Google Next Day Two Recap: G Suite Takes The Spotlight

The second day of Google Cloud Next put a big focus on AI, security and IoT.

The sold-out conference formally kicked off on Tuesday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. On Wednesday, executives doubled down on the theme of ’enterprise ready’ with new G Suite innovations.

’The real magic happens when individuals come together in the team to do big things and that is where G Suite comes in,’ said Garrick Toubassi, VP of Engineering at Google.

Toubassi discussed new functionalities in cloud services that let you go beyond your G Suite content, so you can index all third-party information, whether it’s in the cloud or on-prem. Additionally, Google rolled out an enterprise version of Google Voice, now available through an Early Adopter program. It combines context and intelligence to offer features like voicemail transcriptions and call filtering.

’Up until this year we had seen stagnation in the email and cloud collaboration suite. There had been some updates that were important but nothing like this,’ said Tony Safoian, CEO and president of SADA Systems, a cloud solutions provider based in California. ’Voice has been on the journey of becoming a cloud service for some time. Today, it was sort of Google’s big statement that they are a significant player in this game.’

Another big announcement was the debut of Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). The tiny chip—four of which can fit on a penny—can pair with sensors to execute machine learning while delivering efficiencies in cost and power consumption,

"Edge TPU will bring a brain to your edge devices," said Injong Rhee, Google's vice president for IoT. Rhee said it will deliver affordable and power-efficient data processing and machine learning computation without performance compromises.

’We’re the only cloud vendor today, I believe, that combined our AI research, our software research and our hardware research to build together a hardware that is truly optimized for the latest and great AI in the cloud,’ added Antony Passemard, head of product management for Cloud IoT at Google.

Google Next was held from July 24 – July 26. For more interviews, watch CRNtv’s video.