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Clean Clouds, Happy Earth Panel Discussion: Sustainability in EMEA

The centerpiece of C2C’s virtual Earth Day conference, Clean Clouds, Happy Earth, was a panel discussion on sustainability in EMEA featuring C2C and Google Cloud partners HCL and AMD and cosmetics superpower L’Oreal. Moderated by Ian Pattison, EMEA Head of Sustainability Practice at Google Cloud, the conversation lasted the better part of an hour and explored a range of strategies for enabling organizations to build and run sustainable technology on Google Cloud.According to Sanjay Singh, Executive VP of the Google Cloud Ecosystem Unit at HCL technologies, when advising customers across the value chain evaluating cloud services, Google Cloud becomes a natural choice because of its focus on sustainable goals. Connecting customers to Google Cloud is a key part of HCL’s broader program for maintaining sustainable business practices at every organizational level. “What you cannot measure, you cannot improve” says Singh, which is why HCL has created systems to measure every point of emission under their purview for carbon footprint impact. In alignment with Google Cloud’s commitment to run a carbon-free cloud platform by 2030, HCL plans to make its processes carbon neutral in the same timeframe.Suresh Andani, Senior Director of Cloud Vertical Marketing at AMD, serves on a task force focused on defining the company’s sustainability goals as an enterprise and as a vendor. As a vendor, AMD prioritizes helping customers migrate to the cloud itself as well as making its compute products (CPUS and GPUS) more energy efficient, which they plan to do by a factor of 30 by 2025. On the enterprise side, Andani says, AMD relies on partners and vendors, so making sure AMD as an organization is sustainable expands to its ecosystem of suppliers. One of the biggest challenges, he says, is to measure partners’ operations. This challenge falls to AMD’s corporate responsibility team.Health and beauty giant L’Oreal recently partnered with Google Cloud to run its beauty tech data engine. In the words of architect Antoine Castex, a C2C Team Lead in France, sustainability at L’Oreal is all about finding “the right solution for the right use case.” For Castex, this means prioritizing Software as a Service (SaaS) over Platform as a Service (PaaS), and only in the remotest cases using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He is also emphatic about the importance of using serverless architecture and products like AppEngine, which only run when in use, rather than running and consuming energy 24/7.For Hervé Dumas, L’Oreal’s Sustainability IT Director, these solutions are part of what he calls “a strategic ambition,” which must be common across IT staff. Having IT staff dedicated to sustainability, he says, creates additional knowledge and enables necessary transformation of the way the company works. As Castex puts it, this transformation will come about when companies like L’Oreal are able to “change the brain of the people.”As Castex told C2C in a follow-up conversation after the event, the most encouraging takeaway from the panel for L’Oreal was the confirmation that other companies and tech players have “the same dream and ambition as us.” Watch a full recording of the conversation below, and check back to the C2C website over the next two weeks for more content produced exclusively for this community event.  Also, if you’re based in EMEA and want to connect with other Google Cloud customers and partners in the C2C community, join us at one of our upcoming face-to-face events:  Extra Credit:  

Categories:Data AnalyticsGoogle Cloud StrategyComputeIndustry SolutionsCloud MigrationGoogle Cloud PartnersSustainabilityConsumer Packaged GoodsSession Recording

Positioning Your Product: Earned Media and Audience Connections (full video)

Scott Wilson, Co-Founder of QA Wolf and former Senior Director of Product Marketing for Wyze Labs, presented during a tactical Deep Dive all about getting your product followed, liked, loved, and reviewed. This hour-long session covered actionable steps and expert tips on positioning your product and connecting with your audience using product journey examples from Scott’s work at Wyze, including:(00:00) About C2C and Google Cloud Startups (02:50) Introduction to Scott Wilson, his experience at Wyze, and agenda overview for his best practices for product positioning (08:45) Step 1: Create a remarkable solution that surpasses your users’ expectations Defining “solution” as product plus experience Identifying your core user Creating customer avatars Creating a method of trial Meeting and surpassing expectations Example: what makes Wyze remarkable (21:40) Step 2: Make it easy to share so your customers can advocate for you Building into the solution Encouraging and asking customers to share Example: Wyze sharing (26:20) Step 3: Tell the right people so they do the marketing for you Example: Wyze outreach campaigns Finding the right people and using the right tools (all linked below) Creating a one-pager Drafting your outreach message Sending your message How to persist (45:50) Step 4: Keep your solution remarkable so users keep coming back Example: How Wyze keeps their product remarkable Continually moving the goalpost by keeping a pulse on the market (48:05) Bonus: use cases at QA Wolf (53:15) Open community questions Extra CreditScott shared a great variety of his favorite tools for finding the right people, including:AHREFs for SEO tools and resources Quantcast for digital advertising, website analytics, and audience insights WhatRunsWhere for ad intelligence Brand24 for media monitoring SimilarWeb for website traffic analytics HappierLeads for identifying potential buyers Sparktoro for audience research To connect with Scott, reach out to him via email at scott@qawolf.com

Categories:Google Cloud StartupsConsumer Packaged GoodsSession Recording