Juli 2022 - Seite 8 von 46 - Cloud Computing Köln

In the fragmented world of U.S. healthcare, patients often have to wait in line or on hold, navigate multiple patient portals, and fill out numerous request forms—all in pursuit of their own medical history. Healthcare technology startup PicnicHealth is on a mission to put control back with the patient, where it belongs. PicnicHealth’s growth, from closing successful venture rounds to winning machine learning (ML) competitions, speaks to not only improvements and opportunities in healthcare, but also how startups are leveraging Google Workspace and Google Cloud services to accelerate momentum. The company does the heavy lifting of collecting records and leverages human-in-the-loop ML to transcribe and validate them with an abstraction team of medical professionals. The records are then structured into a complete medical history that patients can access and share with providers to get better care. But PicnicHealth helps to improve patient health on more than one front. It allows patients to contribute their data to de-identified medical research, building high-quality, anonymized datasets that researchers and life sciences companies can use to better understand disease progression and treatment in the real world. Google Workspace has been part of PicnicHealth from day one, helping the founders collaborate and shape the company’s vision using cloud-synced documents and spreadsheets to collaborate and model predictions. “I’ve had a Gmail account since 2006, and in college 100% of people worked out of Google Docs. Workspace continues to be the best choice for online collaboration, and that’s why it’s still the default standard for startups,” said Troy Astorino, CoFounder & CTO of PicnicHealth. “When we started PicnicHealth, my co-founder Noga Leviner was in San Francisco and I was in Southern California, and of course we used Workspace.” Today, Google Workspace continues to play a central role in the company’s collaboration. “We create design documents in Google Docs, primarily for engineering and product changes, and get really healthy, vibrant discussions through comments,” noted Astorino. “This practice has grown beyond engineering and is used for everything from how the company operates to communication norms.” Google Workspace offers everything the team needs to collaborate, no matter where employees are. PicnicHealth’s team has spread from San Francisco to being distributed across the country and around the world. Instant collaboration is crucial. “We work in a complex domain where people need a lot of information to make good decisions,” said Astorino. “Google Workspace allows us to operate in a mode of default transparency, where people can easily get the information they need even if it wasn’t intentionally or directly shared with them. Whether it’s working in Docs or scheduling in Calendar, we can operate much more effectively than we could otherwise.”By any measure, PicnicHealth’s trajectory is one of record success. The startup is a 2014 alumni of Y Combinator, a program that helped launch household names like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Dropbox. Three years later, the team went on to win the $1 million grand prize at Google’s Machine Learning Competition. And the momentum has continued— PicnicHealth has recently announced a $60 million Series C round, bringing the amount raised to date to over $100 million. With the Series C, PicnicHealth is investing in expanding its reach to more patients across over 30 diseases. As a healthcare startup, PicnicHealth faced a very particular set of challenges, especially when working with and accessing data. Data fragmentation and interoperability are only some of the challenges of realizing the value of big data in the cloud. The healthcare industry is notoriously difficult to navigate due to sensitive data protection laws and regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). PicnicHealth started in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, after migrating over to Kubernetes and facing an expanding list of requirements for HIPAA compliance, the company started to explore alternatives. “We needed to be HIPAA compliant, which was going to be painful on AWS, and we wanted to get away from managing and operating our own Kubernetes clusters,” recalled Astorino. “We had heard good things about GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine). And particularly valuable for us, — many technical requirements you need for HIPAA compliance are configured by default on Google Cloud.” PicnicHealth would have had to implement a lot of changes and get specialized instance types to get their existing configuration to work. So, they began experimenting with Google Cloud and discovered a much smoother experience. “It was a lot easier to manage in terms of product setup and developer experience,” said Astorino. “There is a sane product hierarchy of resources you can access and use through Google Cloud and the relationships between them, from coordinated IAM (identity and access management) to using Google Groups for granting permissions. Overall, it’s cleaner.” Astorino added that the move has also opened the doors to taking advantage of other services in the Google Cloud ecosystem like Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and Cloud Composer. PicnicHealth also uses Security Command Center because it easily integrates with everything but also helps meet various compliance frameworks’ requirements, providing visibility, near-real-time asset discovery, and security information and event management. But most importantly, the integrated ecosystem has simplified the work needed for PicnicHealth to create a secure environment for employees to use when working with sensitive medical records while still providing all the tools they need. For example, abstractors not only use Google Workspace but also have Chromebooks because they are easy to manage and secure. Altogether, Google Cloud helps form a technology stack that has enabled the startup to build a massive labeled dataset containing over 100 million labeled medical data concepts. In turn, it accelerates PicnicHealth’s ability to generate highly-performant AI models and feed other ML pipelines, which has been vital for processing and reviewing data at scale.To learn more about how Google Workspace and Google Cloud help startups like PicnicHealth accelerate their journey, visit our startups solutions pages for Google Workspace and Google Cloud.Related ArticleGoogle Workspace, GKE help startup CAST AI grow faster and optimize cloud costsHow startup CAST AI accelerated its growth with Google Workspace and Google Kubernetes Engine.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

27. Juli 2022

da Agency

New Google Cloud Marketplace Private Offers features to help our partners grow

As we shared at the beginning of the year, we are making significant investments in Google Cloud Marketplace to accelerate growth for our customers and partners. This includes new technical capabilities that provide the purchasing flexibility and choice our enterprise customers need when buying software from Google Cloud partners through Marketplace.Private Offers are now more flexible than everToday, we are excited to announce that Private Offers in Google Cloud Marketplace is now generally available. With these new and expanded deal-making capabilities, Google Cloud partners can help our shared customers buy the way they want. All Marketplace partners now have more options to further customize pricing, payment schedules, and terms for privately negotiated Google Cloud Marketplace deals, including: Support across product types: SaaS, Virtual Machine and Kubernetes products can now be purchased via Private Offers.Expanded subscription and discounting models: New committed use discounts (CUD) and enhanced flat fee and flat fee with usage experiences can better support your business model.Flexible payment schedule and contract duration options: Align your Private Offers to how our mutual customers want to buy with pre or post-pay timing options and choice of various contract periods.Prepay installments functionality: Allow customers to make multiple prepay payments of equal or increasing amounts over the course of the contract to align with when they want to pay.Deal-specific terms: Upload pre-existing or customized license agreements to each offer, enabling customers to leverage deal-specific terms of service and accelerate the purchase process by reducing redlining.Private Offer amendment and extension: Support for renewals, expanding existing deals, updating customer plans, and launching new product features.Offering these capabilities is an important step forward in helping our partners grow their business on Google Cloud. As Kathy Barboza, NetApp’s Worldwide Head of Google Cloud Sales Specialist says, Private Offers open new and expanded opportunities, helping us better serve our customers together: “NetApp and Google Cloud have partnered to meet our customers’ unique needs through Private Offers on Google Marketplace and are collaborating to establish long term relationships, growth, and revenue. The partnership provides our joint customers with the ability to anticipate budgets along with the flexibility to address their business-critical requirements as they navigate digital transformation.”And these new capabilities are on top of the existing customer benefits that accelerate deals transacted through Google Cloud Marketplace: Buyers can leverage their existing agreement with Google Cloud for Marketplace purchases, simplifying procurement for quicker deployment and time to value.Customers can decrement their committed spend through Marketplace transactions, which maximizes their cost savings and helps them spend smartly across first and third-party solutions. All Marketplace purchases show up on one bill from Google, allowing customers to easily analyze and manage spend.Check out the Marketplace Partner Fundamentals within Partner Advantage for more on the benefits of Google Cloud Marketplace for your business and customers.This is a major step forward in helping customers solve business challenges more quickly and driving additional growth for our partner ecosystem. Google Cloud Marketplace was already the fastest way to show up to Google Cloud customers in-product worldwide. Now transacting and growing large, customized enterprise deals is easier and more flexible than ever.Simple Private Offer configurationReady to grow your business on Google Cloud with Private Offers? Let’s walk through the guided creation flow.As a prerequisite, you’ll need to publish a transactable listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.Once your product is published, customers can request a negotiated deal by reaching out to you directly within Marketplace, through their Google seller, or via an existing engagement. While confirming pricing, terms, and payment schedules with the customer offline, you can start creating a new Private Offer in Google Cloud Marketplace > Producer Portal and selecting the relevant transactable SaaS, VM, or Kubernetes product and plan that will support one of three subscription models per deal:For SaaS, VM and Kubernetes products with Usage Only pricing models, you can provide your customer with a committed use discount (CUD) subscription. The customer commits to spending a certain amount to use the product and receives a discount based on this commitment. They can apply this commitment flexibly towards different resources of the product.For SaaS products specifically, there are two additional subscription models available:Flat fee: your customer pays a set subscription fee for a specified quantity of software features.Flat fee with usage: your customer pays a fee to use the software, including access to features in specific quantities. Customers pay an additional fee for resource usage incurred beyond what’s included in the flat fee.The three types of Private Offer subscription models are committed use discount (CUD), flat fee, and flat fee with usageAfter selecting the product and plan, you’ll enter the recipient details for the customer or the Google Cloud reseller if this offer is being resold. Enter the recipient’s Billing Account ID—which they can learn more about identifying here. A Private Offer will apply to all projects assigned to their billing account. You’ll then provide a sales contact at your organization that the customer can reach out to if they have any questions on this Private Offer. You can also add notes that your organization will see in the Private Offer dashboard. We’ve seen partners use this for order numbers, procurement IDs, or other CRM IDs to track deals within tools they use internally.Next, you’ll select a payment schedule and the discounted pricing that you’re providing the customer. A postpay schedule will bill the customer monthly, while a prepay schedule—which many larger organizations prefer to help manage cloud spend—allows you to configure an installment schedule. Each installment can be up to a year in length, and each must be equal or greater in value than the previous one. You’ll also indicate a contract duration and offer an acceptance deadline that can be up to 3 months from the creation date. For postpay schedules, you can also select whether the customer can automatically renew this order at the end of the contract duration.Now, select the software license terms you want the customer to agree to for your solution. You can use Google’s standard end-user license agreement (EULA), or you can upload and name a custom deal-specific one. We see most Private Offers using the standard EULA, but you may want to provide custom terms in certain scenarios. For instance, reusing previously agreed-to terms with an existing customer could skip redundant legal reviews, saving you and your customer time.Now you’re ready to review the details for accuracy and preview the customer view of the deal. When everything looks great, generate a link to the Private Offer that you can send for your customer to review and accept.By the way, don’t worry about future-proofing your offer now. We’ve built in plenty of flexibility to support growth in customer usage and renewals. Partners will also be able to amend existing offers as your customers’ needs grow, including:Modifying installment contracts to upsell and upgradeAdding future installments and edit unpaid installmentsExtending contract durationsOffering new features that are launched on existing plansOnce configured, review it for accuracy and click Generate URL to send it to the customer or reseller.Learn more about how to leverage this new feature set in the Private Offer documentation.We’re excited to offer these new Private Offer features that provide you and our mutual customers with greater deal-making flexibility than ever in Google Cloud Marketplace. Stay tuned as we continue to invest in our partner ecosystem to unlock further opportunities that accelerate our customers’ digital transformation. See you in the cloud.Related ArticleHow SingleStoreDB uses Google Cloud Marketplace to drive great customer experiencesGoogle Cloud Marketplace enables partners like SingleStoreDB to enhance customer experiences.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Former employees claim the company placed pieces of pro-China content in its now-defunct US news app, TopBuzz, and censored negative stories about the Chinese government. ByteDance says it did no such thing.