Google Cloud Next @ Go Reply
Wednesday, March 8th in San Francisco Google Cloud Next has started. For Italian Replyers and customers it was possible to follow the event live thanks to Go Reply in Milan and Turin.
The keynote was introduced by Andrea Ulisse, Google’s Solution Engineer, who shortly exposed the features of Google’s Cloud platform. The presentation focused on 4 aspects:
- building an infrastructure which provides the best service all around the world. The latest example of Google’s effort to achieve this is the brand-new fiber connection between Tokyo and California (12.000 km) which reaches an astoundishing rate of 100 Tb/s. Mountain View’s company is focusing on scalability as well: that is why a company such as Snapchat relies on Google Cloud services. The computing power of Google’s infrastructure grants a balanced and an almost flawless efficiency for the application’s features. Consequently, the main task to the developing team is to improve the app without having to worry about the scalability of the web side, managed by Google servers.
- predicting events thanks to machine learning and big data analysis. It was explained that we could divide this analysis in 5 steps in order of increasing importance according to business’ interests:
- algorithms that improve data quality;
- to accelerate the description of data;
- algorithms for diagnostics of fails. For example, a machine that can autonomously report flaws in data-centers to reduce maintenance costs;
- to grant the precision of the prediction, as previously said in maintenance of data-centers or in medicine to detect disease symptoms;
- to deal with data in a semantic way like a human brain. This is vital to business because it allows companies to tailor web suggestions according not only to users researches but also to external and mutable factors like weather.
Companies like Ocado, Spotify, Telco and Aucnet have invested on this aspect to shape a better experience for their clients. If you have started using Spotify since its release, you might have noticed how fast its process of generating playlist has become. The process used to last, now in just few minutes the application learns your musical taste and suggests you the best playlist based on your taste which is able to understand based on just a couple of songs.
- to ease production and creation by reducing time that workers usually spend on searching files and projects in their cloud folders. Google is working on Machine Learning in way to make G-Suite (Mail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Sites) quicker and smarter. Some examples are of what its being thought are automatic display of the most used documents in Drive main page, a smart form autofill, capable of suggesting possible answers according to what the question is about, implementation of Natural Language API that permit to extract more info from our web researches (you can try this example here!), Gmail smart reply thank to AI and Calendar smart scheduling that detect the best time slot to set a new appointment. These improvements in Google Cloud system would allow users to improve productivity saving lot of time to manage all these aspects and focusing on business.
- to facilitate connection through a reliable hardware: Chromebooks are the clearest example of what Google thinks about as “future”. We won’t go to work with our notebook and our external drives: we will just find various Chromebooks in the office and then we will just have to choose one, login our Google account and everything will be on the cloud, ready to be used and modified. This implies that these notebooks run on a light and reliable operating system. In this way, data will be also more and more accessible using smartphones running Android, the mobile operating system powered by Google, which implements every Google Cloud Service.
A concrete result of collaboration between great companies and Go Reply was then shown: this is Google’s Premier Partner (if you still do not know it), and it is the main response to the questions such as how Sky has managed to significantly improve its broadcast and streaming service, and how features above cited brought benefits to the company not only in terms of profit but also of clients’ appeasement.
After this introduction, at 7 PM the official Keynote from San Francisco started. After a short introduction by Google Cloud Senior Vice-President, Diane Greene, and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai the talk focused on only one vital point; as pointed out later by Eric Schmidt, we got to “Get on the cloud… NOW”.
CTO & SVP Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media, Mike White, pointed out the importance of their partnership with Google Cloud as a support for their sites, and of machine learning applicated to stories development making it possible to predict and analyze a probable evolution of a character. Such an instrument frees up developers and storytellers, and allows them to focus on creating great stories. Of course, Google Cloud also helped Disney enhancing their great guest experience through the analysis of data. Now, said Mike White, guests can get a personal experience tailored to their expectations thanks to cloud’s services.
Then Member of SAP Executive Board, Bernd Leukart announced the certification of SAP HANA on the Google Cloud Platform. This means that one of the most used “enterprise platform-as-a-service with comprehensive application development services and capabilities”[1] will enrich the GCP offer. Just to note how much SAP is important in the web business ecosystem just consider that 76% of the world’s transaction revenue touches at least one SAP system. HSBC Global Chief Officer, Darryl West then emphasized how the evolution of data analysis systems and the contemporary growth of the “cloud” is helping big companies, like HSBC (first European banking group), to analyze enormous amount of data but at the same time to grant security. They had to move from a platform like data warehousing, which is still robust and quite scalable but which does not provide data analytics capabilities and implies rising maintenance costs, to the cloud. This new platform has given to bank groups, in this case, databases to evaluate and predict risks faster, to track exchanges in order to identify Money Laundering and to reduce liquidity processing from hours to minutes.
Other testimonials of how the cloud platform has empowered their services and changed the way of how they work were Colgate-Palmolive Company CIO, Mike Crowe, Verizon Digital Workplace Vice-President, Alin d’Silva and Home Depot SVP of Information Technology, Paul Gaffney, who described how the flexibility and scalability of GCP managed to give an efficient service also during the very famous Black Friday, which was a really stress test to servers all around the world.
Then RJ Pittman, eBay Chief Product Officer, exposed why they moved part of their services onto the cloud. First of all, they could enhance data centers capabilities, considering that the eBay shop contains more than 1 billion of items. eBay marketplace has now moved on GCP for the same reason other companies did : big data analysis and machine learning! (Check out the demo with Google Home)
Eventually Google Cloud Scientist (Cloud AI & ML) Fei-Fei Li introduces brand-new Video Intelligence API for GCP (Demo at this link).
To sum up, according to Eric Schmidt, Alphabet Executive Chairman, it is time to move on the cloud and this is what Google imagines for the future of computation, work and business.
Get on the cloud… Now!
This is the leading way for web development.
[1]Description from https://cloudplatform.sap.com/index.html
Thanks to Bongiovanni Pietro for having collaborated to this article.
