Why BigQuery Omni is a Big Deal
Google Cloud’s bet on an open platform is starting to materialize with Anthos and BigQuery Omni.
Three years ago, I started (and sadly never finished) a series called Platform Wars (Part I, Part II), evaluating the tech giants and their strategies in the age of artificial intelligence. In my piece on Google, I explained Google’s shift to an AI-first company, and why Kubernetes was a crucial part of Google’s strategy to compete in the enterprise cloud market. Fast forward two years, Google Cloud reported meaningful growth, but still stood a distant third to AWS and Azure. Thomas Kurian, a former Oracle exec, was brought in to replace Diane Greene, carrying with him a vision for a multi-cloud strategy. Then, a year ago, Google Cloud introduced Anthos, a Kubernetes-based, open platform to extend Google’s cloud services to hybrid (i.e. on-prem, multi-cloud) environments. It materialized Kurian’s vision into a product, which Ben Thompson noted in his post: “Google Cloud Next, Athos, Google Cloud and Open Source.”
Just last week, Google announced BigQuery Omni, a multi-cloud analytics solution to run…
