The Google Cloud Next ’17 has kicked off with a promising start, and a number of new announcements have been made by Google including acquisitions, partnerships, new technological partners and products. More announcements are expected in the course of the three days that the event is going to be run. The measures are intended to solidify Google’s prominence in the market as a cloud services provider, directly taking on major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
SAP Partnership
Google has announced a strategic partnership with SAP, to develop enterprise solutions for customers. The best cloud and machine learning solutions from Google will be integrated into enterprise applications by SAP as a part of the strategic partnership. The in-memory database SAP HANA will be certified on the Google Cloud Platform, new G Suite integrations and Google’s machine learning capabilities.
Kaggle acquisition
Google has acquired Kaggle, a social network for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. The Kaggle platform is used to explore the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and data analytics. There are over 800,000 active users on Kaggle, which has emerged as one of the best communities to explore public datasets. Google will be introducing the ability to store and query large datasets. Google announced the Kaggle acquisition through a blog post.
Support for engineers working with Google Cloud
Google has introduced dedicated support from its engineers to the cloud platform, with pricing models. Google has partnered with Pivotal and Rackspace to deliver this cloud support. There is a flat monthly fees per user per month, and Google engineers will be providing the support. The three choices available are development engineering support with a response in four to eight hours, production engineering support with a response within an hour and on-call engineering support that guarantees a response within fifteen minutes.
Cloud Video Intelligence API
There have been a number of new product announcements. The Cloud Video Intelligence API is in beta testing with a select group of early customers. The service breaks down a video into shots, and provides a description of the content and action in each shot, along with a confidence score of how accurate the analysis is. Users can search through videos in much the same was as they search through text.
Cloud Machine Learning Engine
Cloud Machine Learning Engine is a tool to train models for artificial intelligence applications, and deploy them through the cloud. The models are based on the TensorFlow framework, and has been designed to interact with any kind of data at any scale. Cloud Vision API is a tool to analyse the content of images, and has been updated with additional capabilities. The enhanced OCR capabilities of the API can extract text from scans of documents. The Cloud Jobs API now has a Commute Search feature, which allows users to narrow down their job searches according to the amount of time they are willing to invest in daily commutes.
The three day event has been sold out, with 10,000 registered attendees, which is more than five times the number of people who attended Google Cloud Next ’16. Google will be providing over 200 training and informational sessions to attendees, apart from a series on talks by experts on how best to use enterprise cloud solutions and cutting edge technological solutions.
Alison Wagonfeld, VP of Engineering at Google Cloud said “Google’s cloud technology and approach to the market is the product of 16 years inventing, developing, and fine tuning tools for a fully connected enterprise.”