What You Missed At Google Cloud Next 2017

By Jim Sinur

(Aragon Research) – There were literally lines wrapped for blocks around the Moscone Center West in San Francisco as 10,000 folks tried to get registered and seated for the first day’s general session at Google Cloud Next 2017. The major theme of the event was while Google is still making its cloud the best, it needed to be expanded to support not only individuals, but organizations and ecosystems as well, with a growing ability to conjure creativity and innovation in new ways.

It is clear to me that Mobile and Cloud are now table stakes for organizations and while migrating to the Cloud is no easy task, but it’s becoming a little easier. It is also clear that the speed to leverage the results of being on the cloud is at least an order of magnitude faster.

This blog overviews some of the key highlights and lowlights from Google Cloud Next 2017.

Google’s Case Studies

Google did a great job of putting some big name companies on stage to show enterprise levels of prowess and results. While most were business operational or spreading personal productivity, there were glimmers of innovation in a few of the case studies. I would suggest reviewing the following YouTube video starting at the hour thirty mark (1:30 mark) where it gets increasingly interesting.

I was especially captivated by the Ebay example at the (2:26 mark) Day General Session. Ebay is combining its history of purchases around the world for the last 20 years to provide not only a concierge shopping bot, but a pricing bot leveraging gobs of data in the cloud, natural language chat bots processing, and machine and deep learning to create some real innovation with Google’s new and traditional cloud services.

My Key Highlights:

• Aggressive Partnering with Solutions Providers to Push the Creative Cloud
• Completing a Partnership with SAP for Functional Transaction Access
• Proof Points on Speeding up the Cloud Migration Process with Logical Phased Steps
• Leverage of Machine Learning in a Democratized Fashion
• The Proof Points of a Resilient Cloud (Security, Elastic, Dynamic and Cost Effective)
• Great Improvements in Google Hangouts Supercharged by the Jamboard
• The Application of AI to Image and Video Recognition on a Portfolio Basis
• The Tilt Brush 3D Art Booth (being an artist myself, I was drooling)
• The Integrated Use of Geolocation and Big Data to Visualize Opportunity
• The Emphasis on EcoSystem Creativity and Reach

My Low Lights:

• Not Enough Capacity for Breakout Sessions
• Not Enough Repeat Sessions for Hot Themes
• Too Product Driven; Not Real Market, Sales, and Customer Driven
• Too Many Products Vying for Attention
• Need to Emphasize Google’s Growing Digital Business Platform Capability; Not Just Cloud
• More Emphasis on Other Parts of AI; not Just the Beating Drum of Data Driven Machine Learning

Bottom Line

Google Cloud Next 2017 was a lot like drinking from a firehose where the water is sweet, for the most part. The conference has a lot of moving parts, so these highlights and lowlights provide just a glimpse of what you missed.