Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s 9 Boldest Statements At Next ’19 UK

'We give you this platform to paint a new vision for your company, to imagine what was once considered impossible and to transform the way you serve customers in every industry,' says Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian tipped his hat to Googlers and partners for innovations helping fuel the cloud computing provider’s drive to woo enterprise customers at the sold-out Next ’19 UK conference in London today.

Companies including Irving, Texas-based healthcare giant McKesson, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and London retailer John Lewis Partnership provided customer testimonials on how Google Cloud is helping to transform their businesses.

Kurian and his colleagues at the Mountain View, Calif.-based technology giant unveiled new products and services including security offerings, Explainable AI (artificial intelligence), Bare Metal Solution, which consists of all the infrastructure that customers need to run specialized workloads such as Oracle Database close to Google Cloud, and Smart Compose for Google Docs.

“You are going to be excited to know that thousands of Googlers are working hard every day to give you this platform to help you innovate,” Kurian said. “We give you this platform to paint a new vision for your company -- to imagine what was once considered impossible, and to transform the way you serve customers in every industry. We're investing very aggressively to ensure that you have the right sales resources, customer service resources, as well as product innovations, to take your organization into the future.”

Here's an edited look at what Kurian shared with Next ‘19 UK attendees at ExCeL London, in his own words.

Google Cloud’s Mission

Our mission at Google Cloud is to enable organizations around the world to transform their business using digital technology and to do so by offering the best infrastructure, a digital transformation platform and industry-specific solutions to help you transform your organization as well as to infuse you with our expertise and our culture to help you create that magic. We do so by offering you three important key components. First, Infrastructure as a Service. Second, our digital transformation platform and third, industry solutions. Our foundation is Infrastructure as a Service. We look at it as offering you six important capabilities: compute, storage, Network as a Service protected by new offerings that we're introducing today in the security area, deployable either in Google's cloud regions, or in your premise -- hybrid -- or increasingly out in the telecommunications network -- the edge. The foundation of all of this is our regions. We're live in 20 regions around the world and 61 availability zones. Six of those are here in Europe, and we're…introducing five new regions (under previously announced plans to open data centers in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Warsaw, Jakarta and Seoul). This is part of a much longer strategy to roll out many more regions in different parts of the world to bring you our infrastructure so that you can use it effectively.

Google’s Renewable Energy Commitment

Our regions are not only very powerful and capable, but also built on a foundation that advances renewables energy. Our CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently announced that Google has been a carbon-neutral company since 2007. When you move workload to our cloud, you're moving workload onto a backbone that is built by the largest corporate renewable energy company in the world: Google. So not only are you moving workloads to an amazing platform, but you're also doing good for the planet.

What Google Is Doing For European Customers

Let's start by understanding what we're doing for European customers, in particular. Recognizing that as cloud becomes a more central piece of IT infrastructure around the world, we're introducing a number of commitments. (They allow) you, first of all, to store your data in Europe -- not just the primary copy, but any secondary backups and all copies of data. You manage your own encryption key. You can keep that key of sight from Google itself. And with a new product we're announcing here at Cloud Next, you can deny Google the ability to decrypt your data for any reason. You have sole control of where your data sits, how it's encrypted and who has access to it. In addition, you can also require Google to ask you approval before any operators access your data. For instance, if you want us to help debug something or help clean up your data for you, you can require us to ask you permission before anybody does anything. And when you grant us permission to do so, we give you an audit record of every operation our operators are conducting, so you can see exactly what they're doing and why. And finally, you can also constrain us to ensure that users and administrators supporting your systems are only doing so from within Europe. So we're giving...European customers a cloud that helps you control where your data sits, who accesses is it, who operates it, and it's designed to meet the strictest regulatory requirements here in Europe. The reason we're doing this is that customers are moving more and more mission-critical workloads to our infrastructure.

Google Cloud’s Acquisition Of CloudSimple

We're announcing today a number of new offerings in compute, new compute VMs (virtual machines) optimized in both AMD and Intel processors, faster storage offerings and two really great network offerings -- network intelligence that lets you look at global traffic patterns on the network accessing your systems, and packet mirroring that will allow you to get better reliability in the infrastructure. They're all part of our commitment to give you a secure, reliable, high-performance infrastructure to run both our application workloads as well as partner applications. If you're running VMware on your premise, we're announcing today a new offering to allow you to move VMware workloads to the cloud. You can migrate your VMware workload as is to the cloud. You can use your existing VMware tools, processes and operational practices to run these workloads in the cloud. Not only does it allow you to migrate applications unchanged, you can also do so while maintaining business continuity. And we're doing this through an acquisition we announced earlier this week by acquiring CloudSimple. CloudSimple is now part of Google Cloud. They're recognized worldwide as experts in running VMware, and they have proven technology to let you move VMware workloads to our cloud.

New Cloud Acceleration Program

Many companies run SAP applications in our cloud, because it lets you upgrade your SAP systems without downtime. You can run them with excellent performance. You can patch your systems and maintain business continuity without taking any downtime, and you can improve the information that you get from SAP by using Google's analytic tools and our machine learning technology. We're introducing a new program…called the SAP Cloud Acceleration Program. It's a program we're announcing with a variety of partners -- Atos, Accenture, Deloitte and several others -- to move workloads to the cloud at an extraordinarily attractive price, to run them in our cloud at an extraordinary attractive price, and with new support offerings, including (SAP) MaxAttention, to ensure you get the best reliability in running a mission-critical workload like SAP.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service

Another workload that we're announcing a solution for today is NetApp. NetApp offers a new service: the Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Platform. We're announcing general availability, including right here in London. So if you run NetApp storage on your premise, Cloud Volumes is a full hybrid cloud storage solution. You can move data from NetApp storage on your premise to our cloud. You can migrate applications that run on NetApp without any change to the cloud. You can run them in production, and you can do so while maintaining business continuity.

Atos Workplace As A Service

We're announcing today a new bare metal offering (Bare Metal Solution) to run raw servers running SAP, VMware and Oracle, for instance. You can migrate existing enterprise licenses to the cloud, and you get great performance and scalability. This is a new offering we're introducing in partnership with Atos. They're also offering a broad set of services, including Database as a Service, a new offering called Workplace as a Service (Google Edition, inclusive of G Suite and Chromebooks)...and running SAP, as well as doing data center exits.

Explainable AI

There are people who use our data management infrastructure for AI and machine learning. We offer four important capabilities: a platform, AI building blocks, an AI Hub, which provides one-click deployment of models, and AutoML, (which) makes it much easier for people to build AI models. To make it even easier for customers to adopt AI, we're introducing a variety of solutions -- horizontal solutions like Contact Center AI and Document AI, as well as industry-specific solutions based on Google's AI expertise. One of the important things we're announcing here at Cloud Next is a solution called Explainable AI. Explainable AI allows you, a customer, who is using AI in an enterprise context or an enterprise business process, to understand why the AI infrastructure generated a particular outcome. So for instance, if you're using AI for credit scoring, you want to be able to understand why didn't the model reject a particular credit application and accept another one. Explainable AI provides you the ability to understand that.

Smart Compose For Google Docs

G Suite is used by many people around the world for collaboration. People love this concept called Smart Compose in Gmail, where, (using Google AI), the system suggests a reply for you and makes it much easier for you to compose email. We're now bringing Smart Compose to Google Docs to make you more productive when you're writing documents and collaborating with one another. We've also integrated all the elements of our collaboration tools into a single workspace. Because of these advances today, 5 million companies pay to use G Suite, and we have over a billion people using our Drive and 1.5 billion people every day using Gmail. You could be one of them.