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Google Data Cloud Summit Recap: Unlocking the True Potential of Data

At this very moment, every single company is experiencing some kind of digital transformation. As Gerrit Kazmaier, GM and VP of Database, Data Analytics, and Looker at Google Cloud, explained during his keynote address at this year’s Data Cloud Summit, “to transform, we cannot apply technologies and architectures that are rooted in outdated paradigms.” Kazmaier went on to explain that there three paradigm changes that need to occur to unlock the true potential of data and elevate digital transformation:

  1. The massive amount of data across formats, datacenters, and clouds needs to be brought together.
  2. The ways you can work with data must continue to evolve and expand.
  3. Your data must reach everyone — from employees and partners to customers and suppliers.
Google Cloud Next 2021 Recap: Solving For What’s Next

Because of Google Cloud Platform’s robust suite of tools and services, it is uniquely positioned to prepare business leaders for these paradigm changes and unlock the limitless possibilities of data. In fact, Anita Kibunguchy-Grant, Product Marketing Lead of Databases at Google Cloud, listed several industry titans who are already transforming their data streams with the power of Cloud products:

  • Walmart: Reduced processing time by 23%.
  • Vodafone: Calculates and monitors massive amounts of data worldwide from various legacy systems and pipelines.
  • Wayfair: Improves and streamlines the experience for more than 31 million active customers using the machine learning (ML) capabilities offered through Google Cloud Platform.
  • Niantic: Leverages 5,000 spanner nodes and thousands of GKE nodes at a time.
  • Tokopedia: Reduced computing costs by 25% and improved time to analysis from two months to two weeks.

Introducing New Cloud Innovations

In the spirit of unlocking the true potential of data, Google Cloud also revealed several exciting innovations to help organizations manage multiple workloads and secure the future of their business in the cloud:

  • BigLake is a data lake storage engine built on BigQuery that unifies data lakes and warehouses — thus, eliminating silos, decreasing data risks, and improving enterprise data management.
  • Cloud Spanner Change Streams allows business enterprises to track changes in their databases as well as access and integrate this data with other applications.
  • Spark on Google Cloud is the industry’s first autoscaling serverless Spark that can significantly boost productivity while reducing infrastructure costs for data science workloads.
  • Vertex AI Workbench, when compared to traditional notebooks, allows data scientists to build and train models five times faster.
  • Vertex AI Model Registry is a central repository that allows easier discovery and use of custom ML models. This registry will also allow users to directly deploy their BigQuery ML models to Vertex AI Workbench.
  • Cloud SQL Insights for MySQL is a simple, open tool that allows developers to quickly and easily understand and resolve database performance on Cloud SQL.
  • Unified BI is a Google Cloud initiative to unify Looker, Google Sheets, and Data Studio — thus providing easy and consistent access to every invested stakeholder.

Delving Into Data Strategies

After the keynote address, attendees watched sessions (both live and on-demand) that delved deeper into the future of cloud and strategies for transformative innovation. In one such session, Breaking Down Data Silos to Enhance the Customer Journey, Maven Wave’s own Alex Mendoza, Senior Principal, covered strategies for using the data around your products, customers, and sales to its greatest potential and enhancing the customer journey. This includes ensuring your business and data strategies are aligned, involving all the right stakeholders, and recognizing the utility of various datasets.

Another session, Simplify Data Processing and Data Science with Spark on Google Cloud, how businesses can simplify data processing with Spark on Google Cloud, which includes the best of open-source and cloud-native tools for data and AI all on a unified platform. In this session, Balaji Maragalla, Director of Big Data at Deutsche Bank, explained how Spark on Google Cloud helped the global investment bank with scaling infrastructure, upgrading platforms, capacity planning, and optimizing performance across workstreams.

A session spotlight, Database Strategy and Product Roadmap, highlighted recent innovations in Google Cloud databases, from cloud-native databases to the most popular open-source engines like PostgreSQL and MySQL. Bala Natarajan, Sr. Director, Data Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering at PayPal, described how these innovations allowed PayPal to transform its data journey, positioning the financial technology company to more easily migrate its transaction processing system to the public cloud.

This year’s Google Data Cloud Summit was jam-packed with exciting announcements and strategies for accelerating your cloud data journey, and we’re more excited than ever to see what the future of Cloud holds.

If you missed out on the live event, you’re in luck: you can still watch all of the keynotes and breakout sessions on-demand by clicking here.

About the Author

Kylie McKee
Kylie McKee is a Content Marketing Strategist at Maven Wave with more than eight years of tech industry experience and five years of content marketing experience. Prior to joining the Maven Wave team, Kylie worked as a Content Marketing Specialist for WebPT, Inc. and earned an Associate in Applied Science in Motion Picture, Television, and New Media Production with a CCL in Screenwriting from Scottsdale Community College.
April 14th, 2022
DATA ANALYTICS

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2022-04-19T11:23:00-05:00