Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian: 10 Boldest Statements From Next ’21

‘We help organizations unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combining structured and unstructured data and making data every employee‘s superpower,’ Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said during a segment on Google Cloud’s data analytics power.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian focused on new partnerships, recent customer wins and new tools for multi-cloud environments, hybrid work, cybersecurity and edge infrastructure in his keynote during the Google Cloud Next ’21 conference that runs Tuesday to Thursday.

“We help organizations unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combining structured and unstructured data and making data every employee‘s superpower,” Kurian said during a segment on Google Cloud’s data analytics power.

Later, he said: “Google‘s data cloud is the most complete and unified data and AI platform to help you manage every stage of the data life cycle, from running operational transactions to developing analytical applications. We help customers unify data lakes and warehouses as data lake houses to reduce complexity and to combine structured and unstructured data.”

Kurian discussed new partnerships with Citrix Systems and Tableau and talked about how Google Cloud is working with retail giants such as The Home Depot and Ikea. He also unveiled changes to tools such as BigQuery Omni, which just entered general availability and lets customers analyze data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Here are 10 of Kurian’s boldest statements from his keynote at Next ’21.

Customer Wins In Retail and Finance

Customers are transforming using our purpose-built industry solutions. The Home Depot, for instance, uses Contact Center AI to reduce customer resolution time by 91 million minutes. Procter & Gamble creates personalized omni-channel journeys from over 275 million consumer records. Ikea retail uses Recommendations AI to increase e-commerce click-through rates by 30 percent and increase order value by 2 percent. FIH, a Foxconn company, used Visual Inspection to identify defects 10 times more accurately.

Mr. Cooper, a leading mortgage services provider, uses Document AI to process mortgage documents 400 percent more efficiently. And Bank of New York Mellon developed a liquidity solution that predicts nearly 40 percent of security settlement failures with 90 percent accuracy. We’re helping many businesses drive durable innovation through long-term partnerships with Google’s transformation cloud.

Working With Telecom, Data Services Leaders

Leading telecommunications companies are also choosing Google Cloud. Reliance Jio, the world‘s second largest mobile carrier, is automating its 5G network. (Vodafone is processing over 1 billion network events each day. AT&T is delivering new multiaccess edge computing solutions. And (Telus is migrating critical IT and network workloads all to Google Cloud.

Leading data management companies including Databricks, Redis, Cockroach Labs, Couchbase, Elastic, InfluxData, MariaDB, MongoDB, Neo4J and SingleStore are all growing faster on Google Cloud than on any other cloud.

And they love our storage scalability and advanced infrastructure. MongoDB, for instance, has more net-new customers via Google Cloud Marketplace than on any other cloud.

Cloud Used For Drug Discovery, Government Services

Are we the best at understanding and using data in an industry? We help organizations unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combining structured and unstructured data and making data every employee‘s superpower. Using data analytics and AI together, [life sciences company] Schrödinger accelerated clinical drug discovery by 60 percent, finding new breakthroughs faster.

Like many states around the United States, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development confronted a wave of new unemployment claims. Using Google‘s data cloud, they cleared over 750,000 unemployment claims, reducing claim times from weeks to just days and dispersing over $2 billion in unemployment benefits.

Walmart is transforming the experience for the approximately 220 million shoppers around the globe who visit a Walmart store, club, or e-commerce website each week.

Google Data Cloud

Google‘s data cloud is the most complete and unified data and AI platform to help you manage every stage of the data life cycle, from running operational transactions to developing analytical applications.

We help customers unify data lakes and warehouses as data lake houses to reduce complexity and to combine structured and unstructured data. Built-in data science and AI, with support from MapReduce, [Apache] Spark and Presto, enables continuous learning and experimentation. We support real-time streaming that natively uses open-source standards like [Apache] Beam and [Apache] Flink. Google‘s data cloud is also unmatched for speed, scale, security and reliability.

BigQuery—one of the most successful and beloved data warehouse solutions, with its unique serverless approach—during a typical week, helps more than 3,000 different organizations analyze more than 200 petabytes of data. Thousands of customers use Dataproc to run Spark and Hadoop clusters easily. Spanner, a fully managed relational database with unlimited scale and multi-zone and multi-region consistency, serves more than 1 billion requests per second and provides a five-nines [99.999 percent] SLA [service-level agreement].

Google data cloud’s Vertex AI offers the AI pioneered at Google Research and [Alphabet subsidiary] DeepMind so that every data scientist and ML engineer can now build, deploy and scale AI models faster and with 80 percent less code using AI the same way Google does,” Kurian said. “For instance, GE Appliances, an appliance manufacturing leader for more than a century, is using Google Cloud, including AI at the edge, to build innovative digital products with over-the-air updates.

New Partnership With Tableau

Google‘s Data Cloud is more open-standards based. You can choose from Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB or migrate from Oracle or SQL Server.

And we have strategic partners with leading data driven applications. For instance C3 AI has made its entire lineup of AI-based applications available on Google Cloud. Our customers can analyze, govern and visualize data from many databases and storage systems on Google or other clouds, including all of Google‘s databases, Google Sheets and BigQuery using Looker, our premier BI and embedded analytics solution.

Today, we‘re thrilled and excited to announce that we’ll be integrating Tableau, a leader in data visualization, with Looker, Google Sheets, and BigQuery. Tableau customers will soon be able to use Looker’s semantic model, enabling new levels of data governance and access to data.

New Citrix Partnership

I want to step aside for just a minute and tell you about a hidden secret in our portfolio products: AppSheet, our no-code platform that makes it easy for everyone, not just professional developers, to build amazing apps and workflows. [Google bought AppSheet in January 2020.]

For instance, property managers at [France-based retail company] Carrefour properties used AppSheet to build a mobile app to log, track and resolve problems with headquarters, replacing a multistep manual process.

We‘re also partnering with [virtualization and cloud services company] Citrix because employees sometimes need access to Windows and Mac OS applications and desktops directly served from the cloud. We‘re expanding our partnership with Citrix today to deliver an integrated Desktop-as-a-Service solution purpose-built on Google Cloud.

New Cybereason Partnership, Cybersecurity Action Team

We keep customers safe by eliminating software supply chain vulnerabilities. Over the past two decades, we pioneered an approach to secure our own software supply chain. We are now making that technology available through the SLSA open-source framework and as managed services in our cloud to help you secure your own software supply chain.

We keep customers safe by integrating Chronicle’s threat detection capability with our Security Command Center, allowing you to respond faster to potential risks. And we keep customers safe by bringing our security expertise to you with our Google Cybersecurity Action Team, a team of our leading security experts who can help shape your security transformation from your very first implementation through responding to a major incident and engineering new solutions as needs change.

Finally, we continue to expand our security ecosystem with companies like Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Talus and so many more. Today, I‘d like to welcome a new security partner, Cybereason, with whom we are collaborating to deliver a new extended detection and response offering that will combine Chronicle’s capability with Cybereason’s MalOps engine for faster, easier threat detection and response.

Our products, our new Cybersecurity Action Team and our partnerships all make the world safer from cyberthreats.

Battle Over Migrations, Multi-Cloud

Customers choose our open cloud infrastructure for three main reasons. First, we make your path to migrate and modernize using cloud easy with migration tools, new serverless and container capabilities and managed services as your developers spend more time building experiences that your customers love.

Second, we offer transformative capabilities with cutting-edge performance and security. Our network offers three times the throughput of other cloud providers.

Third, we remain and were the very first and only cloud provider with a clear multi-cloud strategy. We provide you with a consistent developer experience, built on open source, to write once and deploy anywhere.

Many customers, like Plaid, a financial services leader, use Anthos to deploy, operate and manage applications across multiple clouds. Recently, we introduced Anthos for virtual machines, standardizing the way that you manage applications across both virtual machines and containers.

For multi-cloud data, BigQuery Omni lets customers analyze data across Google Cloud, AWS and Azure. With it, Johnson & Johnson, for instance, was able to combine data in Google Cloud and AWS S3 [Amazon Simple Storage Service] using BigQuery Omni without needing to migrate data.

Customers also want to expand where they use Google Cloud, whether in their private data centers or out on the edge. For instance, some workloads cannot move to the public cloud entirely due to the need for large amounts of local data processing, extremely low latency or strict regulations. To solve these challenges, we‘re announcing today Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of hardware and software solutions that extend our infrastructure to the edge and even into your own data center.

Hybrid Work Enablement

Hybrid is redefining how we all work, making it less about where we work, but more about the quality of our experience. Studies estimate that more than 48 percent of employees will work remotely post-COVID. Google Workspace is the best platform for hybrid work with simple, powerful and secure tools to help people communicate and collaborate with one another, no matter where they are.

We introduced Smart Canvas to help content creators remove friction from workflows and enable teams to stay connected outside of meetings to foster well-being and reduce video call fatigue. We made communication and collaboration completely seamless. For instance, users can easily present and collaborate in meetings, create meeting notes from the Calendar, present in Meet directly from Docs, Sheets or Slides and collaborate directly from Chat and Spaces.

We optimized collaboration from all mobile devices to provide great experiences for frontline workers, who make up 80 percent of the global workforce. One of America‘s largest hospital systems, CommonSpirit Health, is advancing its mission during the pandemic by making its frontline doctors and nurses productive with Google Workspace.

Since hybrid work has removed the notion of a physical location for work, Google Workspace created Spaces [formerly called Rooms], a unified digital location for work. Today, more than 3 billion users move securely and seamlessly between Mail, Chat, Audio, Video and now Spaces.

And you, too, can choose among the over 5,300 public apps in our marketplace. And you can also add thousands of private apps to enhance your workspace.

BeyondCorp Expansion

As more digital users access more data for more locations, the risk of cybersecurity breaches is accelerating. By pioneering new approaches to security, Google keeps more people safe online than anyone else in the world.

Take for instance JetBlue. It‘s keeping its system secure, protecting the data of all its travelers and modernizing its security operations using Chronicle to detect threats across petabytes of security telemetry, eliminating data blind spots.

CommenceBank, one of Germany‘s largest banks, is using our new Certificate Authority Service to verify machine and workload identity, improving security, simplifying operations, eliminating entire classes of threats.

Secure by default drives customers to choose Google Cloud. First, we‘ve implemented zero trust at the core of our services and our operations, enabling you to trust nothing. Second, we built cloud-scale threat detection and response, allowing you to detect everything. And third, we know it’s not just about tools. We provide the advisory services you need to transform security operations. We keep customers safe with BeyondCorp enterprise, which enables zero trust access for all users.

Today, we‘re expanding BeyondCorp to all your applications: Modern and legacy, web and desktop, and even to production environments.