Google LLC highlighted the growing strength of its public cloud computing services this week, announcing a couple of new customer wins.

On Wednesday it said the financial services giant Deutsche Bӧrse Group is in the process of migrating its on-premises VMware applications to the Google Cloud VMware Engine service.

The Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation stack, including VMware Inc.’s vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T and HCX products, running on Google Cloud’s infrastructure. The service enables the seamless migration of VMware workloads to Google Cloud, and helps companies to reduce their operational burden while benefiting from the scale and agility of the cloud.

In a blog post, Annette Maier, managing director of the Google Cloud DACH region, and June Yang, general manager of Google Cloud Compute, said Deutsche Bӧrse ran a lot of highly customized VMware-based applications on-premises, and identified numerous benefits to be had by migrating these to the cloud. It decided Google Cloud VMware Engine would be the easiest way to do this, since the service eliminates the cost and complexity of refactoring those apps and in many cases, can be done with just a few mouse clicks, Google said.

Deutsche Bӧrse said one of the main benefits of migrating to Google’s cloud is that its information technology staff can continue using existing skills, tools, policies and processes that comply with the stringent regulatory requirements of the financial industry. The company’s developers also benefit because they can now access Google Cloud services that significantly accelerate the development and testing of new applications and customer services.

“Prior to this, the team had limited testing capabilities, but can now conduct thousands of tests across three or four environments in the same amount of time, allowing for earlier identification of errors in the development process,” Maier and Yang said. “By moving VMware workloads to Google Cloud, Deutsche Börse can set up a new private cloud instance in minutes, while maintaining existing policies and tools, including existing cloud constructs such as networking interconnects, all while increasing business agility.”

In addition to these benefits, Deutsche Bӧrse aims to take advantage of Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities going forward. The company is hoping to automate many of its internal processes using these services. In turn, that will make its IT staff more productive and freeing them up to focus on delivering new services to its customers.

“Like many companies on their paths to the cloud, Deutsche Bӧrse is not finished with its journey, proving that cloud transformation (or any transformation, for that matter) doesn’t happen overnight,” Maier and Yang said. “However, the cloud’s productivity benefits and speed of innovation have already prepared the company for the future, without placing too many demands on the present.”

In another announcement today, Google said the domestic merchandise retail giant Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. has committed to a five-year deal to deploy a range of platform solutions on Google Cloud, in order to optimize its business operations and deliver more personalized shopping experiences and to its customers.

Bed Bath & Beyond said it’s planning to employ a number of Google Cloud technologies, including its popular BigQuery service, Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine.

The retailer said it will use the BigQuery service to expand its machine learning and analytics capabilities, with the aim being to predict future sales trends. Based on those predictions, it will then be able to make “instant, customer-centric decisions” with real-time data that can help it to improve demand prediction and optimize its inventory and merchandise planning.

Bed Bath & Beyond also hopes to create a more personalized shopping experience by leveraging Google Cloud’s AI services to improve its e-commerce platform, including its search, navigation, checkout and delivery and pickup services. Furthermore, the company plans to use Google’s tools to improve data collection with a view to optimizing its fulfillment strategy, it said.

“Retailers are sitting on an incredible amount of data today, but this data is often siloed and lacks real-time processing,” said Carrie Tharp, vice president of Retail & Consumer at Google Cloud. “And high-traffic events like Cyber Monday or the pandemic only put more stress on systems. By migrating to Google Cloud, Bed Bath & Beyond expects to be able to reduce cost and drive business value through real-time analytics across marketing, merchandising, supply chain and more.”

Image: Google