At the annual Google Cloud conference in San Francisco, New Zealand retail platform Trade Me was recognised by the global search engine giant.

Trade Me was awarded the Trade and Auction award for its innovative use of the Google Cloud software to create solutions to use and improve its speed-to-value.

Trade Me’s Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ragone says the company has been working on adopting the software for the past years, dubbed under the name “Project Kapua”.

“Moving to Google Cloud exceeded our expectations for productivity while helping us carve out new opportunities that were previously beyond reach,” he adds.

“For example, we now have a team doing a complete re-architecture of our core platform with the minimum viable product on track to be ready in less than a year. That would have been impossible to consider, or implement, without full-scale adoption of cloud.”

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The team at Trade Me saw Google as an option, following their prior operation of a ‘monolithic stack’, which was on-premise hardware that was complex and slow.

Making use of the software, Trade Me has since shrunk its cycle time from weeks to hours, allowing it to create and release new products and features for its customers at a quicker pace.

“Not only is this great news for our customers, it’s great for our tech teams too,” adds Ragone.

“The transformation has brought learning opportunities for our people as they build their capabilities in this new environment. Those skills will not only benefit them now in their current role but will also equip them for other career paths as public cloud adoption becomes even more prevalent.”

Google Cloud is the future for Trade Me, with Ragone adding that before using the software, less than one percent of the team had public cloud capabilities, but now the team has upskilled for the now primary cloud service.