” is no longer driving the conversation. Rather, media companies now want to understand how Cloud can integrate with their business and drive better business outcomes. 

Over the last years we have partnered with leading media companies including Grupo Globo, TelevisaUnivision and others to not only migrate their content supply chain to the cloud, but also leverage cloud capabilities to innovate their services to:

Increase and streamline content production

Distribute personalized content at planet scale

Forge deep relationships with their audiences 

Identify new monetization opportunities 

Impact of Cloud on Performance & Financials

M&E companies need to be able to provide more content at a quicker pace, with experiences that are seamless and exciting to viewers to retain their attention and dollars. Moving legacy systems and processes to the cloud is an organization-wide commitment, and the journey can pay off financially, while providing M&E companies valuable industry capabilities. With Google Cloud business value engagement framework, we partner to identify where there are opportunities in cost, output, and impact that IT can have. 

Below are some examples of how we have worked with our customers to map organization optimizations  to business drivers

Working Together – How can Google help

Our focus with customers is to help identify and understand the challenges that Media & Entertainment companies have in moving to the cloud, and coming up with the plan and solutions that Google can do to overcome them. Together we commit to understanding your business, both where you are right now in your IT capabilities as well as the progress you want to make to continue providing the best digital capabilities to clients and employees.

As broadcasters move more processes and solutions to the cloud, the exponential effect of harnessing data and AI power will provide incremental business value across all lines of business. Combined, these impacts to a broadcaster allow both operational excellence while optimizing costs as they continue to expand offerings to customers and regions around the world. 

We recognize that every media company’s journey is different and so are expected business outcomes. Google Cloud works closely with customers – partnering every step of the way – to align technology, the media industry, and business outcomes.