Week 2 of Google Cloud Next OnAir ‘20 was highly anticipated thanks to its focus on productivity & collaboration and how to change the way teams work with solutions designed for humans and built for impact. The announcements and sessions surrounding G Suite and Google Cloud’s vision for the future workspace were gladly received as we all navigate the accelerated shift to remote work. SADA’s executives and cloud experts found the following sessions to be particularly compelling and provided some informative post-session insights and commentary that you won’t want to miss:
Week 2 #SADASays Post-Session Recaps
#SADASays With Tony Safoian and Nicky Parseghian – Post-Keynote Commentary
Join SADA CEO, Tony Safoian and Nicky Parseghian, Practice Director, G Suite, as they recap the Week 2 Keynote: Helpful and Human: G Suite’s Vision for Your Future Workspace.
#SADASays With Veronica Raulin & Kelly Wright – Post-Session Commentary
Listen in to SADA’s Veronica Raulin, Head of Change Management, & Kelly Wright, Head of Engineering, G Suite, for their take on Introducing G Suite Essentials: The Simplest Way for Teams to Securely Work Together from Week 2 of Next OnAir.
#SADASays With Tony Safoian and Victoria Mejia-Dai – Post-Session Commentary
Join Tony Safoian, SADA CEO, and Victoria Mejia-Dai, Executive Assistant, as they review Teamwork From Anywhere: G Suite’s Vision for Content Collaboration from Week 2 of Next OnAir.
Opening Keynote
Javier Soltero, Vice President and General Manager of G Suite, kicked off the week with a keynote that addressed the shift to remote work brought on by COVID-19. Soltero stated his belief that COVID-19 “is a catalyst that will accelerate the transition to more flexible and distributed teams.” In addition, remote work is enabling businesses to save money, reduce their carbon footprint, and repurpose office spaces for other innovative uses. Whether it’s a school moving to a distance-learning model, a healthcare provider consulting with patients via video, or an organization seeking to empower remote productivity across roles, the new way of working is here to stay, and Google Cloud is helping organizations solve for what’s next.
Soltero revealed some eye-opening stats to highlight the direction that the modern workforce is going in:
- 80% of the workforce would like more flexibility to work from home (at least some of the time)
- 74% of CFOs intend to shift some employees to work from home permanently after COVID-19
With these stats in mind, it’s no wonder that 6M+ businesses have chosen G Suite as their partner in digital transformation and are now relying on it to help navigate their current challenges. Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), for example, is finding Google Meet and other G Suite communication tools invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic:
“With Google G Suite and SADA’s services, CHA has transformed how our staff and caregivers work, providing collaborative tools to better patient care. We didn’t realize how integral G Suite had become to our daily work until dealing with a pandemic where consistent communication with our CHA staff was of utmost importance. To engage our workforce, we use Google Meet, Calendaring, and even Livestream to book enterprise events. With one click, staff can connect from their Gmail, Calendars, or from Google Meet enabled conference rooms across 3 hospitals, 15 health centers, as well as caregivers connecting remotely from home. We use all of the G Suite tools: Sites, Shared Drives, Forms, and Google Slides for our presentations and have used Q&A in Slides to create an interactive experience for all participants. That’s the true power of a collaboration suite. G Suite is technology at its best. Simple, powerful, useful.”
– James LaPlante, Sr. Director, Technology & Biomedical Services at CHA
Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, TrueCar and McClatchy are just a few other forward-thinking companies that are harnessing the power of G Suite to keep their teams connected, engaged and innovative no matter where they are.
“G Suite was engineered for flexibility from the beginning,” Soltero stated. “Our products have always been accessible with just an internet connection. [With G Suite], you’ve never really been tied to an office. Being cloud native gave us the right foundation to innovate.”
According to Soltero, as the G Suite team began to grasp the pandemic’s impact, they honed in on two critical objectives:
- Deliver meaningful product innovations to help teams stay productive and engaged while working remotely
- Make it incredibly easy for teams that weren’t already on G Suite to access its tools in a flexible way
As a result of these objectives, Google Cloud has made a number of enhancements to its products to help workers better navigate remote productivity and collaboration. Some of the biggest updates include:
- Making Google Meet free and available to everyone
- The introduction of G Suite Essentials, a secure, integrated workspace that includes Google Meet video conferencing, Drive file storage and collaborative Docs built in. Plus, it’s free until September 30, 2020!
- The unveiling of a new integrated workspace in Gmail that intelligently brings together the people, content, and tasks that you need to maximize your time and boost your impact at work
- A variety of Google Meet feature updates including blurred backgrounds, increased meeting size and layout improvements
On Tuesday, July 28th, Next OnAir will be focused on Infrastructure. Tune in to learn more about migrating and modernizing workloads on Google’s global, secure, and reliable infrastructure. Also, be sure to check out SADA’s Next OnAir post-session recaps on Thursdays. Here’s what’s coming up on July 30th:
#SADASays With Miles Ward and Scott VanDenPlas – Post-Keynote Commentary
Join Miles Ward, CTO, and Scott VanDenPlas, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at SADA, for their take on Accelerate Your Digital Transformation through a Modern Infrastructure from Week 3 of Next OnAir.
#SADASays With Michael Masaaud and Mark Pevec – Post-Session Commentary
Listen in as SADA’s Michael Masaaud, Manager of Infrastructure Modernization, and Mark Pevec, Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, discuss the Next OnAir session, Build an Enterprise-Grade Service Mesh With Traffic Director.
#SADASays With Andrew Cook, Technical Account Manager – Post-Session Commentary
Join Andrew Cook, Technical Account Manager at SADA, for his take on Cloud Is Complex. Managing it Shouldn’t Be from Week 3 of Next OnAir.
