With Google Next 2019 coming up, there are a few items I’m looking forward to hearing about.
First and foremost, I’m excited to hear from the new GCP CEO Thomas Kurian and what his vision and plans are for the organization over the next 12-18 months. I think many in the industry understand some of the steps Google needs to make to become the cloud powerhouse it desires to be, with arguably the largest being a greater focus on hybrid cloud enablement. I think we caught a glimpse of that with the Alooma acquisition. I’m hoping to hear more about the plans for Alooma, where/how it will be integrated and some roadmap details on deeper integrations across GCP services.
There are three words I expect to hear a lot of next week: simplicity, security, and automation. These are three key criteria (among other things like performance and scalability) to enabling organizations to confidently gain insight from their data better and faster than ever before. Google prides itself on being able to effectively deliver these core tenets to all organizations whether just getting started with cloud analytics or leveraging advanced AI infrastructure and capabilities.
On the analytics front, I’m looking forward to hearing about Google’s continued effort to provide an end-to-end platform. They’ve done a good job of continuing to innovate, incorporate open-source technology, and add features/functionality, across the data pipeline: ingestion with Pub/Sub and Kafka, transformation with DataFlow and Spark, and analysis with DataProc, BigQuery, and CloudML. But the one component we haven’t heard much about is something around data classification. This is essential to being able to tell the complete story.
For AI, Google will continue to push its leadership in the space. They’ll look to extend their AI democratization story further by better incorporating personas, where they fit in, and how they enable each persona to excel. I’m sure we’ll hear about customer traction and partnerships associated with Document Understanding. Iron Mountain played a major role over the last year and I’m looking forward to hearing about the progress. The same can be said for Contact Center AI, a prepackaged architecture to simplify the deployment, management, and usage of AI to satisfy customer inquiries and interactions. I would love to hear about what’s coming next in their prepackaged offerings. With video, images, and computer vision being such a major focus in AI, I’m sure we’ll hear about something new in this space too.
Last but not least is something I feel has been a challenge for Google, and that’s being able to tell an effective, complete story from integration to insight. They have the products and solutions. It starts with hybrid cloud and data migration, moves to data processing, analytics, and visualization, and eventually leads to AI. And while I would love to hear that story at Next 2019, it may still be a bit early as they first work to complete the end-to-end offerings.
Look forward to the event and if you see me around and have questions, do not hesitate to come over.
