Shortcut was recently certified as a Google Cloud Platform partner, and we will be working with Google to help our customers in their transformation into the cloud. For our first formal partnership we chose one of the technology companies we admire the most, and we are really humbled and excited about the work ahead of us.
Before I get into the details, let me tell me a bit more about why we’re doing this.
When Shortcut was founded in 2007, we wanted to build software products which normal people would love. We were inspired by all the Software-as-a-service startups which used modern web technologies to deliver user friendly, dynamic and powerful apps in the web browser. In order to build a great web app, we believed, we had to have great skills in both UI, UX, frontend and backend technologies.
The app revolution
When Apple introduced the iPhone 3G back in 2008, they also introduced the App Store, which enabled millions of developers around the world to build, distribute and monetize apps for smart phones. Although the duopoly of Nokia and Sony Ericsson at the time also offered native apps for phones they sold, there was no ecosystem of apps at that time. Being manufacturers of hardware, their main source of income was getting people to upgrade their smart phones to a newer model as often as possible. By introducing the App Store, Apple built an ecosystem where end users saw the value of their phones increasing over time through the apps they download and use to solve problems or waste time in their daily lives, rather than becoming obsolete once the manufacturer introduced a new device or model.
Shortcut was quick to jump on the app bonanza, and from time to time we have been criticized for being overly optimistic about apps. Although the app market has matured since 2008, focusing on apps has been key to our success and growth over the last ten years. While the number of successful apps introduced each year is decreasing, the importance of some of these apps keeps increasing. Just look at the success Vipps has seen and how it has changed the banking industry in Norway.
Growing up
As apps have become mission critical for many companies, the expectations our customers have to Shortcut and other app developers have changed. All mission critical apps these days have extremely high requirements for security, privacy, technical quality and user experience. For an app to be successful, all layers of the entire technology stack need to meet these requirements. Just imagine a failure in one of the subsystems behind RuterBillett being down for 30 minutes in the rush hours. Not only would that cost Ruter hundreds of thousands (if not millions), it would also cause problems for tens of thousands of people depending on the app to get by in their daily lives.
Apps are completely dependent on rock-solid, scalable, secure and available backend services in order to meet their business requirements. As a company specializing in app design and development, we have also done our fair bit of backend work in our projects. Over the last couple of years we have seen that more and more of our customers are moving their backend systems to the cloud. We are seeing a trend going from monolithic, on-premised based backend systems to microservice based architectures using building blocks from the major cloud providers. The trend towards using cloud services rather than virtualizing existing servers in the cloud gives lower development and operational costs, and it makes scaling backend services possible.
We believe that in order to keep being able to help our customers in their digital transformation, Shortcut needs to be able to help our customers in building and running their cloud based backend systems too.
Taking a stand
Following an intense process with training, certifications and partner onboarding, we joined the Google Cloud Platform partner in July. We have been impressed with the maturity of Google’s cloud offerings, and we believe that Google is positioned to grow their market share over the next few years. Although many organizations have made a strategic choice of one of the other cloud platforms on the market, we think that most organizations going forward are going to follow a multi-cloud strategy, choosing the best tool for the job. Google encourages such a multi-cloud strategy, and uses open source as a strategic tool for avoiding vendor lock-in.
One of the areas where Google from our perspective offers superior products is in big data, analytics and machine learning. Gathering, processing and learning from data is going to give a competetive advantage, and we believe that Google’s big data products makes this achievable even for companies who don’t have a large team of data analysts. And as this data is personal, maintaining privacy and security for user data is just going to keep becoming more important.
What’s next
We have already achieved our first certifications from Google, and are investing in training and certifying ten of our colleagues who are highly motivated to bring their skills to the next level. We have some really ambitious goals for our collaboration with Google, so expect to hear us talking more about cloud services in the future.
Our first major project in Google Cloud Platform is already well underway, and we are really excited to share the details about it once we’re allowed to. We have also signed some really great people to help us in this next big thing for us who we can’t wait to introduce you to. We will be reaching out to our customers and partner over the coming weeks to start discussing their cloud transformation. In the meantime, please get in touch if you’re interested, and we’ll get the ball rolling.
