New Google Cloud innovations to unify your data cloud

Every company in every industry is on a journey to become more data-driven whether that’s providing great digital experiences to customers, or driving operational excellence through AI, or detecting hidden patterns in data to improve decision making. 

To help with this transformation, we are excited to announce new products and services designed to fully unify your databases, analytics and AI in an open data cloud, so that you can get the most value from your data.

Here are some of our latest innovations to help your organization succeed in today’s data-driven world:  

• Centrally manage, monitor and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools from a single view with Dataplex. Learn more here. 

• Move and synchronize data between heterogeneous databases, storage and applications reliably to support real-time analytics, database replication and event-driven architectures with Datastream, our serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, available in preview. Learn more here.

• Access and share valuable datasets and analytics assets (think BigQuery ML models, Looker Blocks, data quality recipes, etc.) across any organizational boundary with Analytics Hub, a fully-managed service built on BigQuery that allows you to efficiently and securely create data sharing ecosystems with governance in mind. Sign up for the Analytics Hub product preview to learn more and check out this blog post.

Speed up your rate of experimentation with AI projects and accelerate time to business value with Vertex AI, our comprehensive AI platform that gives data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers a way to simplify the process of building, training, and deploying ML models at scale. Learn more here.

Customers leading data-driven transformation

Ever-changing consumer expectations and increased data complexity has made business decision-making much harder. As a result, an insight gap to realize value from data continues to grow with increased data silos across the business and increased risk of security. Digital transformation leaders are digging out of this complexity and offering increased value to their customers by leveraging an open data cloud. 

Carrefour had less than 5% of its apps running in the cloud in 2018. By the end of 2020, more than 25% of its applications (approximately 800!) are cloud-based. Its 700TB data lake moved from on-premise to Google Cloud in only a few months and without any service interruption and now scales to 2TB+ per day. Using BigQuery, its data scientists can access larger amounts of data and spend most of their time on model development. And Carrefour is using Looker to provide data-based insights to its suppliers to optimize the collaboration.

One of the largest transportation logistics companies in North America, JB Hunt, will use Google’s data cloud to better predict outcomes, empower users, and make informed decisions. Real-time data is a cornerstone in the $1 trillion logistics industry, as customers have increased expectations for faster services and more transparency on their shipments. 

And Etsy has helped its community of sellers turn their ideas into successful businesses. The company has adapted its marketplace on which creators are connected with millions of buyers. Etsy achieved scale with better search and smarter recommendations that have helped grow buyer retention and business revenue, all while improving the sustainability of its business. 

More data cloud innovations

In addition to the new products above, we are excited to announce updates to BigQuery, Dataflow, Looker, and Spanner technologies. 

• BigQuery Omni for Azure, now in preview, builds on our commitment to multi-cloud  by giving you a way to analyze data across public clouds from a single pane of glass. We believe in flexibility when it comes to analytics and this announcement, along with last year’s introduction of BigQuery Omni for AWS, helps you access and securely analyze data across Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Join our session Unlock Innovation and Flexibility with a MultiCloud Strategy to learn how customers like Electronic Arts are developing applications and analyzing data residing across multiple clouds with BigQuery Omni, Looker, and Apigee to innovate faster.

• Looker hosted on Microsoft Azure, now generally available, adds Azure to our range of hosting options. With Looker, data teams can connect to data located on the cloud (or clouds) of their choice with support for more than 60 distinct database dialects, host Looker where it makes sense for their data strategy (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and self-hosted), and deliver data and insights to where they add the most value. 

• Dataflow Prime brings resource utilization, radical simplicity and integrated ML to streaming ETL and continuous analytics use cases. Dataflow Prime, with innovations in vertical autoscaling, right fitting and proactive diagnostics, removes the operational toil associated with infrastructure sizing and provisioning, tuning, and debugging performance and data freshness problems. Dataflow Prime provides ML integration, an open framework and APIs and unified batch and streaming data processing for real-time applications. For more information, check out this blog post.

• And we’re making Cloud Spanner, our fully managed relational database that supports strong consistency and infinite scale, accessible to more customers by lowering the entry price by 90%. We’re also offering more granular instance sizing (coming soon) while providing the same scale and reliability, opening up Spanner to more workloads. In addition, BigQuery federation to Spanner is coming soon, which lets users query transactional data residing in Spanner, from BigQuery, for richer, real-time insights. And Key Visualizer, available now in public preview, provides interactive monitoring, which allows developers to quickly identify trends and usage patterns in Spanner for improved decision making. Finally, we’re announcing that Bigtable joins Firestore and Spanner with industry leading 99.999% availability SLA. For more information, check out this blog post.

• Lastly, BigQuery ML Anomaly Detection provides a way to more easily detect problematic data patterns for a variety of use cases, including bank fraud detection and manufacturing defect analysis.

Data analytics partner ecosystem, powered by BigQuery 

Google Cloud has a thriving partner ecosystem for data analytics and we're looking at new ways of celebrating those partners who are building data-driven applications and delivering new analytics services to their customers, all powered by BigQuery. Partners such as Quantum Metric, Shape Security, and Trax are leveraging processing, collection, storage, and analytics on BigQuery to solve their customer challenges for customer analytics, security, and data exchanges. 

Reach out to us through our Partner Advantage Program to learn more about how you can use BigQuery to power your applications. And watch keynote and strategy presentations on-demand at the Data Cloud Summit, to learn and share new ways we can all use data for good.