Google Next announcements 🔎

And also: Funding to State IT budgets 💰, Summary of Microsoft Ignite 👀, Subscriptions show resilience 💪, and more...

This is the Cloudly Update. Helping you stay above the Clouds.

Today we bring you:

Google Cloud Next announcements

More funds to state IT budgets

Summary of Microsoft Ignite

Alibaba’s on-premise hybrid cloud

Subscription shows resilience

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Google presented “Google Cloud Next ’22”, in four key areas:

Data cloud innovations

  • BigQuery - capable of analyzing unstructured, streaming data

  • Supporting significant data formats

  • Looker Studio and Looker Studio Pro to provide support and critical governance capabilities

  • Vertex AI Vision to reduce time to create computer vision applications

  • Supports major open data platforms

Open infrastructure

  • Run 80% faster in large-scale AI training workloads and 50% cheaper than any offering

  • Collaborated with Coinbase to drive blockchain and Web3 development

Hybrid workspaces and cloud collaboration

Invested heavily in Smart Canvas to offer immersive connections which are extensible to third-party applications.

Cloud security

  • Chronicle Security Operations to detect, investigate and respond to threats

  • Google Cloud Carbon Footprint is available to all customers for free

More

Sundar Pichai started Google keynote and mentioned Google Cloud on a $25 billion annual run rate based on third-quarter earnings.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, highlighted customers and referenced Avery Dennison, Groupe Renault, H&M, Johns Hopkins, and ANZ Bank.

Kurian announced the general availability of the latest tensor processing units for training.

He also talked about buildout of cloud regions and requisite storage services.

Kurian did not mention Snowflake (or Databricks) but mentioned “Open Data Cloud” and Data Cloud Alliance.

He spoke about Google Workspace, which is at 8 million users, up from 6 million in two years.

Talking about security, Thomas said they are moving from shared responsibility to shared fate, and this appears to be a clear shot across AWS’ bow.

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The US federal government has stepped up and provided much-needed funding to address pandemic and infrastructure improvements, says Dean Johnson, senior executive government advisor, at Ensono

Congress will continue to re-direct funding to improving artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and business analytics.

2022 Top Technology priorities

1. Cybersecurity and risk management

2. Digital government/digital services

3. Broadband/wireless connectivity

4. Cloud services

5. Legacy modernization of IT systems

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Microsoft Ignite, usually attended by 30,000 people, was held in Seattle with virtual audiences worldwide.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, sent a strong message that the Azure platform allows customers to build their digital business – doing more with less was a key theme.

He presented a meaningful message with Azure Arc to support on-premises and edge workloads and discussed confidential computing at the infrastructure level.

They also showed a demo of how Power Automate would combine with Microsoft Syntex (content processing).

His big focus was on Azure as a developer with GitHub Copilot.

Showed a glimpse of AI-powered avatars and partnerships with Meta Platforms and Cisco around Microsoft Teams.

Nadella finally spoke about security, as a suite of tools, from identity to endpoint governance.

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Alibaba Cloud plans to launch a hybrid cloud to enable enterprises to run a dedicated cloud region in on-premise data centers with multiple availability zones. Service will debut in mainland China by year-end. The new release can use a unified console in the public cloud to manage hybrid cloud environments. Alibaba released a “cloud-native assessment model” to help enterprises evaluate their current posture in cloud adoption.

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Monetization platform provider Zuora has released a Subscription Economy Index™ (SEI) Snapshot, which finds the subscription business resilient.

Key findings

  • 9% greater revenue growth for SEI companies (6.74%) than for S&P 500 (6.16%) in the first half of 2022

  • 24% greater revenue growth than S&P 500 companies in Q2 2022

  • More than double subscriber growth of 2.35% compared to an average quarterly increase of 0.86% in 2021

  • Churn (a subscription metric) remains lower at pre-pandemic levels at 6.13% from 6.5% in 2019

  • Average revenue per account (ARPA) growth decreased from 2.78% in Q4 2021 to 0.94% in Q1 of this year, rebounded in Q2 to 1.89%, higher than the three-year average of 1.81% (2019-2021)

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