Posted by Prajesh Parekh, Google Apps Partner Marketing

Editor's note: This week we’re featuring news, stories and updates about our vibrant partner community as we host more than 700 partners for our second annual Global Partner Summit. Keep an eye on this blog and our Google+ page and visit our program site for more information on the Google Apps Reseller program.

Millions of businesses around the world—from scrappy startups to large enterprises—rely on Google’s solutions for work. And many of them are supported by a community of partners, including more than 10,000 Google Apps Resellers globally, who help businesses set up and get more out of the Apps productivity suite.

We’ve seen our partner program grow up quite a bit since it was launched in 2009. But it’s not just growing in size — our community has gotten increasingly diverse, with IT providers from a variety of backgrounds and specialties joining us in the last few years. New partners include well-established companies, like CDW and SHI, who have provided IT solutions to customers since before tools like Hangouts or Drive ever existed. Wix and Weebly, two of the most popular website builders for businesses, also recently integrated with Google Apps after seeing the benefits it provided their own customers. These partners, like UK-based Grove Group, are driven to give their clients IT solutions that drive a better way of working.

This week, we’re hosting our second annual Global Partner Summit in San Francisco to celebrate the contributions of partners across Google Apps, Enterprise Search, Chrome, Cloud Platform and Maps for Business. The three-day summit brings together more than 700 partners to collaborate on business plans, share best practices, and engage with product experts. At the end of the week, we hope our partners will leave energized with fresh ideas for how to better help their customers.

Posted by James Donkin, General Manager, Ocado Technology

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog)

Editor's note: Our guest blog post today comes from James Donkin, General Manager Ocado Technology at Ocado, the only dedicated online supermarket in the UK and the world’s largest online grocery retailer

Ocado is the world's largest online-only grocery retailer, reaching over 70% of British households, shipping over 150,000 orders a week or 1.1M items a day.

Ocado doesn’t operate out of physical stores. Instead, our customers place their orders online via our webshop and mobile applications. These orders are then picked and packed in huge automated Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFCs), the largest of their kind in the world. They are then delivered to customers’ kitchens in one hour delivery slots by our own delivery fleet.

Technology is at the core of almost everything Ocado does. We consider ourselves a technology company that also does retail. Our culture and make-up is much closer to that of Google than it is a bricks and mortar retailer. We started shipping orders in 2002 and over the past 12 years we have been engaged in a continual process of rapid innovation. Our solution is as unique as our business model and the fact that we own almost every line of source code in this solution means we can evolve it, optimise it and exploit it.

We have a unique business model that is considered highly disruptive within the retail sector, due in part to the scale of automation that we employ.

From the customer’s perspective it’s all about delivering the highest levels of service, quality and choice at a compelling price that all flow from our level of automation - it’s also about providing a customer experience that is irresistible in terms of its convenience and simplicity.

However under the surface, that simplicity does not come easily and is achieved by a huge level of complexity in terms of the processes, automation, software, algorithms, optimisations and data that make it happen. We rely on Google Cloud Platform to do the heavy lifting on data processing and integration so we can focus on what we do best: getting quality groceries to customers in the quickest time possible.

Six months ago, we were ready to make the shift to the cloud and researched Cloud Platform. We were familiar with Google's offerings since we've used Google Apps since 2010. We wanted to evaluate App Engine so we ran a series of intern development projects on this platform and found that the service is easy to use, offers security features like auditing and integrates nicely with other Cloud Platform products including Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage, which increases the productivity and performance of the overall platform. App Engine also scales on demand automatically so that we don’t have to overprovision up front. We can get something live very quickly by just adding a small amount of code and pushing it out, compared to other cloud services where we would have had to build the whole stack from scratch.

We use Compute Engine to run a big data processing pipeline based on Hadoop and process a terabyte of data per week in order to build better experiences for our customers. Compute Engine is flexible, has a great API, works well with App Engine and has high quality, consistent performance, particularly when starting new instances. We’re moving from more traditional relational database technologies to distributed processing, and with Compute Engine, we can try new technologies quickly and be more agile, rather than having to provision and install additional physical machines. We also use Google Cloud Datastore, which scales easily on demand to handle massive amounts of data.

We use Cloud Storage for secure storage of all data we send to and receive from third-parties and partners. It automatically backs up the data and has a good REST API. Meanwhile, we are experimenting with Google Cloud SQL and are finding it makes it easier to port existing applications to the cloud, and supports immediate atomic consistency, an important feature for some solutions. We don’t have anything in production at the moment but are excited about Cloud SQL’s recent general availability.

Cloud Platform is constantly developing and releasing new products and features that allow us to do even more with our data and applications. The data processing features and web analytics capabilities enable us to optimize our site to provide our customers with the best online experience. The ease, integration and scalability that Google offers with Cloud Platform allow us to offer the simplest, fastest and best online grocery shopping around, which is why customers choose to shop with us.

Posted by Jordan Breckenridge, Google Maps, Product Manager

Editor's note: Last year we introduced the Google Maps Engine public data program, which lets organizations easily publish their map content online. Today, we’re expanding on that program and letting organizations improve the discoverability of their maps. To find out more information about the program, read our FAQ.

(Cross-posted on the Google for Nonprofits Blog) 

Governments, nonprofits and businesses have some of the most valuable mapping data in the world, but it’s often locked away and not accessible to the public. With the goal of making this information more readily available to the world, today we’re launching Google Maps Gallery, a new way for organizations to share and publish their maps online via Google Maps Engine.

Maps Gallery works like an interactive, digital atlas where anyone can search for and find rich, compelling maps. Maps included in the Gallery can be viewed in Google Earth and are discoverable through major search engines, making it seamless for citizens and stakeholders to access diverse mapping data, such as locations of municipal construction projects, historic city plans, population statistics, deforestation changes and up-to-date emergency evacuation routes. Organizations using Maps Gallery can communicate critical information, build awareness and inform the public at-large.

Google Maps Gallery also offers several key benefits for organizations. With the Gallery, governments, nonprofits and businesses can publish maps and manage their content on their own terms with settings that enable control over maps branding, styling and licensing. Additionally, with the ability to synchronize maps from legacy systems and open data portals to the Gallery, organizations can take advantage of having a complementary online channel for their data. This lets their maps be more accessible and useful for their audiences — all powered by Google’s reliable cloud infrastructure.

Today, Gallery users can browse content from organizations such as National Geographic Society, World Bank Group, United States Geological Survey, Florida Emergency Management and the City of Edmonton — but this is just the beginning. Maps Gallery is now open to organizations with content for the public good. Organizations interested in submitting content can apply to participate in Maps Gallery.

Google Maps Gallery gives organizations better ways to surface maps and make data more discoverable. Together with governments, businesses and nonprofits, we can unlock the world’s geospatial data.

Posted by Milton Burgese, Head of Education, Google Brazil

Brazil is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world, and the state of São Paulo is the economic powerhouse underneath it all. The future of this continued growth rests in the hands of its youth. The state of São Paulo has more than four million students, 5,000 schools and a community of almost 300,000 teachers and staff.

To equip future generations with the skills to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce, we are partnering with the Department of Education of the State of São Paulo to provide and deploy Google Apps for Education across the state, for free.

“We are so excited to be bringing Google Apps for Education to more than four million students of São Paulo,” said Geraldo Alckmin, Governor of São Paulo. “Finally, classes will go beyond the four walls of the school.” We are working to deploy Google Apps for Education to all 4 million students within the year.

Milton Burgese, Head of Education, Google Brazil, speaks about the partnership 

The municipality of São Caetano do Sul, a thought leader across the country and known for both quality of education and life, announced this week that they are excited to be going Google at an event hosted in São Caetano. We will be deploying Google Apps for Education in 67 schools there, reaching 19,000 students and 1,500 teachers.

“I'm sure that the learning process of our children and youths will be improved by the support of new technological tools that are being brought to our schools by Google” said Paulo Nunes Pinheiro, Mayor of São Caetano do Sul.

We’ve also partnered with the Escola de Formação de Profesores (EFAP), a professional development facility, to train all of São Paulo's 300,000 teachers on the use of Google Apps for Education. Helping them master the new technology will help them communicate, collaborate and partner even better with their schools and students. As Herman Jacobus Cornelius Voorwald, the São Paulo State Secretary of Education, told us, “If we want to change our country, we must use education… We need to dedicate time to helping teachers learn by showing them different ways to embrace technology.”

We believe in the power of the web to help people discover, connect, and learn. And we’re thrilled to see Sao Paolo and São Caetano do Sul join Malaysia, the City of Boston and a growing number of other forward-thinking districts around the world who are embracing the web and technology to drive a new, better future for our students.

Posted by Lee Wang, COO, WeddingWire

Editor's note: In honor of Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of Cupid’s arrow, today we hear from a business that’s in the business of weddings. Our guest blogger is Lee Wang, COO of WeddingWire, a wedding technology marketplace that connects couples planning nuptials with wedding professionals. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


Our goal at WeddingWire is to make wedding planning fun and simple. We connect engaged couples to event merchants, provide them with consumer reviews, online planning tools, and help them stay organized as they plan their big day. We also help event merchants manage their workflow and their business more efficiently through our SaaS business management tools. Using our suite of productivity tools, event merchants can generate new prospects, book appointments, manage their social media, create engaging content, and send digital contracts. They can even collect payment, all without leaving WeddingWire.

We recognize the importance of making work simple, exciting, and enjoyable for our employees at WeddingWire to help power our success. Google Apps plays a big part in that. We’ve used Google Apps to help run our entire IT infrastructure since 2006, when it was a beta product. We were also in beta, with four co-founders working out of our CEO’s pink living room. Today, our organization has grown from four to more than 320 employees.

As we scale our organization, we are often in need of new ways to help keep our team connected and productive. We have WeddingWire team members working around the world, from Los Angeles to Raleigh to international locations such as Brasov, Romania. We rely on Google Hangouts to ensure that everyone from Los Angeles to Brasov can participate in company-wide meetings. Google Apps makes it easy to switch from a physical meeting to a virtual video meeting since Google Calendar and Google Hangouts are so seamlessly integrated. Whether for daily use or for difficult weather-related situations, our essential business functions can always carry on.

Lee Wang and the executive team

We believe that constant thought sharing and collaboration makes us a smarter company. Google Apps helps us realize that philosophy online. In the office, we have an open seating plan and lots of common areas, so employees are can have more and better conversations. The ability to instantly collaborate with Google Docs in real-time to solicit feedback or edits on an idea, project or article, makes us work better and smarter as a team. When we recently rebranded our flagship website (WeddingWire.com), we created a master Google Doc where key stakeholders across the entire organization could add their updates and comments. Everyone from website developers and marketers to sales reps and executives could jump in and know the latest status and sentiment at any time.

Google Apps gives our employees a way to work together better from office, at home, or across the world. It gives us the opportunity to be spontaneous and team-oriented, and frees us up to make work more fun, for us and for our customers. When your job is helping people in love plan the biggest – and most exciting – day of their lives and empowering the businesses of those who serve them, you want to do it right.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome

Cloud applications allow flexibility, scalability and security and enable a work-anywhere environment, but many of our customers still use traditional desktop applications. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) helps bridge the gap between the cloud and a traditional desktop by allowing you to run your traditional software in the cloud and have applications appear on your Chromebook similarly to how they run today. An example might be your Windows based accounting application.

Chromebooks have continued to help more and more customers over the last year. According to NPD, Chromebooks made up 21% of U.S. commercial laptop sales in 2013. Customers prefer the low total cost of ownership, the central web-based management console and the fact that they don't need any additional security or anti-virus software. These are reasons why businesses large and small are adopting Chromebooks.

Today, customers can fully embrace the cloud with Chromebooks using VMware Horizon™ DaaS®. VMware and Google are working together to make the migration of legacy applications even easier, by using the HTML5/Blast experience from Chromebooks. This means you can work with Chromebooks and connect to a Windows experience running VMWare™ Horizon View.

As the countdown to Windows XP end of life continues, deploying Chromebooks and taking advantage of a DaaS environment ensures that security vulnerabilities, application compatibility and migration budgets will be a thing of the past.

VMware Horizon DaaS enables customers to centralize other desktop environments and manage these as a cloud service. Initially available to customers as an on-premise service or by VMWare vCloud Service Provider Partners (VSPPs) offering DaaS in the cloud or within hybrid deployments. Users will be able to access their Windows applications, data and desktops using VMware’s Blast HTML5 technology to their Chromebook.

This technology is available now by bringing together VMware Horizon View 5.3 and Chromebooks as an on-premise service and will be available soon as an application that can be installed from the Chrome Web Store. To find out more follow this link.

Posted by Brent VerWeyst, Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Your company has a wealth of collective knowledge and data, but how quickly can employees or customers find the right information? Google Search Appliance (GSA) gives businesses a simple way to search all their content, no matter where it lives or what format it’s in. Today we’re adding new capabilities to GSA with version 7.2, making it even easier to find documents, organize your data and let your team focus on what really matters: getting things done.

Entity management gets easier
GSA 7.0 introduced entity recognition, which helps businesses categorize unstructured content by extracting entities—attributes like date, author and product type—from documents. With GSA 7.2, you get a chance to test and tweak your entities before indexing begins. This helps ensure that the entities you choose and apply will work best for your organization’s needs.

Helping to make search more universal
Companies rely on GSA to make all their files discoverable from a single search box, no matter where they live. It does this with the help of components called connectors, which link GSA to various data sources and index their contents. In GSA 7.2, we’ve made the connector framework more scalable and flexible. Customers and partners can develop and improve custom connectors more easily, helping GSA become a truly universal information hub.

More search, less typing
Relevant results shouldn’t rely on exact queries—especially when you’re dealing with long product names or technical data. Say you’re searching for part number 3728. With GSA 7.2, instead of struggling to remember the exact part number, you can type in “part number 37” plus a wildcard character such as an * to execute the query. With wildcard search, you don’t have to memorize complicated terms to find what you need.

In addition to these features, GSA 7.2 also introduces a redesigned admin console, improved language support and advanced sorting. To upgrade your GSA software, login to the Google Support Portal and download the release beginning at 9:00 am PT today.

To find out more about Google Search Appliance, click here.