Google Cloud NEXT London 2017 Round Up by EXPRE Cloud|
Google Cloud NEXT is now fast becoming a common occurrence in the London tech scene, with the latest conference hosting over 4500 attendees at London Excel.
The peace and sheer scale of innovation currently running at Google is unbelievable. Growth in revenues is closely followed by mesmerising product and feature release frequency. It was great to experience some of the brightest minds in cloud computing during the two days of knowledge sharing and innovation.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the key concepts and developments we managed to pick up on. However, be rest assured that we’ve probably missed quite a few, and below are only from the sessions we attended.
Open Cloud
A very inspiring talk on Open Cloud Initiative by Sam Ramji. Touching on Google’s commitment to open standards, open code and open ecosystem. Sam talked about changes in digital economy, gave insights into trends and opportunities for businesses to capitalise on Google APIs. Most importantly, he highlighted Google’s effort to the cloud open. Sam is the new VP of Product Management for Google Cloud (as of November 2016) and former CEO of open-source platform for the Foundry Foundation.
Kubernetes
Containers, unified environments and portability are really gaining momentum. With Kubernetes at the forefront, and more and more projects embarked on to manage their clouds through a single, open platform. Qucik check of Google Trends for this platform confirms the popularity of this approach.
Machine Learning APIs
From fraud prevention success of Ravelin, through vision and video APIs and ease of creating and setting up your machine learning tasks on Google Cloud is amazing. Simple task of smart image tagging is now also available for videos. Google Cloud Video Intelligence API allows you to automatically analyse and classify library. Recognise and contextually tag your content down to the second. Search for “Paris in spring” and get all videos you’ve ever produced along with the min:sec location of the scenes. Brilliant.
Spanner
Finally, a saleable multi-region relational SQL database is here. This can be a real game changer. We will be testing the feasibility of running some of our projects using Spanner as soon as it’s out of Beta.
Cloud Pricing
Google makes a compelling case with the automated price reduction for continuous use. As well as various other price promises and competitive comparison to other cloud providers.
GDPR compliance
Timeline and privacy APIs. Great innovations across the privacy spectrum. Allowing selective data redaction with Data Loss Prevention API. Effectively anonymise customer details on the fly, even in images.
G Suite Improvements
This was by far one of the most impressive of the news. The development effort that goes into the creation of the seemingly never-ending list of improvements is surprising. Not entirely sure how this looks like across the pond in G Suite main 365 competition. But we definitely feel we are getting our three to six pounds per user per month back in new features.
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Google App Maker
Soon available to all G Suite Business users. App Maker allows business to user interfaces with low code efforts. Workflows currently running in Google Forms and Sheets can be easily converted into web apps with little or no coding. Simple drag and drop interface can help to replace clunky PO forms and lengthy time-sheet.
Gmail Addons
Expanding and integrating functionality of Gmail was also an interesting area. Since majority of the working day is spent with Gmail interface, this one is key. With developer preview underway, you can now add to your workflow, without closing your email. Better yet, you only have to code it once to work in browser and on your employees’ smartphones.
Improved Hangouts
Being long fans of Webex, JoinMe and GoToMeeting, we are now fully converted to Hangouts. Google really got their game on with the new interface and the ease of setting up and inviting attendees. As well as having a little stab at Slack with the chat, this now seems like a great all-in-one solution. Check out the new Hangouts.
Jamboard
Ordering a Jamboard as soon as it’s out – check it out, Minority Report like collaboration with deep real-time G Suite integration.
add finally…
@meet
Got to try this one out with my team, type a couple of words and get a meeting automatically setup in seconds. See the new Hangouts Chat.
Check out EXPRE’s Cloud Services – leverage all this amazing innovations and move your business to the Google Cloud and G Suite. Get in touch today!
