India is one of the fastest-growing regions for tech giant Google, with the Mountain View, California-based firm witnessing strong growth for its products on databases and analytics. Google competes with global rivals, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to dominate cloud computing services.
“India is one of our fastest-growing regions. When you look at data products (like) databases and analytics, we are witnessing a strong growth,” said Debanjan Saha, vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud, at Google Data Cloud Summit. “Of course, the current Covid situation has been impacting the overall activities there (India), but it is not (deterring) the growth. We have built a large engineering and product team in India to support our local customer base and that’s also helping quite a bit.”
Andi Gutmans, general manager and vice president of engineering for databases at Google Cloud, said regional social media platform ShareChat is a large customer of Google.
“During the pandemic, they’ve really helped communication across a diverse set of communities in India,” said Gutmans. “It has been really remarkable. They handled 5X spike without any issues thanks to Spanners’ ( a distributed SQL database developed by Google) ability to scale up very fast.”
At Google Cloud’s Data Cloud Summit, the company announced three new solutions across their database and data analytics portfolio to provide organizations with a unified data platform. With the preview availability of Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream, Google said organizations can break free from data silos to securely predict business outcomes and empower users. They can make informed, real-time decisions in today’s dynamic digital environment.
“A recent Gartner survey found that organizations estimate the average cost of poor data quality at $12.8 million per year.” With data sprawling across databases, data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts, in multiple clouds and on-premises, enterprises are grappling with how to centrally manage and govern their applications. The other issue is integrating data in real-time to help improve decision making, innovate faster, and elevate customer experiences.
Gerrit Kazmaier, vice president and general manager, Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, Google Cloud, said data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it. He said every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognize data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation. “At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business,” said Kazmaier.
By leveraging Google Cloud’s data platform, customers now will have a comprehensive approach to their data cloud that embraces the full data lifecycle. These include the systems that run their business to the AI and machine learning tools that predict and automate their future.
Available in preview, Datastream is a new serverless Change Data Capture (CDC) and replication service. Datastream enables customers to replicate data streams in real-time, from Oracle and MySQL databases to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner. This solution allows businesses to power real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures.
Other product Analytics Hub is a new capability that will allow companies to create, curate, and manage analytics exchanges securely and in real-time. With Analytics Hub, customers can share data and insights, including dynamic dashboards and machine learning models securely inside and outside their organization. It enables organizations to combine enterprise datasets with unique Google, commercial, industry and public data. Analytics Hub builds on BigQuery’s existing and popular sharing capabilities. BigQuery is a cloud-based big data analytics web service.
Google also launched Dataplex, an intelligent data fabric that provides an integrated analytics experience, bringing the best of Google Cloud and open-source together. This enables users to rapidly curate, secure, integrate, and analyze their data at scale. Automated data quality allows data scientists and analysts to address data consistency across the tools of their choice, to unify and manage data without data movement or duplication. With built-in data intelligence using Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, organizations spend less time wrestling with infrastructure complexities and more time using data to deliver business outcomes.
“What is truly powerful here is that Google Cloud solves for disparate and bespoke systems housing hard-to-access siloed data with enhanced data experiences,” said Tom Galizia, global chief commercial officer, Deloitte.
Deloitte will be a leading teammate in delivering these solutions with industry-critical tools for enterprise customers and institutions.
“They’ve also simplified implementation and management for better decision making. We are truly excited to realize the market potential with Google Cloud’s innovations for building data clouds,” said Galizia.
Customers such as credit reporting firm Equifax, Deutsche Bank, and food retailer Loblaw are using Google Cloud to build their own data cloud strategies because of its long-standing leadership in analytics and AI.
“Our partnership with Google Cloud will enable us to use data more intelligently and more quickly deliver new products and services,” said Gil Perez, chief innovation officer, Deutsche Bank. “By building a data cloud with Google Cloud, we will expand our ability to unify data across our entire organization and innovate faster for our customers.”
Google Cloud has been a critical part of the Equifax journey, helping it protect customers’ sensitive and proprietary data.
“Google Cloud allows us to create a rich, unified and trusted data ecosystem between business units and partnerships–one in which everyone gains immediate value,” said Bryson Koehler, chief technology officer, Equifax.
Another customer, Loblaw is Canada’s food and pharmacy leader and is an early adopter of Dataplex. It could significantly benefit from Dataplex as it provides a single pane of glass for end-to-end data management and governance.
“We are particularly interested in improving platform resilience and data quality by detecting anomalies as early as possible in the data pipeline with the help of Dataplex,” said Elton Martins, senior director of data insights and analytics, Loblaw.
