Google made a raft of announcements at this year’s Next event in San Francisco this week. The most noteworthy of which was Anthos. Formerly Cloud Services Platform, it becomes the first, multi-cloud platform which will appeal heavily to its enterprise customers, marking a shift away from the developer focus in recent years towards business leaders.

It’s a step in the right direction for Google as it’s the C-suite that it needs to be targeting in order to accelerate the platform’s adoption and most will probably agree that the focus has been on the developers for too long. With Anthos, Google has set its sights on the future, heeding the advice of analysts who say that 88% of businesses will undergo a multi-cloud transformation in the next few years. Google’s new multi-cloud platform, “simply put, is the future of cloud”, according to Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure.

But, if you look past all the marketing spiel, you stop seeing the innovative new platform and notice that by releasing Anthos as its flagship product, Google has essentially taken a step down and conceded that it’s the second cloud provider in the market. If you can’t beat them, use them to help you scale, though, perhaps?

“They’ve taken on a very interesting approach,” said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner. “They want to be the second cloud which is kind of interesting because they don’t want to compete with the 40-50 pound gorilla [AWS] so they’re basically saying it’s a multi-cloud world and they’re pushing the multi-cloud narrative so they can come in as the second cloud… and then land and expand so I think that’s a pretty smart strategy”.

One area where Google seems to be leading the charge is in security. Some 30 new products and services were announced at this year’s event which totals more than 100 in the past year alone. 

It’s clear the company is taking security seriously – as it should – and is keen to show its customers that everything the company offers has security baked in from the start. The Cloud Security Command Centre looks like a nice piece of kit for any cloud platform admin to use and has the added benefit of Google’s industry-leading machine learning (ML) capabilities. This, I’m sure, will prove an attractive selling point as it helps users detect malicious activity ahead of an attack. 

Building on the AI theme, the automated functions of all the new features – from AutoML advancements to intelligent event threat detection – continues to provide Google with a serious USP to draw in customers. Google has made it easier than ever to run an advanced cloud environment in a secure and intuitive way. It wants to leave the coding and app creation to the developers and let the admins do their job which is focusing on driving the business forward.

For example, using ML-driven Connected Sheets, businesses could oversee their distribution channels and see where operations were being halted. It would be easy to detect if warehouse stock wasn’t leaving Brazil on time because major road works were taking place so the business could simply re-route the drivers’ navigation systems to get things back on track.

The challenge Google will face in the next year is that of scale. The company has only just started to win over the hearts of business leaders though. Athos garnered the biggest roar I heard all week, but it needs to take that and move on, proving to its customers that it’s really serious about enterprise.

Google also faces the challenge of partnering with the smaller software vendors. Over the week, Google announced partnerships with the biggest bulls in the pen: Cisco, Salesforce, HSBC – I could go on. But, now, what it must do – given it has committed to this containerised and stateless approach with Anthos – is show that it can work with the smaller ISVs.

“The interesting part will be seeing how it can start working with smaller ISVs and convert those apps into Google containers and its containerised as that will be the challenge – that’s how it will grow its business,” said Nag. Smaller apps are the ones that will be modernised in the future, so monetising these will be key to Google’s success years down the line.

It seems as though the new CEO Thomas Kurian is continuing in the hugely successful footsteps of his predecessor Diane Greene – the woman that drove the company to be enterprise-ready in just two years instead of the forecasted 10. Conceding the second place spot to Amazon might be a good move for the company, filling the market gap enterprise customers so desperately needed.

Hybrid cloud is something that many organisations wrestle with and they finally have an answer to the headache they’ve faced for years. We’re excited to see how the company scales in the next year – the first under Kurian’s reign – and whether it’s able to tackle the challenges that it faces.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have been selected to continue competing for the Pentagon’s cloud computing contract, the US Department of Defence said on Wednesday.

The highly sought after Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is worth $10 billion and is part of a broad modernisation of Pentagon information technology systems that could take up to 10 years.

“I can confirm that AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft are the companies that met the minimum requirements outlined,” department spokeswoman Elissa Smith said in a statement to Reuters.

AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle have been the front runners for the contract for a while, particularly after Google pulled out in October 2018, citing a clash of ethical values. But this latest decision is a snub to both IBM and Oracle.

Oracle has stayed in contention for the contract, despite repeatedly opposing its single-vendor specifications. In December, the cloud and database business launched a second bout of legal proceedings over the contract, filing a suit against the Department of Defence in the US Court of Federal Claims. The company’s original legal action was dismissed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Oracle questioned the “propriety” of the procurement process after obtaining communications in which an official called colleagues voicing support for AWS rivals “dum-dums.” The tech giant alleged that two people who helped lead the JEDI project, Deap Ubhi, who served as JEDI project manager at the DoD, and Anthony DeMartino, chief of staff for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, were conflicted because of their relationship with AWS.

Ubhi, the lawsuit states, worked at AWS until joining the Defense Digital Service in the summer of 2016. He returned to AWS as general manager in November 2017.

The GAO has always maintained that the single vendor approach does not violate any laws and that for issues of national security the process is in the government’s best interests. IBM issued a similar legal challenge against the single-vendor process, which is said to violate procurement regulations, but that case was also blocked.

But with IBM and Oracle out of the picture, it falls to two of the industry’s biggest cloud providers, Microsoft and AWS, to battle it out.

Google has unveiled a whole suite of updates to its G Suite, including productivity boosting features, connected sheet support, Hangouts chat to email and new integrations with Google Assistant.

G Suite Add-ons make it easier for users to switch between different apps in Google’s lineup. For example, if you’re in email and want to view a document, you can switch to Docs via the side panel. As well as those Add-ons already available, the company has now added integrations with Copper, Workfront and Box.

Connected Sheets brings the power of pivot tables and shared data to Google Sheets. Connected Sheets allows you to connect up to 10 billion rows of BigQuery data without using SQL and then translate the data into tables easy-to-digest information for the rest of the organisation.

You can now also edit Microsoft Office documents, whether spreadsheets in Excel, Word documents or presentations in PowerPoint directly from G Suite, without having to convert to Docs, Sheets or Slides.

If you need to share any of these documents with others not in your organisation, you can do so using the new Visitor Sharing in Drive function, allowing others to collaborate on files without gaining full access, but using a pin code.

For those that use Hangouts for live messaging and video calling, Google has debuted Google Hangouts Chat into Gmail, so teams can view all communications from the Gmail pane. At the bottom left corner, you’ll see people, rooms and bots. Open up rooms to see conversation streams and threads. While in Hangout Meet video calls, users can now opt to have on screen captions display, powered by the company’s speech recognition tech.

The extension of Google Assistant to enterprise environments makes it much easier to keep your work life organised. Your calendar will sync with Assistant so you can make sure you get to meetings on time, know where you’re going and stay ahead of any schedule changes.

Google has launched a beta version of its AI platform, allowing developers, data scientists, and data engineers with an end-to-end development environment in which to collaborate and manage machine learning (ML) projects.

While ML is already employed in many cloud instances to sift through logs looking for data that could indicate malicious activity, Google announced a range of additional capabilities for its AutoML product – the same one introduced last year which aimed to get companies with limited ML know-how building their own business-specific ML products.

“We believe AI will transform every business and every organisation over the course of the next few years,” said Rajen Sheth, director product management at Google Cloud AI.

“We have focussed on building an AI platform that provides a very deep understanding of a number of fundamental types of data: voice, language, video, images, text and translation,” added Thomas Kurian, CEO Google Cloud. “On top of this platform, we have built a number of solutions to make it easy for our customers and analysts around the world to build products”.

Infrastructure diagram of Google’s new AI platform

When AutoML launched last year, non-experienced workers could build ML-driven tools using image classification, natural language processing and translation specific for their businesses and the data they hold with little-to-no training.

Now Google has announced three new AutoML variations called AutoML Tables, AutoML Video and AutoML Vision for the edge. Tables allows customers to take massive amounts of data, hundreds of terabytes were cited, ingested through BigQuery and use that to create actionable insights into business operations such as predicting business downtime.

It’s all codeless, too. Data can be ingested and then fed through custom ML models created in days instead of weeks by developers, analysts or engineers using an intuitive GUI.

With Video, Google is targeting any organisation that hosts videos and needs to either categorise them automatically using automatic labelling such as cat videos or furniture videos. It can also help automatically filter explicit content and help broadcasters, much like it did with ITV recently, detect and manage traffic patterns on live broadcasts.

Vision was announced last year to help developers with image recognition. With Vision Edge for devices such as connected sensors or cameras, the challenge was that these device struggle with latency issues. Vision Edge harnesses edge TPUs for faster inference and LG CNS, an outsourcing arm of LG uses the tool to create manufacturing products that detect issues with things like LCD screens and optical films on the assembly line.

The new AutoML tools will have the ability to take visual data and turn it into structured data, that’s according to Sheth speaking at a press conference.

“One example of this is FOX Sports in Australia – they’re using this to drive viewer engagement – they’re putting in data from a cricket game and using that to predict when a wicket will fall with an amazing amount of accuracy and then it sends a notification out via social media telling followers to come and see it,” he said.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said that while Google has effectively admitted to being the second best cloud provider with the introduction of Anthos, what it is doing well is leading the AI charge.

“They’re (Google Cloud) very strong in AI and ML, no-one’s doubted that,” Nag said in an interview with Cloud Pro. When asked if customers would choose Google Cloud specifically based on AI as its USP, Nag said: “yeah I think so, that and big data and analytics, you know, they’ve always been very strong in that area”.

How are companies benefitting from cloud AI and AutoML?

Binu Mathew, senior vice president and global head of digital products at Baker Hughes, came on stage after Sheth to talk to us about how his team of developers use Google’s AI tools in the oil and gas industry specifically.

He said, when an offshore oil platform goes down, it costs the company about $1m per day. However, by using ML, the oil company can teach its ML tools the signs of normal business function so when these figures start to go awry, the issue can be fixed before any costly downtime occurs. 

Since using Google’s AI tools, Baker Hughes has experienced a 10x improvement in model performance, a 50% reduction in false positive predictions and a 300% reduction in false negatives.

Sheth said that AI will also be part of Kurian’s and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud vision, you can deploy ML across GCP, on-prem, on other cloud platforms and at the edge. This is because it runs off Kubeflow, the open-source AI framework that runs anywhere Kubernetes runs too and it can all be managed by Anthos, Google’s new multi-cloud platform which “simply put, is the future of cloud”, said Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure.

Speaking at a subsequent and more intimate session compared to the keynote, Marcus East, CTO at National Geographic, told the crowd of the company’s cloud transformation and the quick mission-critical turnaround of migrating the company’s 20-year-old legacy on-prem photo archive system to a GCP-based archive in just eight weeks.

He also briefly mentioned the company’s work with AutoML so Cloud Pro caught up with East and a few of the engineers behind the company’s AI work after the event to hear more about the company’s vision for cloud AI implementation for the future, specifically with AutoML Vision.

Speaking exclusively to Cloud Pro, Melissa Wiley, vice president of digital products at National Geographic, said that one of the ideas it is exploring is that of advanced automated tagging of metadata and how it will be able to assign labels of not just specific animals, but specific species to animals that appear in the circa two million images it stores in its archive.

That starts by using AutoML Vision’s automatic image recognition. Using machine learning, Nat Geo can train its industry-specific ML tool to learn one species of tiger and apply that to identify the same species in all the other photos in which that species appears, according to Wiley.

“When our photographers are out in the field, they might be up to their waist in mud, avoiding mosquitos and being chased by wild creatures – they don’t have time to take a great photo and then turn to their laptop and fill in all the metadata,” said East. “So this idea that we could somehow use AutoML and the BroadVision API to really [make those connections] and enrich the metadata in those images is the starting point. Once we’ve done that, we can give our end consumers a better experience.”

“That’s the next stage for us; we can see the potential to harness the power of these cloud-native capabilities, to build personalised experiences for consumers. For example, we could say we know Connor likes snakes and videos of animals eating animals, let’s give him that experience,” he added.

Wiley also mentioned the enterprise potential for this too, perhaps offering the technology to schools, libraries or even other companies so Nat Geo can help them identify animals too. “There are a million ideas we could talk about,” she said.