Google Cloud Next Data, Analytics, and AI Launches with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza

Mark Mirchandani is back this week with cohost Bukola Ayodele. We’re talking with Eric Schmidt and Bruno Aziza about all the awesome new analytics, data, and AI launches from last week’s Google Cloud Next conference.

Our guests start the show outlining the challenges clients face when storing, organizing, and analyzing data in the cloud. These needs have inspired Google solutions that focus on simplifying data management for customers. Next announcements like BigQuery Omni, which helps customers achieve full data visibility with cross-cloud analytics, and DataPlex, which facilitates data management at scale, will change the way companies think about their data. BigQuery integration with AppSheets and the new Cloud Looker LookML let customers build once and access from anywhere. The new Looker and Tableau integration revolutionizes the use of the semantic model in Tableau, allowing things like company-established data governance and the Looker Blocks ecosystem to pull into Tableau analysis. New Looker Blocks specifically targeted to the healthcare industry were also introduced at Next.

We talk about the ML announcements including Vertex AI Workbench, a fully-managed service used for data exploration aimed at simplifying the workloads of data engineers. Serverless Spark on Google Cloud shares these goals by making performance tuning, scaling, infrastructure provisioning, and other tasks fully-managed. The new PostgreSQL interface for Spanner lets clients use tools already developed in PostgreSQL while leveraging the global scaling and other benefits of Spanner.

Bruno and Eric share some favorite customer stories as we wrap up this week’s episode. Albertson’s, Renault, and others have interesting data journeys on Google Cloud and our listeners can learn more in the YouTube series hosted by Bruno.

Eric Schmidt

Eric is the the Head of Advocacy for Data Analytics at Google and has been at Google for almost eight years. Previously, he was with Microsoft, where he led Advocacy and Evangelism there, too. He focuses on products like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and leads a team of advocates who help customers turn data into value. In his downtime, Eric is a DJ at 90.3 KEXP here in Seattle or online at kexp.org where he focuses on global music culture.

You can find Eric on Twitter. His handle is “not that eric” - not to be confused with the ‘other Eric Schmidt’ here at Google. In fact, internally, people affectionately call him “cloud E”.

Bruno Aziza

Bruno is the Head of Data & Analytics at Google Cloud. He specializes in everything data, from data analytics, to business intelligence, data science, and artificial intelligence. Before working at Google, he worked at companies like Business Objects when it went IPO and Oracle, where his team led a big turnarounds in the business analytics industry. Bruno also had the opportunity to help launch startups like Alpine Data (now part of Tibco). Sisense and AtScale and helped Microsoft grow its Data unit into a $1B business. He has been educated in the US, France, the UK, and Germany and has written two books on Data Analytics and Performance Management.

In his spare time, Bruno writes a monthly column on Forbes.com on everything Data, AI and Analytics.

Cool things of the week

• Next Reaction: Security and zero-trust announcements blog
• Next Reaction: New Data Cloud launches blog
• Next Reaction: Making multicloud easier for all blog
• Next Reaction: Features to reduce IT carbon emissions and build climate-related solutions blog
• Next Reaction: Monitor your conversations, get started with CCAI Insights blog

Interview

• GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast
• BigQuery site
• Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog
• Google Cloud Next—Day 1 livestream - WalMart video
• Dataplex site
• AppSheet site
• Cloud Looker LookML site
• Tableau site
• Vertex AI site
• Vertex AI Workbench site
• TensorFlow site
• Apache Spark on Google Cloud site
• New PostgreSQL Interface makes Cloud Spanner’s scalability and availability more open and accessible blog
• PostgreSQL site
• Cloud Spanner site
• Google Earth Engine site
• Google Maps Platform site
• Inside Industry Data Management 4.0 at Renault site
• Chess.com site
• Google Next Opening Keynote site
• Data Journeys with Bruno Aziza videos
• Cloud Next Catalog site
• Bruno’s Cloud Next Playlist videos
• Cloud Next Data Analytics Playlist videos
• Bruno on Linkedin site
• Lak on Twitter site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Bukola is working on the Click to Deploy video series.