3 min readToday, like everyone else in the Google ecosystem, I watched the Next OnAir keynote from the comfort of my sofa. Gone are the days of piling into the Moscone hours early to get a coveted seat to listen to Google to tell us what’s next and why we should care.
Side note, if you haven’t registered for Next OnAir yet, click here to do so.
The pandemic has allowed Google to put it’s own tools to the test—Google Cloud, G Suite and Chromebooks to enable their employees and customers to collaborate and work from home without disruption.
The opening message should resonate with all of us—How we work has changed forever and we need to navigate these shifts quickly. Failure to do so will most likely result in severe economic impacts which will be difficult to overcome. According to Sundar Puchai, CEO of Alphabet, Google has identified three fundamental changes in the way we will work:
As a result of this new work paradigm, 75% of organizations are accelerating their digital journey. Google has been intently focused on how to engage and enable moving customers to digital. According to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud: "Google is committed to help or accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform."
To that end, Google has identified three core areas of focus:
- Distributed infrastructure as a Service — offer customers advanced capabilities that they can elastically spin up, manage and process
- Digital Transformation Platform — a modern application framework which manages data at scale
- Industry Specific Solutions — Google and their partners have developed a number of vertical market offerings and frameworks, powered by AI/ML to address mission critical industry use cases and enable rapid production deployment within Google Cloud. Across all verticals, there seems to be a theme of "Accelerate, Transform and Modernize" with solutions within these three columns geared towards industry needs
The keynote also introduced the expansion of the Anthos platform, especially as it pertains to management of Hybrid and Multi-cloud environments. Personally, I think this a great move as it will allow customers to leverage applications and data where they currently reside. An example of this Big Query Omni which will analyze data from MSFT Azure and AWS from where it sits instead of having to migrate to Google Cloud, and means no expensive egress charges. This is huge for customers wanting to leverage Google’s superior analytics tools.
Overall, there were no huge announcements or changes in the Google Cloud GTM plan, just a doubling down of accelerating their customer’s journey to the cloud. Given the pandemic and other economic factors, this message of support and enablement for the new world work order is very welcome indeed.