Google Next Day One Recap: Google Cloud Is Enterprise Ready

Google Cloud may only be the third-largest cloud provider, but you might not know it from the scene at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco.

’This is Google’s biggest event ever,’ said Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene during her keynote on Tuesday.

Greene used her time in the spotlight on Tuesday to make it known: Google Cloud is enterprise ready.

’If you think about it, Google is an enterprise company but we're just a very modern enterprise company,’ said Greene. To prove her point, she invited Target CIO Mike McNamara on-stage to discuss why the retail giant chose Google Cloud.

’At the end of the day, it wasn’t me. It was the engineers,’ said McNamara.

Technology partners like business intelligence software and big data analytics platform Looker say they’re excited to see Google Cloud investing in the right places.

’The number of enterprises that are just now thinking about the shift to the cloud is staggering, so I think they recognize there’s enormous opportunity here,’ said Daniel Mintz, chief data evangelist at Looker.

The big announcement on Tuesday was the release of the Cloud Services Platform. The integrated family of cloud services combines open source with Google's infrastructure, operations and security practices to let customers improve speed and reliability, maintain governance at scale and benefit from an open ecosystem. Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the benefits of open platforms during a brief appearance.

’And when we say opening up, we really mean opening it. We create open platforms and share our technology because it gets us to better ideas faster,’ said Pichai.

The services fold Google’s Kubernetes platform and its recently developed open source platform Istio, into a single service. The services can be deployed on both the Google Cloud Platform and in on-premise environments.

’The fact that Google Cloud can support hybrid-type environments is really great for customers as they move along their journey. Google and their partners, of which we are one, can hand hold them through that,’ said Vanessa Simmons, vice-president of business development at Pythian, an IT consulting and managed services company based in Canada.

The conference continues until Thursday, July 27.