cloud-test: JDA embraces new ways of thinking with Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform Blog

JDA embraces new ways of thinking with Google Cloud Platform

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Today’s guest blog comes from John Sarvari, Group Vice President of Technology at JDA Software Group, a leading provider of supply chain and retail solutions.

At JDA, we provide thousands of businesses the technology and consulting services they need to manage their supply chains, and in turn lower costs while increasing revenue. Rich information is at the heart of our solutions and services — using proven techniques, we reap actionable insights from data to help our customers improve their operations. With the proliferation and variety of data available today, there is an opportunity to provide even greater insights into the needs of the consumer Google Cloud Platform allows us to operate at the incredible levels of scale necessary to meet our customers’ needs.

As a dynamic company, we’re always looking for new ways to address our customers’ needs and provide them with improved services. Google Cloud Platform has features that enable JDA to completely rethink the business processes we support. In fact, last year we introduced JDA Labs, a 50-person team dedicated to driving innovation around data science, user experience and product innovation. This team generates forward-thinking ideas, and our output shows the impact - in the past nine months, we’ve doubled the total number of patent applications we have submitted.

As a Google Cloud Platform customer, we benefit from a powerful and reliable backend system that lets us focus on bringing innovations to market and helping our more than 4,000 customers make more data-driven decisions. While we use many Google Cloud Platform products, two that we find critical to our success are Google App Engine and Google Cloud Dataflow. A Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution like Google App Engine removes the constraints of on-premise technology. For example, we provide a solution to forecast sales for both manufacturers and retailers so they can purchase, produce and sell more products more efficiently. Forecasting demands that we process hundreds of millions of pieces of data. Google Cloud Platform provides the technology that allows us to integrate additional data, like social media, weather, and IoT information (such as sensors that report agricultural conditions) to increase forecast accuracy to ensure the right product is available to serve the needs of our customers— and their customers— at the optimal time.

It’s exciting to see how quickly we can respond to our customers’ needs using Google Cloud Platform. Using a small Google Cloud Dataflow configuration, we were able to generate replenishment orders in real-time for over 50,000 point-of-sale transactions per minute. In the past, this would have required more hardware and would be processed using overnight batch jobs. Using Google Cloud Dataflow, we can scale to incredible volumes and process information in real-time with ease.

Our team is committed to developing future solutions in the cloud as we continue discovering new opportunities to use Google Cloud Platform. We live and breathe innovation, which can be seen in our 400 active and pending patents and $125 million invested in R&D, and appreciate that Google has a similarly innovative culture. Working with Google has helped us embrace new ways of thinking to stay ahead of the market.

- Posted by John Sarvari, Group Vice President of Technology, JDA Software Group