Solving for What’s Next

Every year, we look forward to Google Cloud Next as our opportunity to share our latest cloud innovations, recognize the achievements of our customers and partners, and provide a view into the future. This year, we are celebrating with gratitude the many ways in which we have enabled amazing organizations of all sizes to transform their businesses digitally, even as we make bigger bets on what will drive business transformation for decades to come.

At Google Cloud our mission is to enable organizations to transform their business digitally with the best infrastructure, platform, industry solutions, and expertise. We have three unique capabilities that are becoming ever more important with the accelerating pace of digital transformation in virtually every industry. First, our cloud platform, which is designed and built to help organizations transform through digitization; second, our deep and broad ecosystem of consumer services and devices, and the ability to help organizations uniquely connect their enterprise ecosystem with the consumer ecosystem; and third, our comprehensive security offerings that help organizations protect their digital assets and users. 

Helping customers accelerate their transformation

We have many great stories of customer success over the past year. We helped Grupo Globo deliver the Tokyo Olympics to millions in Latin America; we helped Ford transform its cars and the way people buy, experience, and drive them; we helped Schrödinger speed up preclinical drug discovery by 60%; we helped GE Appliances build the next generation of smart home appliances; we helped Reliance Jio, the world’s second largest mobile carrier, automate its 5G network to serve billions of people; we helped Vodafone build a data platform to process a billion network events a day; we helped Carrefour improve customer service online and in-store; we helped Scotiabank personalize the banking experience; and we are helping Univision create market-defining content for the next generation of Spanish-speaking viewers.

We’ve also helped technology startups and unicorns pioneer new industries and quickly scale to meet demands. India’s social media and networking service ShareChat is using Google Cloud to connect 250 million active users in 15 different Indic languages. Spotify is using our cloud to deliver the best audio service to more than 365 million users around the world. Cue Health is working with us to track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. And Shopify, Mercado Libre, and Instacart have all scaled their e-commerce solutions with Google Cloud. 

From large multinationals like LVMH, Whirlpool Corporation and TELUS, to public sector entities like the U.S. Air Force, the state of Wisconsin, and the UK’s Department for Transport, organizations continue to choose Google Cloud to help them grow, scale, and innovate with speed and agility. 

Today, we are proud to announce new or expanded strategic relationships with DPDHL, General Mills, Siemens Energy, Walmart and Wendy’s.

Expanding our partner ecosystem

We continue to add many substantial partnerships that help us reach more customers. For example, we teamed with global telecommunications leaders such as Nokia, AT&T, T-Systems, and Ericsson to deliver 5G and edge computing solutions. We recently announced partnerships with companies like C3 AI and Workday, and we have continued to expand our work with SAP — in just the last year, we’ve added three times the number of SAP customers as the year prior. 

Today, we’re excited to announce more than 20 new and expanded partnerships with technology leaders across each of our strategic focus areas. For example, to help organizations make better decisions with real-time data, we are making announcements with Collibra, Databricks, Fivetran, Informatica, Tableau, and Trifacta. We are also announcing partnerships with cybersecurity experts CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Cybereason to help address our customers’ rising security challenges. Our technology partnerships showcase our open ecosystem and our ability to deliver solutions jointly with partners. We are also grateful for the many systems integrators and managed service providers who have helped our customers implement our solutions. In the first half of 2021, we saw a more than 175% increase in customer engagements sourced by our partners over the same period last year, and this week we’ll roll out additional resources, incentives, and investments through our Partner Advantage program to help partners go to market effectively, profitably, and at scale.

Innovation that delivers transformation

Building on our 1,500 product and feature releases over the past year, we’ll be announcing even more product innovations and partnerships at Next ‘21 to help organizations accelerate their cloud journey:

• The most complete and unified data, analytics, and AI solution. We’re announcing Vertex AI Workbench, which provides a unified user experience to build and deploy machine learning models faster, and the general availability of BigQuery Omni, which enables customers to run cross-cloud analytics while accessing their data in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. We're also unveiling new integrations with data, analytics, and AI providers to give customers a more unified experience across products and services and a new Spark on Google Cloud offering that is the industry’s first autoscaling and serverless data processing service. We enable any size organization to unify and manage their data across multiple clouds and silos, combine unstructured and structured data, and make insights accessible to every employee. We are also announcing a partnership with Salesforce Tableau that provides a best-in-class BI experience, enabling Tableau users to seamlessly analyze data from BigQuery, to get the benefits of Looker’s semantic model, and to launch Tableau directly from Google Sheets. 

• An open cloud you can run anywhere. We’re excited to announce Google Distributed Cloud, which extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to customer data centers, multiple edge configurations (both in our own network edge points-of-presence and in telecommunication carrier networks) and a hosted mode for sensitive workloads with strict security and privacy requirements, all with an Anthos-managed control plane. We’re also announcing expanded partnerships, including NetApp as our primary partner supporting Google’s Distributed Cloud storage infrastructure. Our Distributed Cloud also helps us further our digital sovereignty vision, where we have recently announced partnerships with T-Systems in Germany and Thales in France, to give customers more control over their data and more choice for how and where to deploy and run their workloads. Customers choose our open infrastructure because we make it easy to migrate to the cloud, we can run the most demanding workloads on our high-performance network, we have a clear strategy to support multicloud environments, and we provide a consistent developer experience built on open source that allows customers to write once and deploy anywhere.

• Fostering productivity in the hybrid workplace. Today, we’re making it even easier to build applications for Google Workspace with a new Atlassian Jira integration that helps developers easily create new tickets and monitor issues within the platform, and a new integration of AppSheet into Gmail that allows anyone — even non-coders — to build email apps for tasks like budget approvals, vacation requests and more. We are also expanding our partnership with Citrix to ensure that distributed and hybrid workers have easy, secure, and low-latency access to virtualized applications and desktops from anywhere. In addition, we’re introducing new security innovations in Google Workspace to give customers stronger privacy and data security controls to prevent sensitive information from leaking outside their organization. With Google Workspace, we are delivering a powerful solution that helps people communicate and collaborate, no matter where they are. We are focused on creating a digital location for work that increases productivity with assistive tools like Smart Canvas, delivers a seamless user experience across products, and is inclusive of the unique collaboration requirements of frontline workers. 

• Keeping more people safe online than anyone else in the world. To address the unprecedented security challenges facing organizations in every industry today, we are engineering security into our products, making security operations autonomous, and taking a shared fate approach to our work with customers. In addition to introducing new capabilities in our cybersecurity product portfolio, we are making two significant announcements: 

• First, we are creating the Google Cybersecurity Action Team, a group of experts from across Google that will form what we believe is the world’s premier security advisory team. They can help you shape your security transformation — from your first roadmap and implementation, through responding to a major incident, to engineering new solutions as your needs change. 

• We’re also announcing a new Work Safer program to help you communicate and collaborate securely in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer provides best-in-class security for your email, meetings, messaging, and more by bringing Google Workspace together with other industry-leading Google products and solutions from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. It takes the guesswork out of purchasing a comprehensive and secure solution, making it easier for any organization to achieve a stronger security posture quickly, especially those without in-house expertise.

Whether it's securely operating our global services such as Google Workspace, Gmail, and YouTube, eliminating vulnerabilities with our Zero Trust approach, or leveraging data analytics and machine learning for threat detection, we have decades of experience pioneering differentiated approaches to security. 

Purpose-built solutions for industries

We believe that meaningful customer transformation is accelerated with industry solutions that leverage the customer's knowledge and expertise. So we engineer purpose-built solutions to solve for the biggest opportunities in key industries. FIH Mobile integrated Visual Inspection AI into its mobile phone manufacturing process, increasing the accuracy of defect detection by 10 times. Procter & Gamble uses our data solutions to create personalized omni-channel journeys from over 275 million consumer records. IKEA Retail used Recommendations AI to drive a 30% increase in customer click-through rate. Mr Cooper, an industry-leading mortgage services provider, integrated Document AI into its workflows, increasing mortgage document processing efficiency by 400%. And we launched a number of other AI-powered industry solutions this year, including Healthcare Data Engine to improve health with real-time data; Retail Search to reduce search abandonment and convert purchases; and Lending DocAI to speed up loan processing.

Expanding the global footprint of the cleanest cloud in the industry

Over the past year, we have grown to 28 regions, connected by 19 subsea cables, making us the largest and lowest latency network among hyperscale cloud providers. And we’ve announced our plans to build 10 more regions globally, further expanding our ability to bring Google Cloud closer to customers in their countries.

Just as important as our scale is our leadership in operating the cleanest cloud in the industry. Last year, we made our biggest commitment yet, to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy across our offices and data centers by 2030. Customers that connect to Google Cloud instantly improve their sustainability profile.

Earlier this year, we introduced a way for customers to choose the cleanest regions to run their workloads. Today, we’re announcing an expansion of our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and partnerships that will help reduce your carbon footprint. This is highlighted by Carbon Footprint, which allows customers to measure, track, and report on the carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. We are also bringing Google Earth Engine to Google Cloud, enabling customers to use its satellite imagery and 50+ petabytes of geospatial data combined with BigQuery and Cloud AI Platform to solve for unique climate challenges.

We have many more exciting announcements and customer stories to share with you over the next three days at Next ‘21. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, we’re here to help you learn, build, and transform with Google Cloud. And we invite you to join us!