Google introduced Anthos, a new integrated cloud services tool at the opening keynote of Google’s annual Cloud Next 2019 conference in San Francisco.
“We have always had the ambition to use technology to improve the lives of as many people as possible. Enterprise gives us an opportunity to approach this in a profound way by directly working together with companies, businesses, and institutions that power our global economy, and drive important changes in our society,” said Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai during his opening keynote remarks. “Cloud is one of the largest areas of investments for Google.”
Last month, Google revealed that it will invest $13 billion throughout 2019, to expand its cloud services. The company has also announced two new cloud regions in Seoul and Salt Lake City over and above the 19 cloud regions it already has. Google currently has 58 data centers and is planning to expand this year.
Continuing to strengthen its cloud strategy and in response to the competition from Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure; Anthos is built on a Kubernetes tool which allows users to maintain data on the premises as well as integrate it to their cloud. It would provide a secure data management solution for businesses and a common development platform for developers. Industry experts believe that Google’s approach of developing integrated solutions to enable working with competing platforms might spark a trend where enterprises look to introducing hybrid services.
With this technology, Google is targeting startups and enterprises going through
Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO during the keynote said that Anthos is a digital transformation platform that helps build innovative solutions with three main elements – a stack that can be run within data centers, a single programming model that works seamlessly with hybrid cloud environments, allows management on multiple channels without complexity. It is a tremendous pleasure to acknowledge the support of our partners like VMware who have helped make Anthos live today. I would also like to acknowledge our hardware partners like Intel, who have built the reference architecture for Anthos. Finally, I would like to recognize our solutions and services partners who complement our technology and manage our services on Anthos.
Thomas Kurian
CEO, Google Cloud
Kurian expanding on Google Cloud’s abilities during his keynote address that Google Cloud offers three important capabilities for digital transformation: First, high scale, highly secure and reliable infrastructure, including cutting edge computing, storage, and networking through many regions around the world. Second, a digital transformation platform to manage data at scale, develop and modernize applications, understand and analyze data, collaborate with people and take advantage of new AI capabilities in meaningful ways. Third, a suite of industry-specific solutions that deliver new digital capabilities in healthcare, retail, media and entertainment, and other industries.
Kurian also spoke about Google’s vision for cloud computing. “we see industries around the world being transformed with digital technology whether they are hospitals changing the way they deliver patient care, retailers who want to offer new experiences to customers or financial institutions who want to track customers in new ways. We at Google want to help deliver three important things that help customers through this journey: 1) Global scale digital infrastructure, 2) A suite of digital transformation solutions, and 3) Specific solutions using Google’s advanced technologies for specific industries.”
Anthos is targeted at making cloud infrastructure more accessible for customers. Google is building further capabilities to offer the ability to manage data scale, to build and modernize application workloads, to conduct in-depth analysis and identify data patterns for better business decisions, to use Google’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology advances, and to collaborate with internal and external environments in profound new ways. Google is further building unique industry-specific capabilities for industries such as healthcare, media, financial institutions, and retail.
The company also announced partnerships with seven open source software companies, Confluent, MongoDB, Elastic, Redis Labs, InfluxData, Neo4j, and DataStax. Google is also planning to boost its sales team for cloud this year, according to a statement released earlier.
