The Moscone Center in San Francisco was the venue for Google's biggest ever cloud event, Google Cloud Next 2018. Google have placed a heavy focus on cloud and the event is part of their wider strategy which is to make Google Cloud a critical aspect of its overall business in the future. A huge amount has been invested to utilise emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within its offering, as well as a large expenditure to expand the range of enterprise services available. Google appeared to playing catch-up in the cloud market, trying to close the gap to the leading players Microsoft and Amazon, and has invested billions to improve its cloud infrastructure over the past 36 months.
With cloud the focus for the Google event, the American giant took the opportunity to showcase its newest technology developments including Cloud Functions, its serverless platform to compete directly with AWS Lambda and Azure Functions. They have also announced their new integration and delivery platform, Cloud Build, for rapid application development and deployment. G Suite has been updated with a number of new features aimed at simplifying the user experience as well as administration tasks such as monitoring security breaches. Their innovative use of AI continues with a new AI grammar checker in Google Docs. Also they announced that Google Drive will hit 1 billion users in the coming days.
Probably the key news was the expansion and optimisation of Google Clouds partner network. During her keynote speech, CEO of Google Cloud Diane Green, explained that over the last 18 months the number of technology partners had increased more than tenfold and in turn Google has increased its internal teams to support them. The selection of partners varies widely from large enterprise vendors such as VMware, NetApp, SAP and Cisco to smaller partners specialising in particular technology areas.
As well as a host of other news and new releases there were two announcements that were particularly pertinent to the unified communications and collaboration industries.
Their communication and collaboration platform Google Hangouts, which includes messaging, video chat, SMS and VoIP features, will now be enhanced by voice commands. The age old problem of initiating meetings remains a major pain point for users and Google aim to rectify this by enabling similar voice-enabled artificial intelligence technology it uses for Google Assistant in meeting hardware.
Announcements were made at the end of last year where Cisco or Polycom hardware could be enabled to launch meetings using Google. Although exact figures have not been made public Google have said that many of these Hangouts Meet-enabled meeting rooms have been setup. Users will soon be able to use basic voice commands to initiate meetings, add other users to the meetings and operate a host of additional functions. Using the same technology that consumers are accustomed to, with devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home, all of these voice triggered commands are aimed at reducing the complexity and strain of meetings in businesses.
