DACH businesses embrace Google Cloud for digital transformation

Whether they’re lifting-and-shifting workloads or taking cloud-native approaches to application development, enterprises are increasingly looking to the cloud to build and grow their businesses. As a result, over the past 12 months we’ve seen extraordinary momentum in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland–also known as the DACH region–as more and more businesses take advantage of Google Cloud. In March, we launched a new Google Cloud region in Zurich to support businesses in the region. We continue to expand our support of regional and global certifications and standards, now including FINMA-regulated customers in Switzerland. And we continue to work closely with many enterprises in the region, such as METRO AG, and many more.

Yesterday’s Cloud Summit in Munich is a great example of the continuing momentum we’re seeing. With 2200 attendees and 45 customer speakers, the summit was an important opportunity for us to connect with–and learn from–businesses in the region. Customers across every industry shared with us how they’re transforming with the power of the cloud. Here are a few highlights.

DLR: Groundbreaking robotics research with the help of Google Cloud infrastructure
Part of Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt(DLR), Germany’s national aerospace center, the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics is one of the largest pure robotics research institutes in the world. To advance its work, the institute relies on deep learning techniques, but this requires a substantial amount of compute resources for training and running simulations. Thanks to Google Cloud, it can now easily configure powerful instances with Compute Engine, even using hundreds of CPU cores if necessary. And it now has the flexibility to spin up specialized configurations when needed–something it couldn’t do with in-house servers. You can learn more in DLR’s case study.

“With Google Cloud, we can train our robots between five to ten times faster than before and really explore things like deep reinforcement learning,” says Berthold Bauml, Head of Autonomous Learning Robots Lab, DLR. “We can do cutting edge research and we’re no longer bound by our computing resources. It’s providing totally new opportunities for us.”

ARD: From monolithic architecture to modern microservices
A joint organization of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters, the ARD network produces key national and regional television and radio programs, and faces challenges shared by many media organizations aiming to serve customers with the content they want, where and when they want it. Starting from a monolithic, rigid structure, ARD wanted a technology stack that fit its own culture–open and scalable. With Google Cloud, ARD is able to focus on five digital, scalable core products and take advantage of fully-managed services which has allowed it to increase its number of releases from once a year to 50 releases a day. In addition to using GCP as a scalable underlying platform, ARD is also using an API-as-a-service approach with Apigee to rethink the way they are delivering content to German citizens by making content delivery universally accessible to other broadcasting entities.

Deutsche Borse Group: Embracing a multi-cloud approach to infrastructure
As an international exchange organization and market infrastructure provider, Deutsche Borse Group offers its customers a wide range of products, services and technologies covering the entire value chain of financial markets. As a result, Deutsche B?rse Group has frequently been an early adopter of new technologies that drive its industry forward, whether that’s using distributed ledger/blockchain technology in new ways or offering new advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) services to clients. Most recently, Deutsche B?rse Group has ramped up its cloud-first strategy, led by its inaugural Chief Cloud Officer Michael Girg, choosing Google Cloud to help them modernize, develop and operate its enterprise workloads in a more efficient and secure way that also supports compliance.

“As a key technology, cloud lays the foundation for enabling some of Deutsche Borse’s major initiatives focussing on new technologies,” says Michael Girg, Chief of Cloud Officer at Deutsche Borse. “Together with Google Cloud as a strong partner, we are very much looking forward to accelerating cloud adoption and to jointly define innovative solutions that further push ahead data security for the financial industry”

You can read more on their progress in our recent blog post.

MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group: Transforming retail, online and offline
One of the world’s largest consumer electronics retailers, the MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group operates more than 1,000 stores across 15 countries in Europe, including a sizeable ecommerce presence. But the company was increasingly finding that its on-premises infrastructure, used to first built its online stores, was not able to keep up with evolving business and customer demands. So MediaMarktSaturn turned to the cloud, upgrading its infrastructure but also to adopting a new way of working that places technology at the heart of its strategy. For MediaMarktSaturn, this meant combining data streams into a new data lake from which it can query data with and derive insights with ease, as well as adopting Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), to manage the Kubernetes clusters that form the backbone of its new online system.

“Google Cloud has paved the way for us to break new ground not only technically, but also in our way of working,” says Dr. Johannes Wechsler, Managing Director, MediaMarktSaturn Technology. “Thanks to this strong partnership, we are well equipped to offer our customers a great user experience even in high-load situations and at the same time deliver new features more quickly.”

Looking ahead
We’re excited to see what enterprises in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can do as they embrace Google Cloud. We remain committed to working with them to help them grow and digitally transform their businesses.