Google Compute Engine and App Engine give Evite freedom to expand services anytime

Posted by Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology, Evite

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blog comes from Dan Mesh, Vice President of Technology at Evite, the pioneer in online invitations and social planning. Evite has over 30 million registered users and sends more than 250 million party invitations annually.

In the past year, we’ve introduced a couple of exciting new products at Evite: our Postmark service offers premium online invitations and announcements for milestone events like weddings and births, and Evite Ink lets our users design custom paper invitations that we print and mail for a small fee. We couldn’t have launched these products without Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, which gave us the infrastructure needed to scale our services to high demands and analyze large volumes of data they generate.

Evite has been around since 1998, but behind this well-known online brand is a small and lean team. Migrating to the cloud has allowed us to focus our time, energy and financial resources on development of new products and services, free from worries of server management, capacity planning and hardware costs.

We chose Google Cloud Platform because the combination of App Engine and Compute Engine truly delivers on the cloud’s promise of scalable and elastic computing. App Engine’s autoscaling means that as long as our applications are developed in line with the platform API’s and architecture guidelines, scalability comes for free. This is a huge benefit since we no longer worry about scaling our services to meet heavy demands and are also free from the difficulties and risks inherent in capacity planning.

Most online businesses have very consistent daily, weekly and seasonal traffic patterns, and in Evite’s case, these patterns are even more pronounced. In the past, we used to provision resources to meet peak demand allowing for a healthy margin of error and future growth. Naturally, this resulted in a lot of wasted capital and engineering resources. Now that most of our systems are running on Google Cloud Platform, we see significant savings as application servers expand and shrink elastically in accordance with our web traffic.

For example, in the past Evite was hesitant to roll out major application releases in Q4, typically the busiest time of the year for us. During this time, we reach our peak traffic, and operational focus was on making sure nothing went wrong. Any significant releases represented unwanted risk. Cloud Platform greatly simplifies the release process and provides built-in traffic splitting. This has made it possible for Evite product teams to test new features and release products more frequently and with reduced risks, even during the busiest times of year.

As we add new products and services, Compute Engine plays a key role in our application infrastructure. We use it to closely monitor and analyze the performance of our products and services. All application data and log files generated by applications running on App Engine flow through a cluster of Compute Engine instances running extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, which feed this data into the data warehouse. There we analyze the collected data to detect errors and usage patterns helping us improve the design of our products and maintain performance levels.

Compute Engine gets high marks for interoperability with App Engine and other cloud vendors. We use AWS Redshift as our data warehouse so interoperability is very important. Equally impressive are predictable, high I/O performance and fast instance startup times. For our data processing workloads these two metrics are critical to success.

With App Engine powering all of our customer-facing services and Compute Engine helping us monitor and understand application performance, Evite is in great shape to create and release new products. We look forward to many new releases in 2014 knowing we can count on Cloud Platform to make these launches trouble-free.

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Google App Engine helps MAG Interactive handle explosive growth of word game, Ruzzle

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today we hear from Daniel Hasselberg, co-founder and chief executive officer of mobile game development company, MAG Interactive, based in Stockholm, Sweden. MAG Interactive produces some of the most popular games in the world, including Ruzzle, which has more than 45 million players in 142 different countries.

When we launched our word game Ruzzle in 2012, we had no idea it would become an international sensation almost overnight. We initially promoted the game only to our family and friends, but within two weeks of our launch, Ruzzle was the No.1 game on the Swedish App Store.

I believe if we hadn’t used Google App Engine to build the backend of Ruzzle, we wouldn’t have been able to scale fast enough with our own servers, which would have killed the app in the marketplace. There were about a million downloads of Ruzzle per month in the Nordic region, Holland, Spain and Italy through 2012. As we refined the game’s social integration through channels like Facebook and Twitter, we grew rapidly in Italy and the United States. In 2013, Ruzzle became the No. 1 game download on Google Play and the App Store in Italy, Sweden, the United States and many other countries.

Things were especially crazy at the end of last year. We were seeing about 700,000 new players each day from December 2012 through January 2013. We added 20 million users in a single month! It was incredible to see App Engine scale – and just keep on working – as we grew from about 5 million players to 25 million players in just a few weeks.

Our decision to use App Engine as the platform for Ruzzle and our new game, QuizCross, was strategic. Some of us at MAG Interactive helped develop the server platform for one of the most popular music download services in the Nordic region, so we knew about the challenges of having to scale quickly. While we didn’t anticipate Ruzzle’s popularity, we did recognize even before creating the game that we could face scaling problems if we were successful. So we decided from day one to use a cloud solution.

We looked at Amazon’s platform but preferred Google’s approach to cloud solutions. Google’s scalability was an important factor in our decision, but we also appreciated the company’s transparent pricing. The more efficient we became with App Engine, the less we paid.

The Google Cloud Platform team has been great to work with, as well. They are very supportive and appreciate our feedback. The technical support experts at Google are amazing, too – very hands-on. They know the platform extremely well and can help us work through any challenge.

We’re also using Google BigQuery for business intelligence. We track millions of events in the game every day so we know what users are doing – or not doing – and how we should improve the experience. We really like that we can throw enormous amounts of data at BigQuery, and it still performs. It only takes a few seconds to get results, and there are no scaling issues. It’s also easy to use. We have just one data analyst doing all the work with BigQuery but could probably use more people. If there are a few brilliant data mining experts out there who can imagine a future in Stockholm, please give us a call!

One thing we’ve learned from our BigQuery analysis is that the more users play Ruzzle, the more they improve their skills. New players typically find about 18 words in the two-minute time frame they’re given. After they play 100 games, they can find about 50 words, on average. I think that tracking player improvement is what keeps people playing and has helped to make Ruzzle so popular.

BigQuery offers our company a lot of insight into the use of our games and how we can improve them. We’re looking forward to expanding our relationship with Google as App Engine and Cloud Platform evolves.

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Google Cloud Platform Powers Minyanville’s Buzz and Banter

Posted by Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc

(Cross-posted on the Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc., a New York based financial media company. In this post, Philip looks at the benefits his company received from switching from a major public cloud provider to Google Cloud Platform.

At Minyanville Media, our goal is to create branded business content that informs, entertains, and educates all generations about the worlds of business and finance. We designed our premium Buzz & Banter app app to serve this need. The Buzz ran on a competing cloud platform that presented increasing technical challenges as we expanded our customer base and feature set. We wanted a higher performing platform offering a more flexible and deeper feature set; we wanted to be certain we were serving our longtime clients as best as we could.

We consulted our strategic technology partner MediaAgility, and the company advised us to move to Google Cloud Platform. There were two obvious benefits to switching to Google Cloud Platform from our old provider: better reliability and automatic demand-based scaling of the application.

Every day, thousands of investors access our system globally, everywhere from Syracuse to Switzerland. They turn to us for reliable market intelligence and investing ideas. Today's economic uncertainty, coupled with high frequency trading, keeps us on our toes. When a central bank unexpectedly cuts interest rates or a hacked tweet sends markets into a tailspin, seconds matter. We are timely, or we are out of business. It’s as simple as that. Additionally, we serve two major online brokerage firms, which have very high standards for performance and reliability.

Hence, we decided to move Buzz and Banter to the Google Cloud Platform. The improvement and increase in operational speed was drastic. New Buzz, running on Google App Engine, updates content instantaneously -- even before our content management system refreshes to confirm publication. The icing on the cake is that our operating costs are significantly lower than what they were under our old provider.

It’s rare that everyone wins in a technology transition, but that’s exactly what’s been accomplished in our move to Google App Engine. With a better customer experience, lower operating costs, and fewer technological headaches, we only wish that we’d made the switch sooner.

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News Ltd’s Traderoo Powered by Google App Engine

Posted by Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited, an Australian media company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

News Limited is one of Australia’s largest media companies, spanning newspapers, magazines, online, and subscription TV. We publish over 140 online and printed newspapers in major Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as in suburban areas.

Classified advertising is a key revenue stream across all our markets, but traditionally booking and billing classifieds had been a manual and time-consuming process. We wanted to implement a solution that would allow customers to serve themselves by placing ads online.

Google App Engine has enabled customers to do just that. We chose Google App Engine as the application because it is easy to build, easy to maintain and simple to scale as the user base and data storage grows. Functionalities within the Google App Engine environment, such as Google BigQuery, have also been useful. We can do an in-depth analysis of our ads and item pricing, as well as provide an internal reporting tool, all using BigQuery.

The end result is a self-service, production booking and billing system - www.traderoo.com.au - which we have developed on Google App Engine. It’s proving to be a real winner for both our business and our customers. It’s fundamentally changed the way customers engage with our company, creating a more usable experience and superb responsiveness. It’s easy to use, and gives more control over ad content, as well as the ability to publish ads online immediately. Online ads are free, while print ads are optional and require a small fee, but complement online ads by extending the advertiser’s reach.

When customers book ads using the Traderoo website, they get automatic email notification from the platform that tells them how their advertisement is performing. Traderoo is optimised for PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet, so the browser and ad placement remain consistent, no matter what device our customers are using.

The real advantage for us is that our classified business has achieved faster time to market, lower costs and less overheads in the form of call centre time and manual data entry. The site has been a huge success, and we look forward to continuing to use Google App Engine as we develop Traderoo further.

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Google Cloud Platform introduces new support packages

Posted by Brett McCully, Google Cloud Platform Team

Support is as important as product features when choosing a platform for your applications. And let’s face it, sometimes we all need a bit of help. No matter which Google Cloud Platform services you are using—App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, etc.—or what time of day, you should be able to get the answers you need. While you can go to Stack Overflow or Google Groups, we realize some of you may need 24x7 coverage, phone support or direct access to a Technical Account Manager team.

To meet your support requirements, we’re introducing a comprehensive collection of support packages for services on Google Cloud Platform, so you can decide what level best fits your needs:

• Bronze: All customers get access to online documentation, community forums, and billing support. (Free) 
• Silver: In addition to Bronze, you can email our support team for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors. ($150/month) 
• Gold: In addition to Silver, you'll receive 24x7 phone support and consultation on application development, best practices or architecture for your specific use case. (Starts at $400/month) 
• Platinum: The most comprehensive and personalized support. In addition to Gold, you’ll get direct access to a Technical Account Manager team. (Contact Sales for more information)

Sign up or click here to find out more information about the new Google Cloud Platform support options.

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Cloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa

Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.

Vuyile prints a voucher from his Lula

Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

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Google Cloud Platform: new features, lower prices, extending European datacenters

Posted by Jessie Jiang, Product Management Director

(Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.)

We're constantly making updates to our Google Cloud Platform products—Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Big Query, Compute Engine and others—based on user feedback and to improve the overall experience. For example, two weeks ago we introduced a major update to Google Cloud SQL providing faster performance, larger databases (100GB), an EU zone, and a no-cost trial. But, we know there is more to do. Today, we’re continuing to improve the platform with new storage and compute capabilities, significantly lower prices, and more European Datacenter support.

Lower storage prices and new Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) Storage
To give you more flexibility in your storage options and prices, we’re reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20% and introducing a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage. DRA storage lowers prices by trading off some data availability while maintaining the same latency performance and durability as standard Google Cloud Storage. DRA can be used for things like batch compute jobs that can easily be rescheduled or for data back-up where quick access to your data is important. DRA achieves cost savings by keeping fewer redundant replicas of data. Unlike other reduced redundancy cloud storage offerings, DRA is implemented in a manner that maintains data durability so you don't have to worry about losing your data in the cloud.

And, to automatically keep a history of old versions of your data, we’re introducing Object Versioning. You can also use it to help protect against deleting or overwriting your data by mistake or due to an application error.

More European Datacenter support
We are continuing to roll out our European Datacenter support. Now, customers using Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and (soon) Google Compute Engine can deploy their applications, data and virtual machines to European Datacenters. This helps bring your solutions even closer to your customers for faster performance and enables international redundancy.

36 New Compute Engine instance types and overall reduced prices
Earlier this year we introduced a Limited Preview of Google Compute Engine with four standard instance types. Today, we are announcing 36 additional instance types and are reducing the price of our original 4 standard instances by about 5% for those currently in our preview. In the coming weeks, the following will be available:

• High Memory Instance - High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.
• High CPU Instance - Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.
• Diskless Configurations - Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.

We are also introducing Persistent Disk Snapshotting which makes it simple to instantly create a backup of your disk, move it around Google datacenters, and use the snapshot to start up a new VM.

We want to thank you, the community of developers and businesses who are pushing the platform into new areas and building innovative applications. We look forward to seeing where you take it next. Find out more about the new Cloud Storage pricing and Compute Engine instances. Sign up now and get started today.

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About today’s App Engine outage

Posted by Peter S. Magnusson, Engineering Director, Google App Engine

Editors note: This morning we failed to live up to our promise, and Google App Engine applications experienced increased latencies and time-out errors. For a full report of the incident, visit the Google App Engine blog.

We know you rely on App Engine to create applications that are easy to develop and manage without having to worry about downtime. App Engine is not supposed to go down, and our engineers work diligently to ensure that it doesn’t. However, from approximately 7:30 to 11:30 AM US/Pacific today, about 50% of requests to App Engine applications failed.

During this incident, no application data was lost and application behavior was restored without any manual intervention by developers. There is no need to make any code or configuration changes to your applications.

We will proactively issue credits to all paid applications for ten percent of their usage for the month of October to cover any SLA violations. This will appear on applications’ November bills. There is no need to take any action to receive this credit.

We apologize for this outage, and in particular for its duration and severity. Since launching the High Replication Datastore in January 2011, App Engine has not experienced a widespread system outage. We know that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on App Engine to provide a stable, scalable infrastructure for their applications, and we will continue to improve our systems and processes to live up to this expectation.

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Streak powers their business on Google Cloud Platform

Posted by Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak, a startup alum of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator. Streak is a CRM tool built into Gmail. Aleem shares why Streak chose Google Cloud Platform to run their business.

Everyone relies on email to get work done – yet most people use separate applications from their email to help them with various business processes. Streak fixes this problem by letting you do sales, hiring, fundraising, bug tracking, product development, deal flow, project management and almost any other business process right inside Gmail. We decided to build Streak on Google Cloud Platform to operate at scale, to understand our users and improve the application over time, and to rapidly grow our business.

We chose to build Streak with Google App Engine for many reasons: it can handle tons of load; it requires no maintenance; and it guarantees 99.95% uptime. Streak’s user base grew 30% week over week for 4 consecutive months after launch. Being able to handle the load and data requirements at our scale would have required us to hire a full team of backend engineers just to keep the application running. Instead, the Streak backend on App Engine is built and maintained by a single engineer.

All of our data is stored in the App Engine Datastore, but we also mirror our data using Google Cloud Storage. As a result, Cloud Storage is a conduit to route this data to other Google cloud services, such as BigQuery and the Prediction API.

Last, we use Google BigQuery to better understand our users. It allows us to analyze large amounts of data from our usage logs and query it to answer complex questions such as:

How much does the average request cost broken down by type? How many users are running an old version of Streak? Are there currently any abnormal error rates in our application? On average, if a user is working in a 3 person team, how many deals do they have assigned to them?

We bundle the insights gained from BigQuery and use it to power our dashboards with key business metrics.

One of many Streak dashboards powered by BigQuery showing current usage statistics

When we first launched our business, we had gigabytes worth of data. Now, we anticipate growing to terabytes of data in just a few months. We couldn’t have scaled this easily without Google Cloud Platform. To learn more, check out our case study and our post on the App Engine blog for a detailed technical explaination.

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BBH fosters international collaboration with the help of Google Apps

Posted by Ian Dobb, Interim Global CIO at BBH

Editors note:Today’s guest blogger is Ian Dobb, Interim Global CIO at the renowned advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH). Ian led the implementation of Google Apps for Business across five different countries for BBH’s 1,000-strong workforce. Ian Dobb is co-founder of Ionico. He was brought in to BBH to lead its IT change programme.

At BBH, collaboration is the cornerstone of developing award-winning advertising campaigns. As BBH expands its global coverage, staff are increasingly required to work on projects that have team members in multiple countries. Our international workforce of creative thinkers wants to operate without boundaries and not be held back by clunky email systems and restrictive mailboxes. The previous email system, Lotus Notes, did not live up to the demands of this modern and vibrant workforce.

With the help of Google Apps deployment expert and partner Appsbroker, we implemented Google Apps throughout the organisation across 1,000 staff, a move that completely transformed the way our teams now work together and share ideas.

In addition to email and calendar, many employees now use Google Talk to chat with each other, and they hold multi-person video chats through the Hangouts feature in Google+. For instance, the global executive team, including the Group CEO, recently held a meeting via a Google Hangout. This spanned multiple time zones and three continents. Cutting back on using a third party video conferencing service and associated data comms circuits will save BBH approximately £100,000 a year.

Google Apps also proved its worth as a mobile working and business contingency tool. Last winter BBH employees in London arrived to work to discover the basement was filled 5 metres deep with water due to a broken sprinkler valve, leaving the main building without power, where 450 people work. Google Apps was invaluable in keeping staff up and running. With the help of Gmail, Google Chat, Hangouts and Docs, work continued with minimal disruption while staff worked from home or from local cafes.

With the help of Appsbroker, we’re now building a custom app on Google App Engine to help feed creative thought at BBH. The app will help teams search and browse the vast BBH database of ideas and inspiration, making sure nothing is forgotten and lost in an archive file. It’s an exciting prospect for a business where intellectual property is the key currency.

With so many benefits and some exciting future prospects, we are confident that Google Apps and its constantly expanding range of collaborative features will aid the creative process for BBH staff by making it simpler for them to share ideas, streamlining processes for fast-paced teamwork, and giving clients a more responsive, dynamic service.

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Neural Network for Breast Cancer Data Built on Google App Engine

Posted by Brittany Wenger, Winner of Google Science Fair 2012

(Cross-posted from Google App Engine Blog)

Editors note: Today’s guest blog post comes from 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, the winner of this year’s Google Science Fair. Brittany built an application on Google App Engine called the Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer. This artificial neural network can detect complex patterns in data, learning how to classify malignant or cancerous cells it hasn’t seen before. Learn more about her project.



When a patient has a palpable breast lump, the first step a doctor takes is to determine whether the mass is malignant or benign. One relatively simple diagnostic procedure is a form of biopsy called fine needle aspiration (FNA). Though these tests are less invasive than others, they are historically less accurate as well. My goal was to create a tool for doctors to use when interpreting test results from these procedures.

For this project, I decided to create a neural network built on Google App Engine, using data published to the Machine Learning Repository by the University of Wisconsin. A neural network attempts to replicate the brain as a form of artificial intelligence through networks of computers and can be used to detect extremely complex patterns. It learns from its mistakes, so it can classify a case it hasn’t seen before as malignant or cancerous based on specific criteria like clump thickness or bland chromatin. Because the diagnostic power of the network improves the more data it has, building on App Engine is a way to ensure the app can continue to scale easily, no matter how much information goes into the system.

I got started integrating my neural network application code, written in Java, with App Engine in a few hours using the SDK’s Greeting Service sample code as a starting point. The application has two main parts, a training module, that implements the neural network itself and runs the training process over the input data stored in static files, and a web interface that takes input data and returns the network’s analysis.

Google App Engine provides the scalable infrastructure I need to collect information from every hospital in the world and run when there are many concurrent requests, as usage of my application increases. Because my network is built as a cloud service, not only is my app working on the web, but mobile tablets, smartphones, old PC systems, or new technologies can also easily access the service from any hospital with an internet connection.

The neural network I developed is 99.11% sensitive to malignancy when using leave-one-out testing with original data. Thus far, I have run 7.6 million trials. Moving forward my goal is to make the application accessible to the global medical community so more data can be deposited and used to improve the diagnostic power of the network.

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Announcing Google App Engine education awards

Posted by the Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine blog.)

In addition to the startups and businesses we frequently highlight on our blog, we have seen educational institutions and their students build amazing applications, using Google App Engine as a platform for teaching and groundbreaking research.

Earlier this year we announced funding for researchers looking to use App Engine for scientific discovery. Today we are introducing the Google App Engine Education Awards to foster continued innovation from educational institutions in areas outside of research. Through this program we are inviting faculty members, initially from the United States, to submit proposals for using App Engine for their course development, educational research, university tools or for student projects. A selection of the proposals we receive will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits to assist in making the proposal a reality.

App Engine allows you to build scalable applications using the same technology that powers Google’s global-scale web applications. With no hardware to setup, App Engine makes it simple to learn how to write a simple web application or to build an application that handles millions of hits a day. If you haven’t already tried App Engine, we encourage you to download the SDK, follow the Getting Started Guide and take advantage of our free tier to deploy your first application.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the United States, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. Applications must be received by midnight PST August 31, 2012.

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A new future: hitting “Refresh” on business technology

Posted by Amit Singh, Vice President, Google Enterprise

Over the last two months I had the opportunity to spend time with hundreds of CIOs as we took Atmosphere – our annual cloud event – to 20 cities globally. What I heard from them boiled down to one simple idea: they’re looking for a better way to do things. Their employees want to work in collaborative environments without being tethered to their desks, and their IT departments are eager to shift resources from maintaining old technology to developing new ones.

These business leaders have experienced the power of living in the cloud and they want to bring that experience to the workplace. The cloud has certainly transformed my life by allowing my family to stay connected from all around the world. For example, at the São Paolo Atmosphere event, I joined a Google+ Hangout from my Android phone to wish my dad a happy birthday. This magic doesn’t need to be constrained to our personal lives. After all, we’re the same person at home and at work, and we like having access to the same devices and tools regardless.

A fundamental shift...
There was a time when business technology was at the forefront of innovation and productivity. Industries began to standardize around certain platforms that automated an individual’s work. But with complicated enterprise agreements, customer lock-in and limited competition, business technology lost its edge. IT professionals stopped innovating and relied on a handful of vendors who designed bloated software that was released every few years. At the same time, consumer technology took off. With the power of massive data centers, modern browsers and smart mobile devices at their fingertips, people found it easier than ever to communicate, create, and collaborate. Many people have fallen in love with the simplicity and freedom of these services, and they want to use them everywhere.

…to working in the future
This is where Google comes in. To provide a seamless transition from home to work (and back to home), we extended our popular consumer products–like Gmail and Google Drive–to meet the needs of businesses. For instance, Google Apps for Business provides an additional layer of enterprise features like delegated mailboxes, granular administrative controls, a 99.9% SLA, 24x7 support, migration tools, and an ecosystem of certified resellers.

We’ve also applied the same formula to other products that were born in the cloud: Google Maps Coordinate helps companies easily manage mobile workers; Chrome for Business gives you a consistent, personalized web experience on any device; Google App Engine lets you to build and host your own applications in the cloud; and Google Compute Engine allows you to rent Google’s infrastructure to operate at scale. With each of these offerings, you can access the latest innovation by clicking “refresh” in your browser.

We’re humbled that 5 million businesses (including BBVA and Roche), 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, and government institutions in 45 of the 50 U.S. states have gone Google by choosing Google Apps to live and work in the cloud. We hear from these customers that alongside improving IT administration and individual productivity, Google Apps also helps teams of employees work better together. For example, Google documents let users collaborate in real-time and see each other’s edits as they happen. And now, with offline editing, users can continue working even without an internet connection.

As people have begun to embrace the cloud, some legacy enterprise vendors have started to offer their own cloud-labeled offerings. They claim to offer a bridge between legacy solutions and the cloud. But these offerings still rely on desktop products and on-premise servers, require heavy IT investment, have limited support for mobile devices, come with complicated pricing and licences–and ultimately they’re still focused on individual productivity. If anything, they offer a bridge to the past.

With the explosion of computing devices, ubiquitous high-speed internet, and mobile workforces, there’s a fundamental shift happening in business. The question is: do you want to cross a bridge to continue working in the past...or move to the cloud so you can live and work seamlessly in the future?

Get started with Google Apps or collaborate in real-time today with literary masters: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Poe and more.

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Join us on the Google Enterprise +page

Posted by Chris Farinacci, Global Marketing Director, Google Enterprise

One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is meeting with customers and learning how they’re using our products to change the way they work on the web. In this spirit, today I’m excited to introduce our official Google Enterprise page on Google+, the latest way for us to stay connected.

By adding +Google Enterprise to your Google+ circles, you’ll be able to read about our latest product features, hear directly from some of our customers, and share your thoughts with the community.

We’re really looking forward to hearing what you have to say. To join the conversation, mention +Google Enterprise in your post, or comment directly on our page.

Haven’t had a chance to turn on Google+ for your account yet? With last month’s announcement of Google+ for Apps, you can now enable Google+ for your organization.

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Helping larger businesses make the most of Google’s cloud services

Posted by Rahul Sood, Global Head of Enterprise Partnerships

Today, we’re making it easier for larger businesses to use Google’s cloud services by announcing the Cloud Transformation Program.

With the Cloud Transformation Program, we’ve identified select Google partners that can help you get the most out of Google’s cloud services, including Google App Engine, Google Storage for Developers, Google Apps Script and Google Prediction API. Initially, Cloud Transformation Program partners will offer customized solutions in the following areas:

• Cloud-based applications such as websites, mobile apps, social media apps, business process apps and customer-facing web apps built using Google App Engine and Google Apps Script
• Predictive solutions such as fraud detection, customer sentiment analysis, and customer churn prediction built using Google Prediction API
• Enterprise storage solutions such as storage for applications, data sharing and high-reliability backup built using Google Storage for Developers

Over time, we expect that partners will expand their focus as we add new cloud services.

We’re excited to have CSC, Cloud Sherpas, Cognizant, Opera Solutions, Razorfish, SADA Systems and TempusNova as our initial Cloud Transformation Program partners. These partners all have deep expertise and a proven track record of success helping businesses make the most of their IT investments, so we appreciate their support. To learn how you can use Google’s cloud services in your business, please contact one of our partners directly.

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