Insights from Google Next ‘18
Beanfield Metroconnect made the journey to San Francisco this year to join some of our closest partners, customers, and colleagues from the Google Cloud Toronto team at the Moscone Center for a week of learning, networking, and business development. Here are some of the highlights from our week:
Google Cloud Partner Summit
WANTED: Cloud Integration Service Partners
The conference kicked off with the Google Cloud Partner Summit. The highlight of the first day for Beanfield was the Cloud Maturity presentation addressing the learning curve companies face on their journey from the colo to the cloud. As a telco partner delivering direct connectivity products, in this case, Google Cloud Interconnect, we often observe a knowledge gap that can slow or halt migration projects. The Cloud Maturity presentation defined the specific learning objectives and outsourcing partner roles needed to close those gaps. Our role in the cloud journey is the most straightforward part of the cloud migration process. Successful migrations require expert knowledge of data centre networking, legacy virtualization services, as well as expert level GCP platform knowledge and migration experience. Once the lift-and-shift is complete it’s time to start the optimization journey, then the autoscaling journey, etc. — great digital transformation processes will continuously evolve. Leading up to the conference we hoped to help our customers by growing our partner network, and Google Next brought Beanfield Metroconnect together with some fantastic Canadian companies including Pythian, Arctiq, Sourced, Oncore, StorageASP, and SIRTNet. Canada has a capable network of cloud integration providers, and we look forward to growing our relationships with the amazing companies we met in San Francisco.
The Multi-Cloud Future
Matt Simpson and the Megaport Team are one of Beanfield’s strategic partners, and Matt was one of our favourite keynote speakers at Next. The Megaport presentation and demo at the “Enterprise Connectivity to GCP using Partners” showcased the Megaport Cloud Exchange and Megaport Cloud Router products as the leading edge multi-cloud connectivity solution on the market, and will undoubtedly change how companies access multi-cloud services. Beanfield shares the Megaport vision for the multi-cloud revolution, and together we are already empowering customers in Montreal and Toronto to skip the colocation facility or remove large server rooms.
Congratulations to Matt and Megaport for a job well done!
Favourite Breakout Sessions
The three following days of the conference included a staggering number of informative and amazing breakout sessions. Our schedule was non-stop running between Moscone South, Moscone West, and the AMC Metreon 16 movie theatres converted for conference presentations. There was an incredible number of Canadian companies presenting at Next including Optiva, Scotiabank, and ATB, all with fully booked rooms requiring waitlists for attendees arriving even a minute late. Google has provided videos of most of the sessions, here were some of the highlights:
Media & Entertainment — Cloud Rendering:
Beanfield and one of our closest partners from Toronto, Wayne Kim CEO of SIRTNet, attended the renderfarm demo from the Google Zync team. SIRTNet provides Renderblade-as-a-Service to the Toronto film and television community. The Zync platform was interesting, and Wayne will be working with Beanfield and Google Cloud Toronto to prepare a demo for our local market showcasing the advantages and cost saves of GPU rendering versus CPU rendering for Tractor managed RenderMan workloads. The Zync demo below is an exciting preview of the forthcoming service.
Google Cloud Spanner & Optiva Inc.:
Hybrid Cloud Must Watch:
Cloud Cost Control:
GCP Security:
Disaster Recovery:
Final Thoughts
Google’s commitment and drive for cloud dominance were evident last week, and their message is clear: GCP is enterprise-ready, gaining momentum, and Canadian institutions like Scotiabank, Optiva, ATB and many more will be following Google Canada to the cloud. We want to thank the Google Toronto team and Arun Parmar in particular for making this all happen. Google Next 18 was the first Google Cloud conference Beanfield Metroconnect has attended, and we are enthusiastically looking forward to 2019 conference.
See you next year!
About the Author:
Daniel Simmons is the Director of Cloud Strategy at Beanfield Metroconnect, a cloud product manager, cloud evangelist, and a solution architect for cloud and data centre services. He lives in Toronto with his partner and dog.
