Mahindra group is India’s leading conglomerate which offers business services across 22 industries. With such a massive services scale, the company has decided to move it’s on-premise data analytics system and ERP technology to Google Cloud. The vision is to enable efficient service delivery across wide industrial areas.

As per Mahindra’s business the Group operates in the following mainstream industries: steel, automobile, motorsports, agriculture, and IT industry. The business giant operates in over 100 countries and manages over 150 companies under its brand name. 

With such a huge business footprint, the robust management of services is hard pressed. Mahindra Group is already using data analytics technologies to support it’s service delivery. The company owns a data warehouse as well as a data lake to drive business strategies. The company also owns an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system- a software technology that integrates all the main business processes.

So, with a robust digital infrastructure at hand why, the need for a cloud analytics technology and DevOps?

To achieve ‘Agility’. The demand for agile service delivery has increased today, and competitive survival in the business landscape forces huge companies to move to cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. These technology brands offer powerful tools that enable fast delivery of software services. 

Apart from agility, scalability, and low cost of ownership are other benefits that come with cloud service.

Anecdotal evidence shows that there are two major areas where the cloud platforms offer value to companies: data analytics, and application development. Mahindra Group also appears to seek support in such areas to enable data-driven decision making and enabling DevOps through cloud-native application development.

To enable powerful data analytics, the company decided to fully migrate its data warehouse and data lake to cloud platform. Google cloud offers data engineers and scientists to perform analytics in a quick way with it’s “in-database architecture and powerful semantic layer that provide real-time governed metrics”. 

There’s another interesting feature of Google Cloud, the ‘Vertex AI’ which is a unified machine learning platform that allows building scalable AI models. The platform also offers a low cost of ownership TCO (allegedly 26-34% in three years as claimed by Google).

With regard to the application development, Mahindra group seeks to scale up its DevOps capability by shifting to Google cloud. The cloud platform offers cloud-native application development tools to enable modern application development technology- DevOps. The DevOps (Developers + Operations) team uses cloud technology to develop software that aims to achieve agility in application and service delivery.

How DevOps Works?

The DevOps team builds software across the whole value chain of a business such as logistics, inventory, and customer service. They use technology to automate the traditionally slow processes by developing applications. 

DevOps creates a micro application (called a microsservice) for each operational process and these applications can then interact with each other through APIs or messaging. Through this approach, DevOps team fulfills two of its purposes: increasing operational efficiency and delivering improved QoS to customers. 

Cloud native app development is an agile approach towards application development (also includes updates) to build responsive, fault tolerant and scalable apps on cloud. A microservice breaks apps into smaller components and speeds  up the application delivery as part of the cloud native app development.  

The Mahindra Group estimates a 3-year time frame to fully migrate to Google Cloud. Meanwhile, the company seeks to explore further options within Google Cloud which could be leveraged to escalate the value the platform is offering.