Google Cloud Next ’22 Kicks Off With Goodies

Google Cloud announced Next ’22 new customer wins, partnerships, and product innovations to help organisations of all sizes, across every industry, adapt to rapidly changing customer expectations and shifting global markets.

“This year’s event takes place at an inflection point in the cloud industry,” said Niral Patel, Director of Google Cloud Africa. “Data and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming everything around us, and open, connected ecosystems are essential to everything we do. This week, we are proud to announce cloud innovations that help businesses embrace openness and interoperability, in addition to celebrating the incredible achievements of our customers and partners.”

At Next ’22, Google Cloud announced hundreds of new innovations and partnerships across its portfolio, which includes a data cloud for organisations to better understand their data and automate core processes; an open infrastructure cloud to help modernise legacy information systems and build new applications that are reliable and scalable; a trusted cloud to protect users, applications, and data from growing cyber threats; and a collaboration cloud to enable modern, secure communication and collaboration.

Customers want to utilise their data from all sources, in all storage formats, and across multiple styles of analysis. Google Cloud announced significant steps to provide the most open, extensible, and powerful data cloud in the industry, along with new applications and services to put powerful, applied Google AI technology in the hands of more data specialists. Innovations announced today include:

Big Query support for unstructured data, a new capability that will significantly expand the ability for people to analyze all types of data.
Support for new data formats, including Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, and Apache Hudi, as well as a new integrated experience in BigQuery for Apache Spark.
Looker Studio, a complete enterprise business intelligence suite based on the unification of Looker and Google Data Studio. Google Cloud is also introducing Looker Studio Pro to provide organizations support and key governance capabilities.
Translation Hub, a new enterprise-scale translation AI Agent for self-serve document translation, which lets organizations cost-effectively localize content in more than 135 languages. Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Afrikaans are from the 135 languages available in the hub.
Vertex AI Vision, a new service that makes powerful computer vision and image recognition AI more accessible to data practitioners. It also reduces the time to create computer vision applications from days to minutes at one-tenth the cost of current offerings.
Expanded integrations with many of the most popular enterprise data platforms, including Collibra, Elastic, MongoDB, Palantir Foundry, and ServiceNow—to help remove barriers between data, give customers more choice, and prevent data lock-in.

To better help organisations of all types and sizes run on Google Cloud, at the edge, or in their data centers, the company is announcing a series of infrastructure and migration updates, including:

Five new Google Cloud regions coming to Austria, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.
Infrastructure enhancements tailored to customers’ workloads, including the C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google’s custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU), and general availability of TPU v4, which runs large-scale training workloads up to 80 per cent faster and up to 50 per cent cheaper.
Anthos e nhancements, including a more robust user interface, an upgraded fleet management experience, and the general availability of virtual machine support on Anthos clusters for retail edge environments.
Dual Run, which will help remove the most common roadblocks from migrating 20+ year old mainframes into the cloud.
Migration Center, which brings assessment, planning, migration, and modernization tooling together in one location so organizations can progress faster through their migration journey.
OpenXLA Project, a new open-source ecosystem of ML technologies developed by Google, AMD, Arm, Intel, Meta, NVIDIA, and more.

To help hybrid teams communicate and collaborate, create and share ideas, and get work done safely from anywhere, Google Cloud today announced new innovations in Google Workspace and its partner ecosystem that will help organizations transform the way they work, including:

New capabilities in Google Meet, such as speaker spotlight, which enables presenters to embed their video directly in Google Slides, and adaptive framing with AI-powered cameras from Huddly and Logitech that let everyone in a conference room be seen clearly.
Smart canvas enhancements with custom building blocks in Google Docs, enabling companies to build their own templates that can be easily accessed by all users, and smart chips for third-party applications, including AODocs, Atlassian, Asana, Figma, Miro, Tableau, and ZenDesk, so people can view and engage with rich third-party data without switching tabs or context.
New security enhancements, including data loss prevention (DLP) rules for Chat and the extension of Client Side Encryption to Gmail and Calendar to help keep people and data safe across more of the apps teams use on a day-to-day basis.
New APIs for Meet and Chat, giving programmatic access to common functions like creating and starting meetings or initiating messages directly from a third-party app. Asana, Lumapps, and ZenDesk will be the first partners to leverage these in their apps. Developers can also embed their app directly into the Meet experience with a new Meet add-on SDK.

The rise of cybersecurity threats has every company rethinking their security posture. With the recent acquisition of Mandiant, Google Cloud is extending its cybersecurity leadership and expertise to help customers stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle. This week, the company is announcing new products, partnerships, and solutions to build the most open and extensible trusted cloud offering, including:

Chronicle Security Operations, a modern, cloud-born software suite that better enables cybersecurity teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats with the speed, scale, and intelligence of Google.
Confidential Space, a new solution in the Confidential Computing portfolio, that allows organizations to perform tasks such as joint data analysis and machine learning (ML) model training while ensuring the data they own can stay protected from their partners.
Google Cloud Ready – Sovereign Cloud, a new program for partners and customers to advance digital sovereignty and address growing demand for cloud solutions with the highest levels of control, transparency, and sovereignty.
Software Delivery Shield, a fully managed, end-to-end software supply chain security solution to help customers better protect the integrity of the software that underpins their business.
A significant expansion of the company’s trusted cloud ecosystem, featuring new integrations and offerings with more than 20 partners focused on digital sovereignty and cybersecurity.

The combination of Google’s technical strengths, backed by its unique scale and deep experience in connecting that technology with consumer products and ecosystems, enables Google Cloud to put the tools of tomorrow in the hands of organizations today. New developments announced at Next include:

Project Starline, which creates a 3D model of a person, making it feel like they are sitting in the same room, will enter its next phase of testing with an early access program with enterprise partners. Starting this year, Google Cloud will deploy units in select partner offices for regular testing to see how Project Starline can help people form strong ties with one another, no matter where they are in the world.
A strategic partnership with Coinbase will help serve the growing Web3 ecosystem and its developers. Google’s partnership with Coinbase will make it easier for customers to take advantage of Google Cloud’s scalability, reliability, security, and data services, so Web3 founders and developers can focus on innovation. It also builds on recent Web3 announcements with Nansen, BNB Chain, Sky Mavis, and NEAR Protocol.

The company also announced that Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is now generally available, and provided at no cost for every customer in the cloud console. In addition, eco-friendly routing is coming soon to the Google Maps Platform for developers, to help ridesharing and delivery companies embed eco-friendly routes into their driver applications.

And, earlier this year, Google announced the Google Cloud Ready – Sustainability designation to better scale its efforts and help global businesses and governments accelerate their sustainability programmes. Since that announcement, more than 20 partners have achieved the designation.

For more on Google Cloud announcements during Next, please visit the Google Cloud blog or press corner.