Google Cloud Kicks off Next ’21: Helping Customers Solve for What’s Next

New customers, partners, and innovations across data, open infrastructure, collaboration, security, and sustainability headline Google Cloud’s annual conference

Next ’21, Google Cloud announced a series of new customer wins, partnerships, products, and services to enable organizations to transform their businesses. Google Cloud’s announcements highlight three unique capabilities that help customers and partners succeed in the era of cloud transformation: first, Google Cloud Platform, which is designed and built to help organizations digitize in an open and secure way; second, Google’s deep and broad ecosystem of consumer services and devices, which gives organizations the ability to uniquely connect their enterprise ecosystem with the consumer ecosystem; and third, the company’s comprehensive security offerings that help organizations protect their digital assets and users.

“Each year at Next we celebrate the achievements of our customers and partners, and the many ways they have transformed their businesses digitally,” said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO. “We also look forward to sharing our latest cloud innovations and providing a view into the future—what we think will drive business transformation for the decades to come.”

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Customer Momentum Across Every Geography and Industry
Businesses of all sizes, spanning every industry—from digital natives to established multinationals—are leveraging Google Cloud’s products and services to help them digitally transform. Building upon recent momentum with leading organizations like Casino Group, Energizer, Ford, HSBC, Reliance Jio, Scotiabank, Univision, U.S. Air Force, and Wells Fargo, as well as fast-growing technology startups AppLovin, BlueZoo, Cue Health, Dapper Labs, and Outdoorsy, Google Cloud today announced several net-new relationships with DPDHL, General Mills, Siemens Energy, Walmart, and Wendy’s.

Extending Customer Success Through New Innovations and Partnerships
Continuous innovation is a hallmark of the cloud. Today, Google Cloud announced a number of new partnerships, products, and services that extend its ability to help organizations in every industry accelerate their cloud journeys:

A unified data, analytics, and AI portfolio
Customers turn to Google Cloud products for unmatched speed, scale, security, and reliability to build their data clouds. These products enable organizations of all sizes to unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combine unstructured and structured data, and make insights accessible to every employee. New innovations announced today include:

• Vertex AI Workbench, which provides a unified user experience to build and deploy ML models faster; the general availability of BigQuery Omni, which enables customers to run cross-cloud analytics with data in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure; Sparkon Google Cloud, the industry’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service; and a new PostgreSQL interface for Cloud Spanner.
• Additionally, to help organizations make better decisions with real-time data, Google Cloud announced partnerships with Collibra, Databricks, Fivetran, Informatica, Tableau, and Trifacta.

An open cloud that runs anywhere
Organizations are turning to Google Cloud because of its cutting-edge performance, migration tools, and serverless and container capabilities that make modernization easy. Google Cloud offers a multi-cloud strategy and consistent developer experience, built on open source, that allows customers to write once and deploy anywhere. To accelerate cloud deployments regardless of location, Google Cloud today announced:

• Google Distributed Cloud,which extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to edge locations and customer data centers with an Anthos-managed control plane.
• An expanded partnership with NetApp, who is our primary partner supporting Google Distributed Cloud’s storage infrastructure.
• Elastic and MongoDB are also making their support for Google Private Service Connect generally available, allowing customers to privately, securely, and quickly connect their cloud networks to services like Elastic Cloud and MongoDB Atlas.

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Collaboration across every facet of the hybrid workplace 
Google Cloud is committed to providing services, products, and partnerships that will help enable secure and productive hybrid work for organizations of all types. Google Workspace enables more than 3 billion users to communicate and collaborate, regardless of where they are, by creating a digital location for work. It helps increase productivity through assistive tools like Smart Canvas, and delivers a seamless user experience across products like Docs, Gmail, Meet, and Chat to address the unique requirements of front-line workers. Today, Google Cloud is announcing:

• A new Atlassian Jira integration that helps people easily create new tickets and monitor issues within the platform.
• A new Gmail AppSheet integration that allows anyone—even non-coders—to build email apps for tasks like budget approvals, vacation requests and more.
• An expanded partnership with Citrix to ensure that distributed and hybrid workers have easy, secure, and low-latency access to virtualized applications and desktops from anywhere, with management controls from Citrix and Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.
• New security innovations in Google Workspace, including client-side encryption for Meet that gives customers control over encryption keys, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Chat to prevent sensitive information from leaking outside an organization.

Keeping users, applications, and data safe online
Whether it’s securely operating global services like Google Workspace, Gmail, and YouTube, eliminating vulnerabilities with our Zero Trust approach, or leveraging data analytics and machine learning for threat detection, Google has decades of experience in pioneering differentiated approaches to security. To address the unprecedented security challenges that organizations face today, Google Cloud is making two announcements:

• The new Google Cybersecurity Action Team comprised of experts from across Google who will leverage Google’s own security best practices to guide, educate, and inform organizations. From developing a roadmap and implementation, to responding to a major incident, to engineering new solutions as the threat landscape changes, this team will help shape customers’ security transformations.
• The new Work Safer program will help organizations, especially those without in-house security expertise, quickly achieve a stronger security posture in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer provides best-in-class security for email, meetings, messaging and more by bringing Google Workspace together with other industry-leading Google products and solutions from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

Scaling the Cleanest Cloud in the Industry
Last year, Google made its biggest sustainability commitment yet: to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy across its offices and data centers by 2030. And earlier this year, Google Cloud introduced a way for customers to choose the cleanest regions to run their workloads. Today, the company is announcing an expansion of its carbon-free solutions portfolio and partnerships that will help customers reduce their carbon footprints:

• Carbon Footprint is a new tool that reports on the carbon emissions associated with each customer’s Google Cloud Platform usage, enabling them to measure, track, and report on the progress against their climate goals. It is available to every user in the Google Cloud Console, at no charge.
• Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify and flag projects that are likely abandoned, so that organizations can choose to easily delete them, in turn saving money and mitigating security risks. Customers will soon be able to estimate the carbon emissions saved by removing these idle resources.
• Google Earth Engine is now available in preview as part of Google Cloud Platform. Combined with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery, Cloud AI, and Google Maps Platform, Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor, and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, helping them save on operational costs, mitigate, and better manage risks—all to help them become more resilient to climate change threats.
• A new partnership initiative with leading data and application providers to help global businesses and governments accelerate their sustainability programs and better understand the impacts of climate change. Carto, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet will bring their core applications and more than 50 petabytes of satellite imagery, demographics, mobility, and telematics data to Google Cloud, helping customers deploy and access applications and data at global scale and make more data-driven decisions with BigQuery and Earth Engine.

All of this innovation is taking place on Google Cloud’s leading infrastructure, which delivers the capacity and performance customers need. This year, Google Cloud opened four new regions in Warsaw, Delhi, Melbourne, and Toronto. Now, with its global footprint of 28 regions with multiple availability zones, Google Cloud has the largest and lowest latency network among hyperscale cloud providers. The company has also announced 10 future regions in Berlin-Brandenburg; Columbus, Ohio; Israel; Madrid; Milan; Paris; Santiago; Saudi Arabia; and Turin.

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