What’s next for digital transformation in the cloud

Welcome to Google Cloud Next ’22 — an event where we come together from around the world to learn, engage, and solve tomorrow’s challenges. With customer expectations and global markets rapidly changing, organizations need to make sure they are prepared for tomorrow by making the right decisions today.

This year’s event takes place at an inflection point in the cloud industry. Data and AI are transforming everything around us, and open, connected ecosystems are essential to everything we do. Now is the time where we need to embrace openness and interoperability, and we are incredibly excited about everything we are doing on that front.

Helping customers transform for tomorrow

We’re proud that industry-leading companies — many of the world’s biggest brands — are choosing Google Cloud. This includes 9 of the top 10 retailers, 8 of the top 10 banks, 8 of the top 10 automotive companies — and they’re driving impressive results. For example, Home Depot is saving 30% on its cloud costs; HSBC is running “what if” risk simulations 16 times faster; and Ford has already delivered more than 5 million software updates to customers automatically, adding new features and upgrades to drivers.

In addition to large multinationals, some of the most impressive, new emerging companies are choosing Google Cloud. Tokopedia, one of the largest ecommerce companies in Indonesia, is using Google Cloud to deliver hundreds of terabytes of data in 700 milliseconds; Doordash is helping its 340K merchants better target promotions; and Rent the Runway is working with Google Cloud to migrate onto a more scalable container-based platform to better power its future growth and innovation. We are immensely proud that 70% of the top 100 startup “unicorns” run on Google Cloud, relying on our technology to create entirely new businesses and industries. 

From global brands like MLB in North America, H&M Group in Europe, Banco BV in Latin America, and ASX in Australia, to public sector institutions like the New York State, Central Dutch Government, and the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Army, organizations worldwide continue to choose Google Cloud to help them build for the future.

And, today, we are proud to announce new or expanded relationships with Coinbase, Prudential plc, Rite Aid, Snap, T-Mobile, Toyota, and Wayfair.

What’s next in the cloud

In the first half of 2022, we delivered approximately 1,300 new product and feature releases. Building on this work, we’re proud to reveal additional product innovations and partnerships to help the people in your organization — the data decision-makers, the developers and builders, the IT teams, the cybersecurity experts, and all employees — make transformation real, impactful, and sustainable. These span four key areas where Google Cloud differentiates: our data cloud, open infrastructure cloud, collaboration cloud, and trusted cloud. 

An open data cloud 

We’re announcing significant steps to provide the most open, extensible, and powerful data cloud — ensuring that customers can utilize all their data, from all sources, in all storage formats and styles of analysis, and across the cloud providers and platforms of their choice. We’re also releasing new applications and services to put powerful, state-of-the-art applied Google AI technology in the hands of more data people. 

• Support for unstructured data in BigQuery: We’re launching a new capability to analyze unstructured, streaming data in BigQuery that will significantly expand the ability for people to work with all types of data.

• Support for major data formats in the industry: We're adding support for widely adopted data formats including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi, and offering a new integrated experience in BigQuery for Apache Spark.

• Looker Studio and Looker Studio Pro: We’re unifying two popular business intelligence tools, Looker and Google Data Studio, under the Looker umbrella to create a deep integration of Looker, Data Studio, and core Google technologies like AI and ML. This will help every self-service analyst infuse their workflows and applications with the intelligence needed to make data-driven decisions. We’re also introducing a professional version, Looker Studio Pro, that provides organizations support and key governance capabilities.

• Translation Hub: Organizations can now cost effectively localize content in more than 135 languages with Translation Hub, our new enterprise-scale translation AI Agent for self-serve document translation. 

• Vertex AI Vision: This new service makes powerful computer vision and image recognition AI more accessible to data practitioners. It also reduces the time to create computer vision applications from days to minutes at one-tenth the cost of current offerings.

• Supporting all major open data platforms: To extend our leadership in driving an open data ecosystem, we’re expanding our integrations with many of the most popular enterprise data platforms, including Collibra, Elastic, MongoDB, Palantir Foundry, and ServiceNow. This will help to remove barriers between data, give customers more choice, and prevent data lock-in. 

Easy, transformative, open infrastructure 

To help IT teams build infrastructure for transformation, we're announcing a series of infrastructure and migration updates. These will make it easier than ever for organizations of all types and sizes to run on our cloud, at the edge, or in their data centers.

• Growing our global footprint: To meet the needs of our growing customer base, we continue to invest in the growth and expansion of our global network. Today, we’re announcing five new Google Cloud regions: Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden. This is in addition to the four regions we announced earlier this year, for a total of 48 live and announced regions serving customers in more than 200 countries and territories.

• Workload-optimized infrastructure: We’re making a number of infrastructure enhancements tailored to our customers’ workloads, including the C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). We’re also delivering AI-optimized infrastructure with the general availability of TPU v4, which runs large-scale training workloads up to 80% faster and up to 50% cheaper.

• Anthos enhancements: We’re making it easier for our customers to run their cloud where and how they want with enhancements to Anthos, including a more robust user interface, an upgraded fleet management experience, and the general availability of virtual machine support on Anthos clusters for retail edge environments.

• Dual Run and Migration Center: We’re unveiling several major investments that will assist our customers on their journey to the cloud: Dual Run will help remove the most common roadblocks from migrating 20+ year old mainframes into the cloud, and our new Migration Center brings assessment, planning, migration, and modernization tooling together in one location so organizations can proceed faster through their journey. 

• Increasing our open source AI commitments: Anyone should be able to quickly and easily turn their artificial intelligence (AI) idea into reality. Today, we are taking that commitment a step further with the OpenXLA Project, an open-source ecosystem of ML technologies developed by Google, AMD, Arm, Intel, Meta, NVIDIA, and more.
  

Advanced security tools to protect what’s important

We continue to champion invisible security to help organizations move to a future where cloud security is engineered in and operations are simplified. Google has always provided a secure cloud infrastructure, and with the acquisition of Mandiant, we extend our cybersecurity leadership and expertise to help customers stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle. This week we’re announcing new products, partnerships, and solutions to build the most open and extensible trusted cloud offering, including:

• Chronicle Security Operations: We’re unveiling a modern, cloud-born software suite that better enables cybersecurity teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats with the speed, scale, and intelligence of Google. 

• Confidential Space: The next solution in our groundbreaking Confidential Computing portfolio, Confidential Space will help unlock the value of secure data collaboration.

• Google Cloud Ready - Sovereign Cloud: This new program for partners and customers advances digital sovereignty on Europe's terms, to address growing demand for cloud solutions with the highest levels of control, transparency, and sovereignty.

• Software Delivery Shield: Protecting the integrity of the software that underpins the business is one of the top priorities for every organization today. To help our customers address this challenge, we’re introducing Software Delivery Shield, a fully managed, end-to-end software supply chain security solution from Google Cloud.

• New and expanded Google Cloud partnerships with leaders across the security ecosystem: We’re announcing a significant expansion of our trusted cloud ecosystem, featuring new integrations and offerings with more than 20 partners focused on digital sovereignty and cybersecurity.

An integrated, AI-powered collaboration hub

With hybrid work, the physical office is no longer the sole space in which people work together. Organizations need a digital workspace that helps their teams communicate and collaborate, create and share ideas, and get work done safely no matter where they’re working from. We're announcing innovations in Google Workspace and our partner ecosystem that will help organizations transform the way they work and unlock the full talent and productivity of their people:

• Immersive connections: For the past few years, we've reimagined Google Meet to deliver on our vision of enabling truly immersive connections so that a video call feels every bit as engaging as an in-person meeting. Now, we’re taking it a step further with new capabilities, including adaptive framing with AI-powered cameras from Huddly and Logitech that lets everyone in a conference room be seen clearly, and speaker spotlight, which enables presenters to better engage their audience by embedding their video directly in Google Slides. Beyond meetings, we’re helping teams have more authentic and expressive communications with custom emojis and inline threaded conversations for Google Chat. 

• Smart canvas: We’ve invested heavily in smart canvas, our next-generation collaboration experience, that brings documents to life with intelligence and co-creation capabilities so teams can stay focused instead of switching between tools. The smart canvas experience is getting richer with custom building blocks in Google Docs, enabling companies to build their own templates that can be easily accessed by all users. We've also opened up smart canvas for 3rd-party applications. New smart chips for AODocs, Atlassian, Asana, Figma, Miro, Tableau, and ZenDesk will be released next year, so users can view and engage with rich third-party data without switching tabs or context.

• Work safer: We’re extending ways to keep people and data safe across more of the apps teams use on a day-to-day basis, including new data loss prevention (DLP) rules for Chat and the extension of Client Side Encryption to Gmail and Calendar. 

• Extending the power of Workspace: For developers, we’re announcing new APIs for Meet and Chat, giving programmatic access to common functions like creating and starting meetings or initiating messages directly from a third-party app. Asana, Lumapps, and ZenDesk will be the first partners to leverage these in their apps. Developers can also embed their app directly into the Meet experience with a new Meet add-on SDK. 

Delivering next-generation computing to enterprises

Our customers and partners put their trust in our team to deliver next-generation cloud technologies to help them become the best tech company in their industry. The combination of Google’s technical strengths, backed by its unique scale and deep experience in connecting that technology with consumer products and ecosystems, enables Google Cloud to put the tools of tomorrow in the hands of organizations today. A few examples of these developments include:

• The next frontier of collaborating and connecting from afar: Last year we announced Project Starline, a technology project that enables coworkers to feel like they are together, even when they are cities apart. It creates a 3D model of a person, making it feel like you are sitting with someone in the same room — not at the other end of a video call. After thousands of hours of testing in our own offices, including demos with enterprise partners, we’re seeing promising results. Today, we're announcing our next phase of testing with an early access program with enterprise partners such as Salesforce, T-Mobile, and others. Starting this year, we'll be deploying units in select partner offices for regular testing. As we build the future of hybrid work together with our enterprise partners, we look forward to seeing how Project Starline can help people form strong ties with one another. 

• Powering the future of the Web3 ecosystem: We’re also helping Web3 founders and developers with scalability, reliability, security, and data, so they can spend the bulk of their time on innovation. Many of the largest exchanges in the world use Google Cloud to bring scale and speed to always-open spot markets for cryptocurrency trading. Today, we’re announcing a new partnership with Coinbase, who has selected Google Cloud to build advanced exchange and data services. We will also enable select customers to pay for cloud services via select cryptocurrencies by using Coinbase Commerce. This news builds on our recent Web3 announcements with Nansen, BNB Chain, Sky Mavis and NEAR Protocol.

Powerful new ways for organizations to develop sustainably

A critical part of helping customers make lasting change is by creating a more sustainable future, and we are committed to helping customers do this through products and services that minimize environmental impact. We proudly operate the cleanest cloud in the industry, and customers who run on Google Cloud can instantly improve their sustainability profiles. For example, Salesforce has reduced its cloud carbon emissions for certain workloads by up to 80%; Etsy migrated in record time and is speeding up innovation to meet sustainability goals; and Carrefour reduced energy consumption by 45% by moving from on-premises data centers to our public cloud infrastructure. 

To continue helping companies reach their sustainability goals and address climate change demands, we’re announcing today that Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is now Generally Available, and provided at no cost for every customer in the cloud console. In addition, eco-friendly routing is coming soon to the Google Maps Platform for developers, to help ridesharing and delivery companies embed eco-friendly routes into their driver applications.

All of this work can’t be done alone. To scale our efforts, we are building our partner network across industries and since we announced the Google Cloud Ready - Sustainability designation this summer, we’ve seen incredible momentum with more than 20 partners achieving the designation. 

Next ’22 is a unique opportunity to share insights and learn together from customers, thought leaders and developers around the world. Throughout the week, we’ll share many more exciting product announcements and customer stories on our Google Cloud blog and press room, and replays of our more than 125 sessions will be available on the Next website after the event. We hope you join us!

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