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Albertsons Companies helps customers find COVID-19 vaccines with Business Messages

Since the release of initial COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020, online searches for vaccines have surged. While vaccines are becoming more broadly available, many people still have questions about eligibility criteria, as well as where and how vaccine appointments can be made.Meanwhile, for some vaccine administrators, there is no centralized process or call center that can efficiently handle the level of inquiries from the public. That’s where Google can help. Organizations around the world can activateBusiness Messages, a conversational messaging solution, and receive messages from customers in Google Search, Google Maps, and the business’s owned channels. We’re now supporting vaccine administrators such as Albertsons Companies that need to alleviate communication burdens, reduce the volume of incoming calls, combat potential misinformation, and boost customer satisfaction. People can connect with their local Albertsons Companies banner pharmacies—like Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Albertsons, Acme, Shaw’s, Tom Thumb, and more—directly through Google Search and Maps via a “message” button. From there, they can quickly receive up-to-date information about vaccine eligibility, availability, appointment booking, and frequently asked questions. Click to enlarge“The eligibility criteria for the COVID-19 vaccine is dynamic and varies across states or even adjacent counties. We were seeking hyper-local solutions for customers to find a timely answer to ‘Am I eligible?’” said Omer Gajial, SVP of Pharmacy and Health at Albertsons Companies. “With Google’s Business Messages, we can quickly and accurately inform people of where, when, and how they can get the vaccine. For our patients, this means getting them information quickly. For Albertsons Companies, it means freeing up our pharmacies to focus on what’s most important—administering the vaccine and taking care of our patients.”Other organizations are also choosing Google’s Business Messages as a scalable communication channel for vaccine information. Since early 2020, Walmart has been using Business Messages to inform the public of store hours, pick-up and delivery options, and it’s now using the technology to provide information about its vaccine distribution. Business Messages drives customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing helpful information to current and potential customers. This technology can also use Google Contact Center AI’s Dialogflow, which can build and deploy a virtual agent with personalized messaging. Business Messages will continue innovating to support all kinds of organizations, giving them the ability to connect people with helpful information when they need it. For more information on how you can activate Business Messages for your organization, please fill out the Contact form on the Business Messages website or reach out to a Business Messages partner.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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The bots are here: Use RPA and AI to automate digital tasks

The bots are coming! But don’t worry, they’re here for the boring stuff.Robotic Process Automation, or RPA to you acronym lovers, is all about AI-powered digital critters that take over repetitive and manual tasks, like receiving an invoice, extracting the data, and then entering that data into a bookkeeping system. RPA has been popular with CIOs as an emerging technology that streamlines enterprise operations. It fits well in the trend towards business process automation and higher levels of abstraction for developers, akin to serverless technologies. With RPA, you can automate mundane rules-based processes, enabling you to devote more time to serving customers, improving products, and other high-value work. Since they liberate developers, Google Cloud sees RPA bots as an investment in the future. In a strategic, multiyear collaboration, Automation Anywhere—a leader in RPA—will be working with Google Cloud to enable customers to scale application automation using API management, low- or no-code development, and the development of ML workflows. Automation Anywhere’s Automation 360 platform will be available on Google Cloud (generally available in May 2021), and together they will bring RPA capabilities to multiple Google Cloud products, including Apigee, AppSheet, and AI Platform. Let’s face it, we developers could use a break. With the digital acceleration that was spurred by COVID over the last year, developers have been spending more time on data entry, managing an ever growing number of APIs, and making sure cloud-native apps integrate with legacy on-premises systems. When existing software doesn’t provide the necessary APIs, users and developers spend time and resources performing work that feels… well, robotic. We’ve already seen an increase in companies applying RPA technologies to automate mundane tasks in invoice processing, call center workflows, and employee onboarding. Through business logic, RPA captures and interprets data from applications for processing transactions, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems. Where does RPA fit in?RPA fits well with the Google Cloud quest to offer more serverless and event-driven architectures. Cloud Workflows, launched in January 2021, enables you to orchestrate and automate Google Cloud and HTTP-based API services with serverless workflows. It’s service-oriented, and you can chain events in large emergent systems. Combining Cloud Workflows with other serverless products, such as Cloud Functions and Cloud Run, you can call external APIs to create flexible serverless applications. On the data processing side, Cloud Composer is a fully managed data workflow orchestration service that lets you author, schedule, and monitor pipelines. It’s well suited for data processing pipelines (for example, batch processing and ML workflows). RPA complements the serverless world by welcoming ML and AI into the picture. It uses AI to automate clunky business processes that usually involve manual, human-centric work. At the same time, it complements the AI world, like Google Cloud’s DocumentAI or Lending Doc AI. You can, for example, reduce the time it takes to move a lending application from start to finish by using Document AI to automate manual “stare and compare” work during the lending process and use RPA bots to connect this process to other systems, for instance, a cloud-based lending platform. I think the opportunity for RPA lies in industry-specific use cases in financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, retail, and the public sector. RPA can handle the previously painstaking work of hunting for information hidden in documents and sheets (unstructured data in the form of XML files, web server logs, sensor data, emails, and images). This is why Apigee, AppSheet, and the Google Cloud ML APIs/AI Platform are a sensible launchpoint for RPA in the Google Cloud ecosystem. These low-code, API management, and ML-focused products pair well with Automation Anywhere’s ability to integrate computer vision, natural language processing, and ML to automatically classify, extract, and validate information from business documents and emails. The Automation Anywhere IQ Bot, for example, can uncover unstructured data and enable the automation of these processes (for example, extracting numerical data, performing calculations, and transferring results into another application). Meanwhile, Apigee acts as the API full lifecycle management layer deployable as a single view across hybrid and on-premises environments. This will surface Automation Anywhere’s internal APIs and bots as well designed, secure, and managed APIs. Then AppSheet empowers you to use these fully managed APIs to build custom applications without code. Use it for approval, audits, and scheduling, with built-in connections to data sources such as Google Sheets and Salesforce.Just because RPA bots do the boring stuff, that doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with them, either. You can combine products together, using RPA in conjunction with other technologies. Create an RPA bot that uses Google Cloud’s NLP API to contextually respond to FAQ emails and schedule meetings with faster-turnarounds. Meanwhile, use Cloud Workflows to process customer orders, trigger an inventory refill from a supplier, and call external APIs to notify sales reps about large orders. As they used to say, “Collect ‘em! Trade ‘em!”RPA should not stand apart from your development processAlthough RPA emphasizes low-code, visual techniques for defining applications and integrations, you should still think of RPA as a long-term arc and build it into your entire automated development cycle. Exception handling and data structures are still important. In a way, RPA is the inverse of software testing: Instead of creating automations designed to test a software application until it breaks, an RPA developer aims to create automations that will be resilient. Architecting and maintaining RPA bots means building them for durability, and understanding when you’re stretching them to their limits (in which case a traditional software development project might make more sense).With Google Cloud serverless, API, and AI offerings, Automation Anywhere and Google Cloud are poised to shake things up. As we gear up for a more automated future, RPA’s non-intrusive nature can help you make the most of existing infrastructure without causing disruption to underlying systems, opening up new opportunities for you to work on less robotic tasks. If you’re keen on exploring what a no-code development journey looks like, check out the AppSheet quickstarts here. To keep up with the latest on Google Cloud, follow me on Twitter @stephr_wong.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done

Today we’re excited and humbled to announce Docker’s Series B raise of $23 million to accelerate our mission of delivering tools development teams love to quickly take their ideas from code to cloud. The round was led by Tribe Capital with participation from our existing investors, Benchmark and Insight Partners. Arjun Sethi, Tribe co-founder and partner, will join the Docker board. 

This would not have been possible without the Docker team: Thank you for giving each other your best, every day, despite the disruptions of the refocusing, the pandemic, the overnight switch to work-from-home, and so much more. We also thank our developer community of users, contributors, customers, partners, and Docker Captains – your enthusiastic engagement throughout this past year was invaluable.

Hit Refresh

Tribe sees in Docker what we saw in November 2019 when we refocused the company: the opportunity to build on the bottoms-up developer love of the Docker experience and provide a collaborative app development platform for development teams to accelerate getting their ideas from code to cloud. And that’s just what we did.

Key inputs to Tribe’s investment decision were our results this last year, which included attracting 80,000 developer participants to DockerCon 2020, adding 1.8 million new registered developers for a total of more than 7.3 million, and growing our annual recurring revenue (ARR) 170% year-over-year. From their own “Magic 8 Ball” analysis of Docker, Tribe concluded that Docker has “a brand halo with a peer set you can count on one hand among developers. Such an asset is rarely and hard-earned. By doubling down on what earned that place in developers’ hearts, Docker seeks to further entrench and evangelize that brand.” It’s an opportunity to create an “N-of-1” company, like Tribe portfolio companies Carta and Slack. 

The Road Ahead

Financings are milestones in company-building, not the destination. This raise will accelerate our build-out of our collaborative app development platform for development teams, so they can spend more time building and sharing applications that impact their organizations. Specifically:

Collaboration. The complexity of microservices-based app development and the new “virtual-first” nature of development teams increases friction when collaborating, which in turn slows shipping. To address this, we’re focusing on helping team members easily and quickly share with each other their in-process work, get better visibility into colleagues’ output and pipeline state, and benefit from the intermediate build and task results of others.

Content. Microservice’s modularity, the ability for development teams to compose their app using a mix of custom code they write with standard components, like databases and base images, can significantly compress the time it takes to get an app working. Of course, any development team using third-party components must trust its software supply chain. This is the root of the popularity of Docker Official Images and Docker Verified Publisher images as well as of our integrated secure supply chain tools with Snyk and JFrog. With this raise, you’ll see us expand the breadth and depth of content from both open source projects and ISVs as well as deliver additional tools to help development teams increase software supply chain confidence, security, and visibility.

Ecosystem. Docker already simplifies app development for teams while providing them choice. Whether interoperability with popular container orchestrators (eg, Kubernetes, AWS ECS, Azure ACI, Swarm), 100% compatibility with the major container runtimes (e.g., Docker Engine, containerd), or simultaneous builds of multi-architecture apps (e.g,. x86, ARM), Docker does so without any additional burden on the development team. To enable teams to continue to benefit from partner innovations throughout the container ecosystem look for us to continue to drive open standards together with ecosystem partners (e.g., OCI, Compose spec, Notary v2). In addition, we will deliver more APIs and SDKs to enable development teams and partners to integrate their tools much more quickly and easily.

You can see in the above our continued focus on helping development teams by simplifying app development complexities while expanding choice, which enables them to get their ideas from code to cloud as quickly as possible. In parallel, we remain committed to growing a sustainable business that continues to provide a 100% free experience for developers while meeting the demands of professional development teams with additional subscription services. Doing so allows us to scale the Docker experience to the next 10 million developers to make our ecosystem that much stronger.

Join Us!

We couldn’t be more excited to continue our journey and double-down on the successes of the past year. As always, you – the Docker developer community – play a critical role in defining and contributing to our direction, and we invite you to join us, whether it’s participating in DockerCon 2021, contributing to the Docker product roadmap, becoming a Docker Verified Publisher, or simply trying Docker for free.

Let’s together go and get ship done!
The post Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done appeared first on Docker Blog.
Quelle: https://blog.docker.com/feed/