Google have rebranded and repackaged their popular enterprise toolbox into a single portfolio called Google Cloud.
The new brand combines all of Google’s developer, collaboration and productivity tools as well as their APIs, Android OS and Chromebook OS, creating a unified and consistent experience across the brand’s software.
The move is seen as being a step towards making their overall offering more ‘enterprise appropriate’ and integrated across different platforms.
“Because digital transformation and moving to the cloud are technical processes, we have customer engineers, customer reliability engineers, site reliability engineers, product engineers, all there to partner with our customers as they migrate, deploy and evolve.” said Diane Greene, Senior Vice President, Google Cloud. “Our approach and our commitment to Google Cloud customers is simple: we’re in it together.
G Suite
After ten years as Google Apps for Work, the company’s productivity tools will now be renamed to G Suite and have been revamped with the latest machine intelligence features.
For instance, Quick Access in Drive on Android claims to make the most relevant files to the work you’re doing easily accessible — right at your fingertips when you open Drive. Based on signals like your interaction with colleagues, recurring meetings and activity in Drive, machine intelligence helps Drive understand the rhythm of your workday and offers the files you need before you even ask. Google research suggests Quick Access saves about 50% of the time an employee would usually spend finding a file.
Updates to Google Calendar use machine intelligence to help users easily find a time when invitees are free, and it also suggests available rooms based on past use. When the list of invitees grows long and no times are available, Calendar will suggest times across the group where the conflicts are easiest to resolve, such as recurring 1:1 meetings.
Google Docs have also gotten a smarter and can now answer questions and requests asked in natural language, making the creation of tricky formulas a thing of the past.
With research suggesting that 30% of the total time spent creating slide show presentations is spent on formatting, Google are aiming to address the issue in just a couple of clicks, so users can focus on building a presentation ‘so polished people will think you’re a professional graphic designer’ say the company.
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform now serves over one billion end-users globally through its customers’ products and services, including Airbus, Home Depot, Snap Inc (formerly SnapChat), Evernote, Niantic Labs (Pokemon Go), Telus, Accenture and Pivotal.
To meet growing demand, the company have announced they are expanding to a variety of new locations including Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt, with more to be announced next year.
The new regions allow the company to deliver an 80% improvement on latency issues for customers.
Accenture Partnership
The company also announced a global alliance with Accenture that will see the two brands collaborate to bring industry-specific solutions to market across cloud, mobility, and analytics.
“The Google alliance supports our digital and cloud strategy, and will help clients benefit from innovative and industry-specific cloud and mobile solutions built on the full stack of Google technologies,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer, Accenture. “Whether our clients need to innovate faster, create new services or increase the value from their existing technology investments, cloud should be the starting point for their digital transformations. Together with Google, Accenture will help clients take advantage of game changing solutions that help solve real business needs.”
Google and Accenture will work together to deliver solutions to customers in a number of industries including retail, healthcare, consumer products, energy, finance, and others. The solutions will combine products from across Google Cloud including Android, apps, analytics, augmented reality, big data, IoT and machine learning. Accenture and Google will provide dedicated resources from each company with capability in cloud solutions architecture, mobility and app development to help bring these solutions to large enterprise clients.
“Our alliance with Accenture is designed to help enterprises transform and take advantage of the latest technologies from Google Cloud,” said Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud. “Google’s ongoing product advances, incorporated into joint customer solutions – from mobility and analytics, to machine learning and productivity apps – combined with Accenture’s deep industry knowledge, means we can rapidly address the critical business needs of our customers.”
These announcements were made at the company’s invite-only Horizon event in San Francisco.
We recently spoke to Google Cloud Platform’s Miles Ward to find out more about the company’s machine learning developer tools. Listen below:
(Images: Google)
