STEPHANIE WONG: All right.
By now, everyone should know about the Google Cloud Data
Summit.
This is our signature event for all data leaders out there.
Last year, Bruno Aziza, Head of Data and Analytics at Google
Cloud, introduced this concept to us,
as his team had just spearheaded the inaugural version
of this summit.
So this year, the event has returned.
And in fact, it's now become an expected and highly anticipated
occurrence.
And we are thrilled to welcome back Bruno
to tell us about what's happening this year in terms
of new product launches and awesome-- awesome customer
and partner news.
So Bruno, welcome back.
BRUNO AZIZA: Thanks for having me, Stephanie.
STEPHANIE WONG: So last year we talked, and you and the team
were just kicking off this event for the very first time.
Now it's become the stable industry event
for the data industry, with tens of thousands of attendees
and an impressive set of new products and customers.
Then a few months later at Google Cloud Next,
you all did an awesome job, again,
with more customer and more new products.
In fact, I even had the opportunity
to jump in and join our keynote, which
was a super fun experience.
BRUNO AZIZA: I know.
That was super fun to have you.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes.
And now, no later than last month,
you also kicked off yet another series, the Google Data
Community Summit, where you interviewed
Delivery Hero about their data mesh deployment,
and where you also introduced the new BigQuery Migration
Service, Dataflow Prime, Serverless Spark,
and the general availability for Dataplex GA.
And then there's more.
BRUNO AZIZA: There is always more, Stephanie.
So in fact, over the last two years,
we've drastically accelerated the pace at which
we connect with the community.
Our goal really is to provide context
around all the innovation that we're
introducing in the marketplace.
And there are many of them, right?
So we're really driven to provide
the community with as many opportunities
to engage with us, give us feedback,
and perhaps more importantly, really
create a platform for the community members
to learn from each other.
And that includes us.
Frankly, we learn a lot from the community and the wonderful way
that they choose to deploy products and the services
we've built for them.
So you're right.
In addition to Data Cloud Summit,
and Google Next, and Data Cloud Community series, just
this past month, we're accelerating
the pace of how we can connect with the community,
and also increasing the number of times
that our Data Analytics Customer Council meets.
Originally, it was a yearly occurrence.
And now we have regional versions of the Data Customer
Council.
So if you don't know about this event,
you should apply to join it, of course, because now you
can meet with the product team in your region multiple times
a month across the globe to discuss our product strategy
and really tell us how we can be the better partner
for your innovation journey.
So you're right, Stephanie, there is more.
And I believe that more communication is always better.
So you know that when we launched the Data Cloud
Summit, last year, I had a feeling that the community
would really latch onto it.
And they've responded in droves.
And so this second year in a row for the Data Cloud Summit,
I'm really excited about it.
But I've got to tell you, we're not stopping here.
And I don't want to pre-announce anything,
but if you're following us, pay attention
to some of the upcoming announcements.
There's going to be more later this year as well.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes, very excited for that.
But let's go ahead and focus on this Data Cloud Summit.
What can people expect this year?
BRUNO AZIZA: So you know by now.
And we're all about customers, customers, customers.
Our commitment, everything we do is for customers and partners.
So you can expect to hear from them first.
For instance, you'll hear from Ignacio,
who is the CIO of Vodafone.
Vodafone is a very innovative company.
It's Europe's largest mobile communication company.
And they show us how they innovate with Dataproc,
BigQuery, and Vertex AI to create compelling customer
experiences-- a great session, great interview to watch.
You'll also hear from Wayfair, and how
they use data to create more personalized and compelling
experiences but also better customer service.
If you're a Wayfair customer yourself or employee,
you see the results of that for yourself.
You'll also hear from ING Group's
global chief analytics officer, Kerem,
in a session with our partner Deloitte.
He explains how the company went about choosing the right data
cloud to power their data analytics and AI use case.
It's really important to know what are the criteria
that you should really choose to make the right choice.
You'll hear from Walmart.
Their senior director of engineering,
Bob, comes in and talks about digital transformation
using Spanner--
great, great session.
And then finally, Forbes.
Forbes is the world's biggest business media brand.
Their CTO Vadim is coming on stage with MongoDB
to talk about migration, security, costs,
infrastructure.
So in my opinion, all these sessions
are must-watch sessions.
Maybe watch them multiple times, share them with as many people
as you can, and then more importantly, connect
and follow those leaders, because they
have a lot to share, and they're great members of the community.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yes, lots of leaders to look forward to.
But what about the products?
I have to ask.
BRUNO AZIZA: Yes.
And I'm excited about that as well,
bringing a lot of innovation into the market.
And more importantly, I think, the theme of this moment for us
is what we call "limitless."
In fact, I even have the T-shirt for it.
And this idea of limitless is that,
if you've been in the data world like I have been,
or as long as I have been, you know that the potential
of your data, the potential of your people is truly limitless,
yet the architecture and the approaches of the past really
aren't.
So they're not supporting us to do that.
And we want to talk about how we can
help you manage across workloads, users,
data of all type, all sizes, all forms.
And we know that's really hard for you.
And so we've been working really hard
to bring solutions together and make you--
give you the tools to bring down those barriers
between your data, your people, and your workloads
so you can reach your potential.
So the first innovation is an innovation project
called BigLake.
So BigLake is a data lake storage engine,
which unifies data lakes and warehouses.
Look, we know that managing a data
across lakes and warehouses can create silos.
It can increase risks, costs, and reduce agility
for customers.
And that's why we're introducing BigLake,
because it's a great project that
is going to allow you to unify data warehousing and lakes
together, and also give you fine-grained access
control in an API interface that spans, of course,
across Google's assets, but also with open-source formats
like Parquet and open-source processing engines like Apache
Spark.
So this is going to open a lot of opportunities
for customers that want to unify these workloads.
Another workload that's important for customers
is real time, and capturing changes in real time.
That's why another innovation we're introducing--
and it's really exciting-- is Spanner Change Streams.
This innovation is coming soon, will let you
track changes within your Spanner database in real time.
So we're talking about inserts, updates, deletes.
It writes the changes to downstream systems
in real time at scale.
It replicates changes from Spanner
to BigQuery for real-time analytics.
It triggers downstream application behavior
using Pub/Sub.
And it can store changes in GCS for compliance.
So it's really, really a great example
of what customers need to manage and keep data systems in sync
in real time.
At the Data Community Summit last month,
we introduced this new BigQuery Migration Service.
And at this event, we're introducing Apache HBase
to Cloud BigTable with live migration.
That's in GA.
And so there's a lot of automation here.
The offer automatically creates tables in BigTable
based on your existing tables in HBase.
It validates the data integrity during the migration
between the source and the target.
And so really, a lot of great new ways for people
to accelerate their innovation in their journey
to the cloud for a better future.
STEPHANIE WONG: All right, all right.
So that's for data of all types in real time and at scale.
BRUNO AZIZA: That's right.
And I know it's a lot.
I want to just take a pause here and talk
about why this concept of limitless data is important.
So I think we've all learned over the last couple of years
that the world is digitalizing at an incredible fast clip,
and that the challenges that organizations have to deal with
is not just about the fact that the data is growing itself,
but it's about the unpredictable nature of that growth
and the unpredictable nature of the data itself.
So your data is limitless.
And it's coming at you in all types of shapes
and all types of speeds.
And so what we hear from customers
is that they need more simplicity to handle that.
They need a unified platform that, one, is,
of course, orchestrated for unpredictable scale, type,
and speed, but also runs at the highest level of reliability
so you can truly run your data applications as a business
critical workload.
So that's really how we focused and how we think about it.
So give you an example, Spanner currently
processes over 2 billion requests
per second at peak, with up to 99.999% availability.
That's really, really quite amazing.
And so beyond scale, shape, speed, and high availability,
there's a need for customers to operationalize innovation
faster, which now brings me to the third innovation
that we're introducing around AI.
You know that one of the most important workloads
that customers come to us for is machine learning and AI.
And you know that our AI portfolio is really
anchored around Vertex AI.
That's our managed platform to build, deploy, and scale models
and has been available in GA since Google I/O in last May.
And Vertex AI is optimized to work seamlessly
with workloads in BigQuery.
So at the Data Cloud Summit, we announced more innovation
to enable customers to get AI models into production faster
and make the maintenance of those models even easier.
So there's two innovations to pay attention there.
The first one is Vertex AI Workbench, generally available
now.
It brings data and machine learning systems
into one interface, so you have one-- now one common toolset
across data analytics and data science and machine learning,
because it natively integrates with BigQuery,
Serverless Spark, and Dataproc.
So that's a really big deal, I think,
for people trying to innovate with AI.
The second one is the introduction of Vertex AI Model
Registry.
That's in preview and it's going to make it easier for customers
to manage and maintain models.
So in Vertex AI, a model registry, basically
it's a central repository that you
can use to discover using governed machine learning
models, even the ones that are in BigQuery machine learning.
So you could see here a lot of integration,
a lot of simplification.
Now, this past month, I talked about Serverless Spark,
as you've mentioned in the introduction here.
And this is the industry's first Serverless Spark offer.
At the event, we introduced here in preview pervasive Spark
experience.
So this is where you can connect, analyze, and execute
Spark jobs from BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Dataplex,
in just a few clicks without custom integration.
Again, it's going to bring you a lot of this unification
together.
There's also a lot of flexibility coming in,
because we also introduce-- we also
GA'd flexibility of consumption.
That means that you can choose between deploying
with serverless, GKE, or compute clusters for your Spark
applications.
So you can see here a lot of flexibility,
a lot of unification, a lot of simplification
to the service of our customer's limitless data needs,
essentially.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah.
Wow, that is a lot coming out, yeah.
BRUNO AZIZA: I know.
I know that's a lot.
And that's just scratching the surface,
because I'm not talking here about our new partner
initiatives.
We've made a lot of progress there,
over 700 tech partners built on the Google Data Cloud.
We also have news on data sharing.
We're also talking about our new database migration program
and awesome, awesome demos.
You've got to make sure that you catch those,
because I think you'll be blown away with some
of the innovation there.
STEPHANIE WONG: Yeah.
I am pretty sure everybody universally loves demos.
All right.
So you talked about limitless data, limitless workloads.
But what about people?
Is there such a thing as limitless people?
I know we already have a movie about it, but--
BRUNO AZIZA: Yeah, yeah.
So we like to call this "limitless reach."
And the idea here is that your data really touches everyone.
Your data has the potential to enable everyone--
of course, your people, your employees,
but also your partners and your suppliers.
And it's not just one type of employee, right?
It's the data engineers but also the business users,
your executives-- so essentially, everyone.
And at this event we're really focused
on the unification of business intelligence capabilities.
That means bringing Google Looker, Google Workspace,
Sheets, and Data Studio closer together.
We're bringing capabilities that allow
you to connect all your people around the same semantics,
same definition, from the information workers that
love spreadsheets to the data engineers that
are building data-rich applications using LookML.
So for instance, we are now launching Connected Sheets
for Looker and the ability to access data models
within Data Studio.
So a lot of unification.
And really, it's going to enable customers to interact
with data however they choose.
STEPHANIE WONG: All right.
So clearly, Bruno, we've covered a lot here today.
And as you said, we were just scratching the surface
with a few of these announcements
that your team is working on this week across products,
partners, and customers.
So of course, everyone wants to know, how can they get started.
BRUNO AZIZA: Yes.
And we want you to engage.
That's why we're creating as many ways as we can to do that.
I would say at least there's three ways.
So if you couldn't attend the data summit live,
you should register anyway, because you'll
get access to the recordings and all the resources.
You'll be able to watch them on demand,
share them with your colleagues and friends at work.
Second is we want to make sure you subscribe to Data Journeys.
This is a program every week.
We've created a platform now for customers to come in and kind
of confess their dos and don'ts, and reveal their architectural
secrets for you.
We're going to put a link to that
down here so you can go in and subscribe,
and watch the videos that are already available,
that is publicly available.
And then finally, is there anything that we're missing?
Anything that we should be doing that we're not
doing to help you?
Just ping me on my LinkedIn profile or directly here.
We want to know how we're doing.
And we want to see what else we can do
to help you innovate with data.
STEPHANIE WONG: All right.
Well, we covered a lot here today.
Everyone look forward to the Data Cloud Summit.
Thanks again, Bruno.
BRUNO AZIZA: Thank you, Stephanie.