VIKAS ANAND: Welcome.
Thanks for joining me today.
I'm here to talk to you about Apigee and AppSheet,
Google Cloud's market leading technologies for API
management, and no code.
My name is Vikas Anand.
I'm head of business application platform
product, which includes both of these technologies.
And it gives me immense pleasure to introduce you
to Thomas and Matthieu from Carrefour
who are joining me to talk about how
they are using our technology to enable their business.
Welcome, Thomas and Matthieu, and we'll
be covering the customer case study
towards the end of the session.
So let's start.
So I'm going to talk about three things.
One is the trends.
Number two is a little bit about product and strategy
and third is our vision.
We have been in the pandemic for the last two years.
However, digital transformation kicked in much before that.
The pandemic only accelerated the adoption
of digital transformation in a very, very aggressive
and accelerated way.
It's not uncommon for you to make your doctor's appointments
today and actually see them through telehealth unless you
really need to visit them.
We are all doing a lot of cashless transactions.
So you can really see that 57% drop in cash usage
is real today.
And all of this is actually happening
across different verticals, whether it's retail, telco,
fintech, and others.
And it's powered by APIs.
APIs are encapsulating data in a secure way.
APIs are encapsulating and providing
business processes in a secure way,
and they're offering it to consumers in experiences
like never before.
That's the power of the API.
Obviously, with all of these APIs
being prevalent in the enterprise
and being used by everyone, there's
a significant need to manage these APIs.
And that's where Apigee comes in.
We have been a leader and we defined
the space of API management and we continue
to invest in this area.
So before we talk about our investments and areas of focus,
let me take a minute to introduce you to the platform.
API management full lifecycle capabilities
that are offered by Apigee.
Whether it's the capabilities to enable our customers to scale
with their runtime, which can scale to hundreds and millions
and trillions of API calls.
And, of course, as API has become more pervasive
our customers continue to be concerned with security.
So we have a big focus here to prevent abuse and really
invest in the security needs for API management.
Or for analytics both from a lens of technology, IT as well
as business so that you can optimize the outcomes
from an API perspective.
And, of course, continue to offer rich capabilities
for developers so that they can create APIs, meaningful APIs
with a business outcome and API first strategy in focus,
but also be able to consume APIs to be
able to monetize and extend their business processes.
So in API management with Apigee market leading capabilities
something which we're really excited to be
continuing to invest in innovate on an almost daily basis.
And this is reflected in some of the capabilities
that we've announced over the last one year.
We have continued to innovate and invest and offer
capabilities, not only in the code Apigee and the API
management product capabilities, but we've also
brought the best of Google Cloud capabilities
to be available to our customers through Apigee.
As an example use of AI and ML for anomaly detection
or the capability of global in scale and performance
by leveraging Cloud CDN and Apigee together.
All of this is the continued innovation examples
that we are focused on.
What we're also doing is on a regular basis,
we are looking at areas in the future
that we can really help our customers through thought
leadership but also studying the evolving needs
of our customers.
So API management needs are evolving
and it's been serving different personas over the last decade.
In fact Apigee can take credit for coining the term API
product manager.
We've talked to you in the past about the needs of API
developers and API architects, and their needs
span from governance for the architect to flexibility
to the API product manager looking at more of ROI.
And of course API consumers' needs for ease of use.
Today we're introducing new personas--
API platform operator and API platform security persona,
which is API security updater.
And these two personas are primarily
focused on two things.
One is efficiency for managing operations of the platform,
and second is to really prevent and protect
against malicious attacks and ensure compliance.
And these are the drivers in terms
of how we focus and innovate and invest for our futures.
As we look at the evolving needs of these personas as well.
So from a future perspective, we are
focused on pivoting our customers
from digital transformation to a team of digital excellence.
From building APIs to API products.
From API products to helping them monetize and make
profitable API products.
And we are focused on four things
to help our customers with that.
Number one is add more capabilities for developers
to be successful when they're building APIs.
Number two is to enable the hyperscale
as scale of API programs occur across the globe.
Simplify application operations with API operations of the AI.
And finally, Apigee is used by retail telco or fintech
and health care customers.
And we want to bring the best of industry capabilities
in our platform so that you can consume it easily.
So that's a big focus for us.
And recently to this effect we've
announced some capabilities for the developers.
For API developers we've announced API first integration
with capabilities with Apigee integration.
We are continuously enhancing the support for GraphQL.
Developers are looking for support for known risk APIs,
and here it is.
And, of course, more enhancements for SDLC.
Apigee integration as an example is really
focused on enabling API developers to connect systems
of engagement to systems of record in an accelerated path,
in an API first approach.
So all of this is happening in the unified platform
which we call as Apigee.
We bring in a purpose-built runtime with global integration
technology at Google scale, offering
the patterns of integration.
Something which we are really proud about and excited about
to introduce it to it.
Of course there's a dedicated session.
Please go and listen to that, and you'll also
see a demo of Apigee integration during that session.
But we are not just stopping here.
This is the focus we have on technology, on the developers.
We do realize that our customers are also
looking to solve new challenges with the changing environment.
Today the global workforce is changing,
and it's all about enabling even the non-technical line
of business users to be able to solve problems by themselves.
This is top of mind for CIOs, CEOs, and CTOs.
To enable a broader set of employees
within the organization to be able to manage, build, and use
applications that they need.
And to do that, we have AppSheet.
AppSheet is a product which basically
enables line of business users to build applications
with no code.
We take an idea, enable the data source,
create an application on automation in minutes.
And how we do this is really interesting.
We've really focused on making work easier for everyone
by doing three things.
One is converting app automation and communication
for the end user.
Number two is enabling an intent based platform
for building application and automation seamlessly.
Three is an intelligent policy driven framework
so that IT can govern these applications and program
shadow IT.
A good example of how the app automation and communication
is converging is the integration that we've done with Gmail.
You can use, actually, Gmail today with dynamic emails.
Let me take a quick example for an order process
for, say, ordering furniture by an employee.
When I ordered a table, it should
go to my manager for approval so that he can check his budget
and approve it in the context of budget
and whether I'm allowed to do so.
So this business process can be implemented quickly
in AppSheet, including a mobile application.
And now you can surface that app in Gmail
for the manager to go and look at the details of the order
and approve it.
A seamless integration that AppSheet has done with Gmail,
and it's available to millions of Gmail users
who can now start using AppSheet and build
these applications together.
We're not only stopping there.
We continue to invest for the creator as well as for IT.
For creators we have focused on two things,
making the platform much more intent-aware
so there's predictability.
And smart suggestions whether you're
building an app or automation.
Number two is imagine a world where a line of business user
can actually talk to a platform and the platform creates
an application for you.
So here we are, utilizing natural language processing
for the app creation experience so
that you can set up logic, bots, or build applications
from scratch.
Really powerful capability we're excited about.
Pivoting to the IT needs, it's really important
to enable an unlock org-wide innovation.
But for that you need trust, control, and scale.
And that's a big focus area for AppSheet
where we're offering capabilities
under these three buckets.
With AppSheet you can standardize app and automation.
You can do it with controls, which
can allow you to put guardrails for governance and visibility.
And three, you can scale these apps from 10, 20,
to thousands of users without platform.
And now I think I have a great story.
An example with Carrefour for talking to us about how they're
using our platform to enable application
innovation in their ecosystem.
So with that said, let me bring Matthieu and Thomas,
our customer spotlight, to talk about their story.
Matthieu and Thomas, take it away.
MATTHIEU MAURAS: Hi, I'm Matthieu Mauras,
the CTO of Carrefour Property.
THOMAS POLTAU: Hi.
I'm Thomas, leading the innovation team in Carmila.
MATTHIEU MAURAS: Before speaking about our use of AppSheet,
just a few words about our context
and the business of Carmila and Carrefour Property.
Carmila is the sixth largest listed owner
of commercial property in Europe.
It was founded by Carrefour in 2014
in order to transform and earn the value of 215 shopping
centers are ajoin Carrefour markets in France, Spain,
and Italy.
Carmila and Carrefour Properties team
have a deeply [INAUDIBLE] retail culture
with experts in all aspects of retail attractiveness,
operation, shopping center management, leasing,
local digital marketing, business setups, and see-saw.
These experts-- about 300 people--
spend lots of their time on the spots in the shopping mall
in order to solve any incident, animate the center,
or coordinate the works.
To be efficient these experts have
to work together and share reliable and precise
information.
In the traditional way, the job may be quite difficult
because of the number of centers,
the data which is not centralized, and many region
reports.
But during the first containment,
I discovered AppSheet.
And so all these platforms can quickly
digitize many of our processes.
I presented AppSheet to my management
who also sought interest and wanted to test it
with incident management.
We made a short brief of 15 minutes to understand the needs
and in only two days and one developer,
we managed to do an application with AppSheet
accessible in production by 200 people
directly on their phones.
In this app, anyone can log an incident
that happened in the shopping centers
with the description and a picture.
And then there is a workflow which automatically
sends email notifications to the people in charge
until the problem is solved.
It was really amazing.
And this application still worked and is still
used by Carrefour Property and Carmila's team every day.
We have just created in two days a way
to manage effectively in real time
all the incidents of our shopping mall.
As it's possible with AppSheet to develop
in a few words or a few days an application in production,
you can really change your mind and make software
adapted to the reality of business,
which is often unpredictable.
You can create apps with a limited lifetime,
sometimes only a few weeks, as we made it for the COVID.
With AppSheet, you adapt IT tools
to the business, not the reverse.
It is the reason why we have decided to, for one year,
to use AppSheet to collect all the local data by creating
many apps accessible from a unique portal we call MyMall.
Therefore it's very easy to create a dashboard with Data
Studio, linking with this data.
And at the end you can easily and quickly
collect, monitor, and analyze all incidents
in order to define priorities.
THOMAS POLTAU: I'll say what are the results now.
The most important thing you can see
is that people are still on board.
French and Spanish fields teams continue to save money,
to save time each day.
Each day, the impact of actions, plans
are monitored thanks to the local data collected by MyMall.
But the real revolution noticed isn't operational.
It's a mindset change.
Now, at home in our shopping centers,
we all know that we can digitalized any kind of process
without pain, collaborating with the IT team.
So as Matthieu has said, today the Carmila and Carrefour
Property teams already can use the master app MyMall.
You can see it to manage incidents,
to manage the impact of COVID, to make technical checklists,
to improve facility and property management,
and to produce easily marketing reports by using
the functionality of AppSheet to produce PDF reports
from a Google Doc template.
And we are working on many other features.
You can see some of them.
I can highlight the report creator, which is a very shared
pain in our company.
In most of companies, I think.
And to conclude, I thank all the Google team
for this opportunity to show off Carmila and Carrefour Property
and I want to share you my conviction.
The no Cloud platform.
Or the low Cloud platform, I prefer.
Do not encourage shadow IT.
On the contrary, the helpers, IT teams, innovation teams,
and field teams--
they help us to test fast.
To fail fast.
To learn.
To always learn.
Actually, to innovate.
Thank you very much for being part of this presentation.
MATTHIEU MAURAS: Thank you for listening to this use case.
I hope we will be convinced by the interest of local platform.
Thank you.
VIKAS ANAND: Thank you, Matthieu.
Thank you, Thomas.
What an amazing story of using AppSheet and Google Cloud
technology in Carrefour.
What a wonderful story.
I'm sure our listeners enjoyed it thoroughly.
Well, with that, we're actually at a wrap.
And just to bring it all together
we talked about Apigee and AppSheet in our session today.
And all of this is a part of our Google Cloud business
application platform where we are really focused
on enabling our customers--
deliver their innovation through application development
and automation.
And we are doing this by of course investing
in our core platform with Apigee and AppSheet
that you heard today, but also through partnerships.
We announced a partnership with Automation Anywhere
earlier in the year.
Automation Anywhere is a market leading capability in RPA.
And we're working along with them
to build, bring out a broader set of capabilities for you
to use in your ecosystem to help solve you a broader
set of business problems.
And, of course, as business processes are built out,
analytics are really important.
So we continue to do integrations
with Data Studio and, of course, our analytics platform
to enable that for our line of business users as well.
So bringing it all together in Google Cloud business
application platform, it's a wrap.
Thank you so much for listening in.
I hope you enjoyed our customer case study.
And of course, all the content that we shared with you today.
Thank you again and I wish you happy Next.
And thank you.