As the ESG team gears up to attend Google NEXT, these are some of the hot spots we will be focused on:
- The first and most obvious will be to see what stakes Thomas Kurian is driving into the ground to help drive Google Cloud execution in the market and candidly to see how they intend to close the gap with AWS and Microsoft Azure.
- Google NEXT has historically scored an A on technology and a C on a clearly defined message and execution strategy into the enterprise. My observation is that attendees participate in Google NEXT because they see great things with the technology but have historically walked away without a clear path to simple things that are highly relevant to enterprise IT–e.g., virtual machine migration, basic cloud readiness assessment, and relevance of legacy IT that is anchored to on-prem infrastructure and process.
- The market appeal to companies that are not digital-native or born in the cloud. Kudos to Google for sharing some fascinating customer success stories at NEXT, but it would be valuable to see how Google plans to address business in the financial services industry, retail customers that want to run away from AWS, and common scenarios where business still own and maintain multiple data centers. How can Google help?
I’m positive the ESG team and attendees at NEXT will be fascinated by the technology, but the magic for Google will be for attendees to get back to work the following week and clearly see where they can snap Google Cloud into their short term plans and long term strategies. We consistently hear that Google has some of the best tech, but how will this tech lure new customers and close the gap with the competition?
Please stay tuned into ESG as we provide on-site insight via our social channels, record on-site videos, and debrief our clients on Google NEXT 2019.
