Google’s ‘Operation Seduction’ Comes into Play
The Mountain View company fully intends to conquer major French companies, and has strong arguments to put forward at this Google Cloud Summit. Positioned as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Cloud IaaS, Google has announced that it invested $30 billion three years ago and can count on the support of new global partners such as Atos, Cisco, SAP and Salesforce.
What better way to seduce the French market and its large companies, than by bringing Thierry Breton, Atos CEO and former Minister of the Economy to the stage? The historical player Atos not only brings a strong dose of respectability to Google, but it also helps in reassuring the market of Google’s ability to ensure the sovereignty of data through this trusted third party.
Security by Design
Ulku Rowe, Technical Director of Financial Services at Google Cloud then took the mic, to tackle the subject of transformation using the Cloud. According to her, the companies most suited to survival are not those that will do things a little bit better or a little less expensive, but those which will be able to do things differently, to adapt to change while relying on the Cloud. There are three major axes:
- Don’t operate with technologies that don’t differentiate you (entrust them to a provider)
- invest in your core business to transform data into knowledge, decisions and commitments
- innovate to disrupt yourself before being disrupted!
The keynote then largely focused on the topic of security, with Google promising integrated security by design on each of the layers. According to Ulku Rowe, safety is at the foundation of everything at Google: “Trust Nothing” is the philosophy of the company: don’t trust the software, the hardware or the network. Hence, by default, data both at rest and in transit are encrypted and travel on Google’s private network.
Some figures support Google’s obsession with security: 10 million spam emails are filtered every minute by Gmail; Google has a bandwidth 1,000 times greater than the biggest DDoS attack, and protects 3 billion devices every day from malicious URLs. To finish on the subject, Ulku Rowe recalled a feature recently released, “Access transparency”, which offers logs in near real-time access to content, or your administrators’, or those of Google.
Etienne Bureau’s testimonial
Etienne Bureau, Strategy & Innovation Director at Devoteam
Google sends a strong and clear message to big groups by reassuring them on its ability to support their digital transformations to scale. It sends a message with its big deals, from the more traditional ones such as Atos, to the more innovative ones such as Salesforce. It sends a message with the testimonials of large groups that made Google their choice to speed up their transformation: Total applying AI to fields of exploration, and Airbus with collaboration to improve their workplace. Google has so far surpassed its challenger position, and is ready to play its role in supporting business transformation in a necessarily multi-cloud approach.
This keynote emphasised that security remains one of the fundamentals of Google, on which a data centric and collaboration centric approach is built. It is not only a question of GDPR, but of global security, integrated by design into all the layers of the Google offer, because security is a prerequisite for transformation and the development of uses. Google also benefits from its position as a leader on the subjects of data, and collaboration, with Gsuite being the only, truly, collaborative by design Cloud offer.
Finally, Google doesn’t forget to recognise its premium influencer community- developers! The true assets of a company like Google, in keeping with its geek culture, are developers and all those who enrich the open source offer around Google products. At a time when the purchasing of Github by Microsoft is taking the developer community by storm, the timing of this recognition is definitely not trivial.
Data and Machine Learning
Unsurprisingly, the next topic is data. Everyone knows it, the data volume is exploding, but this data is useless as long as it is spread over multiple sources. The challenge is therefore to unleash the power of data, to find “the signal in the middle of the noise”, and it is the role of machine learning, which allows for transforming raw data into insights. Machine learning is already integrated into many Google products (photos, translate, mail, sheets, slides, drive…).
Behind the algorithms that help categorize your photos or suggest automatic replies to your emails, we find TensorFlow, the Google Machine Learning library, powered by the 3rd generation of
TPU (Tensor Processing Units), 15 to 30 times faster. For companies wishing to build a Machine Learning model, Google offers three options: to buildyour own model, to rely on already-existing, pre-trained AI models, or to use AutoML if you do not have the time or expertise to train your own model. Concluding on the subject of Machine Learning, Lucie Vannier carried out a demo to build a model to identify and classify the different types of clouds, by dealing with approximately 2,000 data with 5 different labels (Cloud types).
Client case: Total
Yves Le Stunff, Digital Officer of the exploration department at Total, testified on the collaboration between Google and Total in the development of AI solutions for geosciences.
Each year $200 million are dedicated to acquisition, data processing and data analysis, and Total carries out subsoil studies relying on seismic imaging. Using Google, Total wishes to use machine learning to automatically analyse images and compensate for the manual interpretation which can take several months. Machine Learning will notably allow for exploitation of already-labeled data for several years. In addition, Cloud Natural Language is used to optimise the researchers’ watch skills, by extracting information from publications. Eventually, the goal is to build a virtual assistant for geoscientists.
From G-suite to developers
In a world where startups have nothing to lose, large companies on the other hand, have everything to lose if they don’t take risks. Unleashing the creative forces of the company assumes sharing data and ideas, and to do so, we need tools. Of course, we’re talking about G-Suite, adopted by 4 million companies, enriching itself with new machine learning functions or a Jamboard – a connected whiteboard usable by all participants of a remote meeting. To illustrate collaboration at the heart of the enterprise, it is Mario Bolivar Caba, in charge of Airbus’ Intranet teams, Social & Collaboration, who came to explain how G-suite helped Airbus sustainably transform its work habits for better collaboration.
How can we transform the work environment? Greg DeMichillie, Director of Product Management, has the answer, and it is a declaration of love to developers, who are, according to him, the source of innovation. Today, developers are no longer a cost centre, they are the ones who build the products and solutions delivered to consumers, they are the ones who imagine how to lever data and help in the decision… Developers are hard to recruit, they are expensive, so we need to give them the best tools to unleash their strength. Developers want to go fast, they want choice, they do not want to be bound by decisions made 10 years ago, and the Cloud offers that freedom. Kubernetes, the Open Source container orchestration system developed by Google, illustrates this desire to provide developers with the tools they need. Today Kubernetes is a must, with a rate of company adoption at more than 54%, and Greg DeMichillie assures us that within two years, Istio will become as important as Kubernetes on the market. Istio is a service “mesh”, namely a component deployed in a Kubernetes cluster, and is responsible for connecting all services together and to each other. Istio offers load balancing features, service discovery, traffic management, etc. We will have the opportunity to tell you all about it very soon!
The original article was written in French by Julien Lemarchal here.
