Google cloud’s momentum
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Google Cloud practices an annual ritual around a week before their annual user conference, Next. They begin media engagement about a week before the conference starts and this year was no different.
Karan Bajwa, Google Cloud APAC VP, hosted a preview briefing for APAC media to share what would be upcoming for the week ahead, with an overview of product news announcements that were divided into ‘six distinct pillars’. These are:
- better insights with leading data and analytics
- being cleanest cloud in the industry
- more choice and flexibility with an open cloud
- approach to purpose-built industry solutions
- ability to connect and collaborate with Google workspace
- a safe and secure platform to do all the above with
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Karan also shared overall customer feedback which is that there is an inevitable and fundamental shift to a different model; a digital business model.”The last 18 months have only accelerated this journey for everyone,” he said. For example, healthcare is transitioning, or is at least seriously considering telehealth and virtual care, while retailers are starting to explore e-commerce.
“Our commitment as a company is to meet our customers where they are and how they want to go ahead in their digital journey,” Karan said.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian was to later on share during the conference’s keynote, about their strategy to help accelerate an organisation’s ability to digitally transform their businesses with the best infrastructure, platform, industry solutions, and expertise.
Customer momentum
According to Karan, he is personally spending a lot of time with ‘business leaders from some of the largest and most important businesses in Asia, across industries large conglomerates digital natives.
He added, “And they’re telling me they’re choosing us because we are placing bets in places where the industry is going versus where the industry is, for example in areas like artificial intelligence, security sovereignty, industry solutions, data analytics – these form the core of our engagement with our clients.”
Karan had also observed that these conversations are happening not just with big companies as customers, but that technology companies are also choosing Google Cloud.
And they’re telling me they’re choosing us because we are placing bets in places where the industry is going versus where the industry is, for example in areas like artificial intelligence, security sovereignty, industry solutions, data analytics – these form the core of our engagement with our clients.
“As we look back at the year gone by, we have had great momentum with customer wins, in virtually every industry, in every geography located around the world,” he said naming new customers like Wells Fargo, HSBC, General Mills, Siemens Energy, and more.
Partners
When it comes to partners, it is really about building an ecosystem that builds the transformation journey for clients.
Karan shared, “In the first half of this year, partners were awarded almost six times as many eight figure deals within the same period compared to 2018. That is progress.”
In the first half of this year, partners were awarded almost six times as many eight figure deals within the same period compared to 2018. That is progress.
Together with the partners, Google Cloud is focused on helping customers obtain better insights with leading edge data and analytics capabilities, providing customers more choice and flexibility to the open cloud, enhancing collaboration to help organisations’ employees connect and collaborate with Google Workspace, as well as keeping all of these safe and secure.
According to Karan, Google Cloud has launched new partnerships and expanded existing partnerships across all these areas, for example with SAP, T-Systems, C3AI, Workday, Automation Anywhere, and many more.
“To give you an example with Citrix, we are helping equip organisations to support distributed teams for the long term with new virtualised applications and desktops, on Google Cloud,” he said.
Data analytics
Gerrit Kazmeier, head of Google’s database, data analytics and business intelligence, also later briefly shared why customers are choosing Google’s Data Cloud.”First and foremost, it is the most integrated and most unified data and AI platform.
“We cover every aspect of the data lifecycle from transactional databases to analytical applications to data warehouses to data lakes to real-time data stream processing.”
Besides this, Google Cloud has speed, scale, security, as well as up to five nines of availability in offering services.
Gerrit added, “Machine learning runs in our DNA and since the first day Google has pioneered AI research and we are bringing this intelligence into all our products, which you can see with innovations such as BigQuery ML.”
Last but not least, Google’s cloud is open, which is a quality many organisations are looking for as they consider their multi-cloud options and select the cloud they can plug into their environment seamlessly, easily, and with interoperability.
Click here for Google Cloud Next’s keynote by CEO Thomas Kurian.