Even though we couldn’t be together in person, Next OnAir ‘20 provided businesses with the opportunity to hear from Google Cloud executives and their customers from across industries, connect with experts, and gain new insights about how to solve the tough business challenges we’re all facing today.
The nine-week digital event featured compelling content showcasing the latest in cloud technology and innovation. With a new topic featured every Tuesday, companies learned how Google Cloud can help them solve their most pressing challenges related to productivity and collaboration, security, data analytics, application modernization, AI, and more. SADA’s executives and experts were engaged throughout, providing post-session recaps and commentary each week.
As usual, Google Cloud didn’t disappoint with a variety of exciting announcements surrounding its solutions and products. Here is a brief recap of some of the most exciting announcements from each week of Next OnAir:
Week 1: Industry Insights
Week 1 of Next OnAir was geared towards the theme of Industry Insights, and Google Cloud executives focused on their transformational efforts across industries working with customers and ecosystem partners. One of the biggest announcements to come out of the first week was the introduction of BigQuery Omni, a new multi-cloud analytics solution that is powered by Anthos. BigQuery Omni will extend Google Cloud’s analytics platform to other public clouds, enabling organizations to use BigQuery’s familiar interface to break down data silos and create actionable business insights, all from a single pane of glass.
Week 2: Productivity and Collaboration
Week 2 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. In addition to a number of enhancements to its products to help workers better navigate remote productivity and collaboration, Google Cloud unveiled 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.
Week 3: Infrastructure Modernization
Week 3 was all about migrating and modernizing workloads on Google Cloud’s global, secure, and reliable infrastructure. Google Cloud announced new capabilities in compute with expanded availability of its Bare Metal solution; in storage with its high scale file solutions; and in new networking with enhancements to its CDN, Cloud Armor, and Network Intelligence Center solutions. The company also announced exciting new machine learning-powered capabilities to make their infrastructure significantly easier for organizations to use.
Week 4: Security
Week 4 delved into leveraging Google Cloud solutions to detect, investigate, and respond to online threats to help protect your business. Google Cloud shared numerous ways that they’ve enhanced security capabilities, including Assured Workloads, a set of controls for customers in regulated industries that enable you to configure and deploy sensitive workloads according to security and compliance in just a few clicks, and Confidential VMs, game-changing technology that offers the ability to encrypt data in use (i.e., while it’s being processed).
Week 5: Data Analytics
Week 5 focused on how to generate instant insights from data at any scale with a serverless, fully managed analytics platform that significantly simplifies analytics. In addition to delving deeper into BigQuery Omni, Google Cloud announced real-time AI solutions like anomaly detection, pattern recognition, and predictive forecasting that can be used across multiple industries.
Week 6: Data Management & Databases
Week 6 focused on how to migrate and manage enterprise data with security, reliability, high availability, and fully managed data services. Google Cloud introduced a variety of new features for Cloud Spanner this year, including additional multi-region configurations and user-managed backup and recovery. Developer productivity was improved with:
- Open source JDBC driver and Hibernate ORM support
- Additional introspection capabilities
- A local emulator (now generally available)
The SQL feature set has been enhanced with:
- Foreign keys
- WITH clause support
- Query optimizer versioning
Week 7: Application Modernization
Week 7 covered how to develop and run applications using open source and other software without operations staff. A number of Anthos updates were announced, including hybrid AI capabilities that enable businesses to use Google Cloud’s differentiated AI technologies wherever their workloads reside. Google Cloud’s first hybrid AI offering, Speech-to-Text On-Prem, is now generally available on Anthos through the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Week 8: Cloud AI
Week 8 focused on how to generate value with AI on Google Cloud’s AI Platform. A hosted offering for building and managing ML pipelines was announced earlier this year. Now, a fully managed service for ML pipelines will be available by October this year. With the new managed service, users can build ML pipelines using TensorFlow Extended pre-built components and templates that significantly reduce the effort required to deploy models.
Week 9: Business Application Platform
The final week of Google Cloud Next OnAir ‘20 focused on designing, securing, and scaling APIs anywhere with visibility and control. Google Cloud introduced its new business application platform category, encompassing API management, no-code application development, automation and data insights capabilities.
