Tech Excellence Day: A showcase of how leading businesses are creating value at scale

It was a power-packed day for the developers, business decision makers, and leaders that attended the Tech Excellence Day on June 25, hosted in association with Google Cloud.

Over a series of interactive sessions with industry leaders and Google Cloud experts, attendees got an overview of how leading businesses are leveraging Google Cloud solutions to solve for scale and growth.

Here are some key takeaways from this event day.

Re-imagining business models crucial to growth (watch video)

The first session “Funding the future: A fireside chat with India's VCs” The fireside chat featured Amit Somani, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners; Sameer Brij Verma; Partner at Nexus Venture Partners and Bikram Singh Bedi, MD at Google Cloud India. Here, they spoke about key trends and how technology can unlock new growth opportunities for emerging businesses.

Amit Somani of Prime Venture Partners noted that both consumers and businesses have undertaken a massive adoption of digital technologies, particularly in education, SaaS, and insurance. “And while it does belies the hardships that people are facing, such a trend is a positive step for the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole,” he said. He also noted that companies that were not doing well would benefit from reimagining business models and creating new products to thrive.

Sameer of Nexus Venture Partners also echoed Amit’s views, adding that as an early stage investor, Nexus places importance on the kind of people running the business. “We look at the characteristics of the people, whether they can build teams around themselves, the market that they are going after, their approach and their agility,” he said, adding that in today’s climate, companies must structure their burn and cost structures to adjust to the realities of uncertain times.

Bikram Singh Bedi of Google Cloud India outlined how digital indispensable to a successful business strategy, right from building applications and running data insights to artificial intelligence, machine learning, enabling collaborations from anywhere, and operating at scale reliably and securely. He also gave some examples of prominent companies like Ather Energy that leveraged the analytics capabilities of Google Cloud to improve their time to market by two years. When asked about what companies do to ensure success in today’s environment, he said, “While it is important to focus on the present, it is equally important to be prepared for what’s next. Build with scalability in mind and use digital technologies to differentiate your business.” he said, adding that Google Cloud’s main objective is to help digital native businesses grow with solutions that enable them to scale up and down, resiliency, agility, security, cost-efficiency.

Missed opportunities is the biggest loss (watch video)

In the keynote session ‘Innovation at Scale’ Narayan Babu, CTO at Glance gave his insights on how the content app scaled from 0 to 100 million Daily Active Users in under two years. By recounting Glance’s growth story, he also showcased how Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been helping them scale while managing costs, and fostering speed with their innovation. He noted making the right infrastructure investments, having a strong data strategy, building with the future in mind, and the need to maximise the efficiency of shipping a product, are essential for enabling efficient scaling. “Moving fast is slightly more important than moving right. Wasted opportunity is the biggest loss,” he said.

Automation of maintenance operations and fault tolerance crucial to accelerating innovation (watch video)

On the first parallel track, “Accelerating innovation for modern applications”, Ashmita Kapoor Customer Engineer at Google Cloud India spoke about how Cloud Run for Anthos can be used to increase developer productivity, bring new capabilities to Kubernetes such as rapid scaling, per-request load balancing at no lock-in. The track also featured Ram Bhavaraju, Head of Software & Web Technologies at Ather Energy sharing how Google Cloud enabled them to accelerate the pace of their innovation. “Given that we develop electric vehicles, we need to constantly be receiving the data generated by it. That is where serverless architecture is quite efficient and we have Kuberenetes as our serverless tech,” adding that GCP was suitable for meeting sporadic demand, providing Devops automation, scale to zero to optimise costs, traffic splitting and is 100 percent fault tolerant.

How APIs can enable developers to focus on core business functions and open new growth opportunities (watch video)

In the APIs track, Abhishek Pathak, Partner Engineering Lead at Google APAC explained how GCPs Apigee can help businesses build enterprise-class APIs, and how it can help with API management, security, monetisation, analytics and enhancing the developer experience. He was then joined by Abuzer Nawab, Lead Engineer at Dr. Anywhere, who explained how APIs were crucial to expanding their presence to four countries in just one year. “Smart API management provides control and visibility into all the APIs that connect into applications, and data across enterprises. It helps developers to focus on the core business functions as opposed to the maintenance related parts,” he said, adding that the API management by Apigee allowed for the easy onboarding of healthcare providers and insurance companies, which helped them scale their presence in Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Flexibility, data management crucial to building a solid data analytics platform (watch video)

In the Data Analytics track, Prasanna Keny, Customer Engineer at Google Cloud India first explained how GCP can create serverless and scalable data pipelines that can manage data at scale, activate data insights easily, and manage ML operations at scale so that businesses can focus on innovations. He was then joined by Sanjeev Singh, Head of Data Platform at BharatPe, who spoke about how they are leveraging GCP’s analytics capabilities to secure data insights, create analytical reports that help the business to grow, enable monitoring systems to improve fraud detection and more. He recounted how a thorough understanding of the various data types and databases, the right data management systems, data tools, and a flexible platform that can integrate with other cloud platforms, are crucial to building a robust data platform. “GCP has given us a lot of confidence so far, and Google Cloud BigQuery has given us a lot of flexibility as it acts as both a data warehouse and a data lake. We chose GCP as it was the complete package to build a data platform, right from data warehousing, to schedulers, and more,” he said

Building the future of work with Google Workspace

In the final track on Productivity & Collaboration tools, Sujata Dusi, Customer Engineer at Google Workspace talked about how the productivity suite can redefine the remote work experience by improving communication across teams, igniting real-time collaboration, driving cost savings, ensuring security and more. Ajeesh PG, Head of IT, Udaan explained how the e-commerce company has been leveraging Google Workspace for greater collaboration. “We expect a tech partner to provide us with a deeper employee engagement, which is crucial from a collaboration perspective,” he said.”Thanks to Google Workspace, we have created a ‘scheduling culture’ so that the back and forth of not being able to pick up calls is reduced. Google Calendar and Google Meet are now our most used apps. Google Docs and Spreadsheet has been very useful for collaboration in a secure way as well,” he said, adding that Google Forms has also been instrumental in conducting surveys and carrying out vaccination drives.