Fronde shares their thoughts on the announcements made by the tech giant at its Next conference in San Francisco.
Australian Google partners Fronde, DDLS, IT Genius and Dialog IT have shared their thoughts with CRN on the announcements made by the tech giant at its Next conference in San Francisco last week.
Partners expressed their excitement for Google’s direction in taking enterprise solutions more seriously, and that the update might just be enough for more customers to make the jump to Google Cloud.
Google announced several enterprise offerings as well as changes to their existing product lineup, including Google Cloud Services, Istio, Cloud Build, the Edge TPU hardware chip, to count a few. G Suite also saw AI and machine learning enhancements and the Google Kubernetes Engine is now also available as an on-premise solution.
itGenius director Peter Moriarty told CRN that earlier announcements have effectively made Google’s enterprise suite complete.
“[The suite] has all the ticks in the right boxes, so that now it’s a really formidable product and ecosystem, whereas a couple of years ago, there were some key things missing.”
As a G Suite specialist, Moriarty was especially enthusiastic about Smart Compose, calling it a game-changer. The product predicts complete sentences while composing emails, cutting back on repetitive writing and reducing the chance of any spelling and grammatical errors.
“Smart Compose is happening in real-time, and I think that shows the power of an application that’s 100 percent cloud based,” he added.
James Valentine, chief technology officer of services partner Fronde, said Google is now offering a broad, cohesive cloud platform after the holes have been largely filled.
“The announcements have given some really interesting opportunities that we can leverage with customers and hopefully we can help challenge people to think about new ways to build things.”
After Google phased out the rack-mounted Search Appliance in 2016, Valentine said Fronde had been looking forward to a cloud alternative.
“With the announcement of Cloud Search, we’re looking forward to being able to provide customers with a Google search option for the enterprise,” he added.
“Google has some really unique offerings, and you’d want to be able to offer those as well,” he said. “Even if you’ve made a significant investment in one particular cloud provider, I think it’s important to be able to offer the right solution at the right time for a customer.”
While he wasn’t able to attend in person, Dialog IT national practice manager for Google solutions Glenn Irvine said Google leveraging its strengths in machine learning and AI to enhance G Suite and Google Cloud Platform will be a differentiator.
“The AI in G Suite for instance will have a lot of its DNA in Google Translate and the ability of Google to construct appropriate Grammar, etc. This will be a real strength in G Suite,” he told CRN.
“Google is impressive when it comes to scale and reliability, the fabric of their infrastructure is unparalleled when it comes to the global resilience and architecture. G Suite has matured into an enterprise collaboration suite, and will go from strength to strength with it's exploitation of machine learning.”
He added that if anyone is in the market for a scalable, secure, reliable cloud offering that is cloud-native with all the benefits of machine learning and AI will provide, then you can’t go past Google's Cloud Platform and G Suite. “By a long mile,” he affirmed.
On the learning side of things, Gary Duffield of training provider DDLS was especially satisfied in the increased Australian representation at Next.
“From the perspective of a new Google Partner, especially a learning partner, I take a huge amount of satisfaction in seeing how Australia was represented at the event, from IoT projects on cattle, to Telstra and Monash University — as a minimum — having speaking gigs,” he said.
“It’s reassuring to know that Google Cloud is alive, well and thriving down under.”
He added that he found it especially refreshing to hear continual references to the need to get skilled.
“From the key notes to the breakout sessions and fire side chats, learning continued to get a shout out. Certification is important to Google, and to those responsible for implementing, maintaining and architecting.”
This article was originally posted on crn.com.au
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