Better together: Working with EMEA businesses to help them do more in the cloud

We launched our first Google Cloud services in Europe more than six years ago to bring the benefits of the cloud to more enterprises. This week, we kick off Google Cloud Next in London by welcoming more than 8,000 leaders, developers, customers and partners to what will be our largest Google Cloud event in Europe to date.

Across every key industry in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, we’re seeing strong momentum as more enterprises look to the cloud to transform how they do business. Media companies like Sky are using the cloud to build scalability, expand digital offerings and provide tailored experiences for their customers. Retailers like Carrefour are creating new shopping experiences and even their own data labs to evolve how they meet customer needs. Gaming companies like Ubisoft are building open source projects that improve research for academics and Egyptologists. And all global enterprises need ways to inspire collaboration, with companies like Fiat Chrysler Automobiles using G Suite to connect teams spread across many different regions. These are just a few of the more than 80 stories from our customers we look forward to hearing at Next this week.

This is an exciting time for Google Cloud in EMEA. Over the last 18 months, we’ve launched four new Cloud regions, including Finland, Germany, London, and the Netherlands, and we announced a new region in Zurich. We continue to expand our infrastructure across the Atlantic to make sure our customers have the speed, capacity and reliability they need—helping us deliver, for example, our new BigQuery London region announced today. Through investments in subsea cables like the Havfrue cable connecting the US, Ireland, and Denmark, and the Dunant cable connecting the eastern seaboard to the French Atlantic coast, Google Cloud customers can make use of the same powerful network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.

We live in an information age that makes it increasingly necessary for businesses to understand and incorporate technologies like AI and machine learning into their future. At Google, we embraced AI early, and it’s built into everything we do thanks to thousands of the world’s leading researchers moving our AI technologies forward every day.

To further our AI research in Europe, Google’s DeepMind recently announced a new AI lab in Paris. This adds to our increasing presence in the region, and will compliment our Dublin Advanced Solutions Lab, where companies can learn directly from Google Cloud ML engineers and build the skills they need to create and deploy ML at scale. We’re also training developers in over 20 European countries through our OnBoard events, and we offer numerous online training programs. Today, we’re also announcing the beta release of our third generation, liquid-cooled Cloud TPUs, making compute-intensive machine learning faster and more accessible to businesses worldwide.

We also continue to invest in our partnerships across EMEA. Earlier this year, we announced a global partnership with Atos to deliver hybrid cloud, machine learning and collaboration solutions to enterprise customers. Our engagements with leading systems integrators, including Deloitte, Accenture, and strategic partners like SAP have also expanded. And we were delighted that more than 1,000 people registered for our 2018 Partner Summit, which took place yesterday ahead of Next.

Compliance is top of mind for many of our customers in the region, and we remain fully committed to helping them address their security and compliance needs. This year we delivered a comprehensive set of updates to help our customers respond to the new GDPR regulations. In September, we announced that we completed a third party audit against the German Federal Office for Information Security’s Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (commonly referred to as BSI C5). And we’re continuously working to achieve and maintain validation against the rigorous global security and privacy standards that matter most to our customers.

And, of course, we continue to launch new products to support the European market. Yesterday we announced that Smart Compose is coming to Gmail on mobile (at first, a Pixel 3 exclusive), and in the coming months Smart Compose will begin supporting four new languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian.

Our goal is to make the cloud accessible to every business in EMEA. We strongly believe you possess unique advantages all your own—from comprehensive knowledge of your market to your own data sources and business goals. We want to help you build on these core assets by providing you with world class infrastructure, products and services that help you take advantage of what’s possible. To learn more, visit our pages on our regions and our customers, or tune in to our Next livestream in London.