Google Next 2017: On to Innovative Infrastructure

There were literally lines wrapped for blocks around the Moscone Center West, here in San Francisco as 10,000 folks tried to get registered and seated for the first days general session. The major theme was that while Google was still making their cloud the best, it needed to be expanded to support not only individuals, but organizations and ecosystems with a growing ability to conjure creativity and innovation in new ways. It is clear to me that Mobile and Cloud are now table stakes for organizations and migrating to the Cloud is no easy task yet, but it's getting better. It is also clear that the speed to leverage the results of being on the cloud is at least an order of magnitude faster.

Google did a great job of putting some big name companies on stage to show enterprise levels of prowess and results. While most were business operational or spreading personal productivity, there were glimmers of innovation in a few of the case studies. I would suggest reviewing the following YouTube Video starting at the hour thirty mark (1:30 mark) where it gets increasingly interesting. I was especially captivated by the Ebay example at the (2:26 mark) Day General Session. EBay is combining its history of purchases around the world for the last 20 years to provide not only a concierge shopping bot, but a pricing bot leveraging gobs of data in the cloud, natural language chat bots processing, machine and deep learning to create some real innovation with Google's new and traditional cloud services.

My Key Highlights So Far: 

Aggressive Partnering with Solutions Providers to Push the Creative Cloud
Completing a Partnership with SAP for Functional Transaction Access
Proof Points on Speeding up the Cloud Migration Process with Logical Phased Steps
Leverage of Machine Learning in a Democratized Fashion
The Proof Points of a Resilient Cloud (Security, Elastic, Dynamic and Cost Effective)
Great Improvements in Google Hangouts Supercharged by the Jamboard
The Application of AI to Image and Video Recognition on a Portfolio Basis
The Tilt Brush 3D Art Booth (being an artist myself, I was drooling)
The Integrated Use of Geolocation and Big Data to Visualize Opportunity
The Emphasis on EcoSystem Creativity and Reach

                                                          Immense Cloud Network

                                                         Visualization of Big Sensor Data

                                                        Power of Geolocation Context

                                                      Leveraging Video with Hangouts

                                                Video Indexing of Semiotic Themes

                                                    Collaborating with a Shared Jamboard

                                                       Tilt-Brushing it Baby


My Low Lights So Far:  

Not Enough Capacity for Breakout Sessions
Not Enough Repeat Sessions for Hot Themes
Too Product Driven; Not Real Market, Sales and Customer Driven
Too Many Products Vying for Attention
Need to Emphasize Google's Growing  Digital Business Platform Capability; Not Just Cloud
More Emphasis on Other Parts of AI; not Just the Beating Drum of Data Driven Machine Learning

Bottom Line:

Drinking from a firehose where the water is sweet for the most part. I wish there was two of me to get a grip on this large and overwhelming conference.