Off we go for Google Cloud Next ’20 OnAir EMEA! Today, the flagship event of Google Cloud in EMEA kicked off with an opening keynote by Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, and Chris Ciauri, President of Google Cloud EMEA. What can you expect from the EMEA version of the virtual Google Cloud yearly signature event, taking place online from 29th of September to 27th of October 2020? Get a list of must-watch sessions & recommendations from our experts in this article!
Next weeks, we’ll be spoiled with content on different topics about the latest and greatest of Google Cloud. With each week covering a new topic, there’s fresh Cloud insights for everyone. You can see the full agenda and register here.
Lost in all the sessions? See here which sessions are the must-sees, recommended by our experts.
So what’s different for the EMEA version of Google Cloud’s flagship event, normally held in San Francisco USA, but due to Covid-19 shifted to a virtual event? The main difference is that you’ll hear from customers & Google product managers based in EMEA during this version of Google Cloud Next ’20 OnAir.
The rest of the concept of the virtual Google Cloud Next OnAir stays the same: each week, new sessions are unlocked for the different topics; with sessions there to re-watch on-demand at any time after that. There are also some great learning opportunities and demos for you to watch online, from the comfort of your home or office. Any pressing questions for Google Cloud? You can meet Googlers virtually to ask away.
The first week of Google Cloud Next ’20 EMEA will be devoted to Industry Insights, week 2 to Productivity & Collaboration, week 3 to Infrastructure & Security, week 4 to Data Analytics, Data Management & Databases and Cloud AI and lastly week 5 to Application Modernisation & Business Application Platform.
Your guide to must-watch sessions, recommended by our experts
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Here is an overview of the recommended sessions by our Fourcast by Devoteam experts:
- Opening keynote of Google Cloud Next ’20 EMEA
- ‘Awesome new features to help you manage BigQuery’
- ‘Generating value with AI’
- ‘From business continuity to business agility with GCP and SAP’
- ‘CCAI state of the union keynote’
- Solution keynote: ‘Beyond the office’
- ‘Tools and skills to accelerate recovery’
- ‘Integrating VM workloads into Anthos service mesh’
- ‘Managing change in an SAP world – tips on how to leverage the cloud’
- ‘An introduction to ML Ops on GCP’
Get introduced to these must-watches by our experts and find out why they recommend these sessions:
Jeremy Bonnevalle – COO
I’m really looking forward to the ‘Generating value with AI’ session because Google has been making quite some advancements in the pre-trAIned models that are that are focused around artificial intelligence, which bring an enormous amount of business value.
I’ve had the pleasure to be in touch with the product team of Document AI, for example, quite often in the past couple of months. And the amount of progress that these teams make in a very short period of time is incredible. The business value that
Document AI for example brings is amazing.
So I’m really looking forward to see whether Google is bringing more of these
pre-trained models to the market which can immediately have a huge impact
on each and every business. So I’m really looking forward to that.
Julie Dockx – Head of Customer Success
As I’m customer success manager at Fourcast by Devoteam I’m very much looking forward to the solution keynote about ‘Beyond the office’.
What are the new collaboration and productivity features? What’s the vision of Google for the future of G Suite and the G Suite applications? As that’s what we’re using every day and what we are inspiring our customers to work with. And to have their own digital transformation, in order to accelerate and leverage all the G Suite
applications and their functionalities.
So that’s the first one I’m very much looking forward to. And then a second session I recommend is a special one related to Covid-19, titled ‘Tools and skills to accelerate recovery’.
Google is mentioning themselves that since 2015 they have helped millions of people to find a job, to grow their business and their career. So it’s Google’s intention to help every one of us, every business, every company and every individual with the recovery that we’re all facing due to the coronavirus crisis.
They do this by helping with their technology, their tools and their training so that
we, you, everyone as a business, can grow even stronger, faster and more resilient.
Niels Buekers – CTO
I’m really looking forward to viewing the session on ‘Integrating VM workloads into Anthos service mesh’. I expect this session will close the gap between the old and the new.
Many companies are already working with production microservices in Google Cloud and can leverage all the benefits we love Kubernetes and Anthos for. On the other side though, those same customers still have a lot of legacy VM workloads running in their on prem, which are excluded from this new way of working.
By bridging these environments using Anthos service mesh, customers will be able to benefit from all the benefits Istio brings to the table.
I do strongly believe this will be a great session for every cloud architect that is looking forward to how to bring the benefits of cloud-native deployment to their VM environments.
Denis Abedinaj – Chat- & voicebot specialist
Personally I will be attending the ‘CCAI state of the union keynote’ powered by Antony Passemard, who is the head of product for conversational AI at Google Cloud. I’m really excited about the Contact center AI, also called CCAI, product of Google. Why?
Because this product aims to help companies in the daily basic interaction they have with their clients. It also acts as a virtual customer support agent that offers AI-based conversations as service by Google Cloud.
The CCAI solution is definitely the best service companies can use to increase operational efficiency and personalise customer support.
But what is CCAI exactly? This tool has been designed to help Contact centers in three different ways.
First, with conversational technologies basically Contact center AI can understand what the customer says with speech to text, respond naturally with text to speech and ultimately take actions with Google Dialogflow.
Then, there is also virtual agent. Here we are talking about the usage of conversational technologies to provide automated responses to user inputs from basic and recurrent FAQs, for example.
And then Agent Assist. Sometimes certain questions will still require live support agents. CCAI allows this to be redirected towards a customer support agent.
Jasper Roelants – Sales Executive
I am really looking forward to the opening keynote of Google Cloud Next ’20 EMEA. In this session, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian will be joined by Chris Ciauri, the president of Google Cloud EMEA.
Together they will share insights on how businesses can leverage Cloud technology
to build for the future and to adapt to complexities, to challenges and opportunities.
It’s always very energising and interesting to hear Thomas Kurian talk about Google Cloud’s vision and to get an overall overview of Google Cloud’s plans
for the future.
Charles Verleyen – Head of Data & Analytics
As a data analytics passionate I always favour some BigQuery sessions as a first choice.
So this one is the session DA300 that’s presented by
Tino Tereshko and it has a very appealing name: ‘Awesome new features to help you manage BigQuery’.
So this session is really great in the sense that it will introduce all the new features in BigQuery which are already in alpha and other features that are still on the roadmap.
First, the session will start by introducing some key integrations with two Google solutions. The first one is Auto ML. BigQuery will make it even easier for you to
run your Auto ML model directly from data stored on BigQuery.
The other cool integration is with Looker. Looker has been acquired by Google and they have done a lot of efforts to integrate BigQuery with Looker to give you the ability to get your visualisation and your insights as fast as possible directly from BigQuery into Looker.
Aa second cool feature is BigQuery Slot Recommender. As a reminder, you have three pricing models on BigQuery: on-demand pricing, flex slots and flat rates. It’s sometimes a bit difficult to choose between these three and that’s why BigQuery now is coming up with this recommender.
It will base itself on your queries and when you start consumption it will tell you which BigQuery pricing plan suits you best.
All these new features will just make BigQuery more and more robust and all of these integrations with Looker and Auto ML will also make it more accessible for users to get fast benefits out of their data.
Michael Van Leemputten – Territory Manager
I’m going to make a recommendation of two
must-see sessions. The first one is ‘Managing change in an SAP world – tips on how to leverage the cloud‘.
The reason why I have chosen this specific session is that change is a given for any SAP customer. We are all very aware and we all know
that SAP is forcing everyone to upgrade to S4 in 2027 latest.
So this is going to impact a lot of companies out there, but it’s specifically going to be a real adventure for all companies. It’s really not an easy project to move a mission-critical environment like SAP to the Cloud.
During this session, Google is going to explain they have a lot of things in place to mitigate risk and really help you to get to that end goal that you have envisioned.
Second session that I recommend, and I’m going to stay in the same topic, it’s
the session that’s called ‘From business continuity to business agility with GCP and SAP’.
This is a session where two of Google’s SAP leads are going to give some insights on how you as an SAP customer can deliver practical innovations in the short term without having to already make that upgrade to S4.
So basically giving you a view on what’s possible already in the short term and helping you to plan in the long term.
Tristan Van Thielen – Head of Machine Learning
The session I’m going to recommend is AI212: ‘An introduction to ML Ops on GCP’. By now, I guess probably most of you are familiar with DevOps, which is a way to release software into a production environment.
ML Ops is pretty much the same, but for Machine Learning models. That’s an area where we see a lot of our customers struggling. They are well capable of developing a model that has adequate accuracy and they want to test out in a production environment.
But they don’t really know how to deploy it, let alone how to iterate on that model. This is something that ML Ops provides and is very good at.
Google Cloud has some new services that can help you with ML Ops and that’s what this session will be about. You’ll probably hear about tools such as Kubeflow and AI Pipelines which are very very cutting edge. It really will help you in your journey to leverage AI a lot more in your organisation.
Do you want to access the sessions & put together your own agenda for the coming weeks of Google Cloud Next ’20 OnAir? Register today & join the Next fun!
