A Sneak Peak At A New Google Cloud Data Analytics Tool

Debanjan Saha, vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud, gives CRN a high-level, sneak peak at the new product.

Google Cloud is working on a still-unnamed product — with an announcement expected this quarter — involving the sharing of data and insights across user communities in a secure and privacy-safe way.

“It’s good to have powerful tools, but you also need easy access to data, because without data, those tools are not really that effective,” Debanjan Saha, vice president and general manager of data analytics at Google Cloud told CRN. “Once you have data and tools, you want to address real-life business problems — for example, fraud analytics in financial transactions or… predictive inventory management for retail, smart factories or autonomous cars. We want to apply analytics in those problems. And one of the things that I’m really, really interested in is how you share data and insight with your own team, with your customers, with your partners, so that you have an end-to-end view of what’s going on.”

A retailer, for example, may be working with a supplier who is sending products to the retailer’s warehouses. From the warehouses, the retailer gives the products to its logistics partners so they can be shipped to customers.

“Today, sharing that information is not particularly easy,” Saha said. “But if you have an environment or a platform where you can, in real time, share that information in a way which is secure and privacy-safe, that helps everybody with end-to-end visibility. And it’s not just about sharing data. You also want to share the insight and share various different ML (machine learning) models and various different dashboards. That’s one of the products that we are working on.”

Miles Ward, chief technology officer for Los Angeles-based SADA Systems, helped with one of the early prototypes for the new product.

“Customers in almost every vertical need to work more closely with their whole ecosystem of vendors and partners and clients, but inflexible, unintelligent data makes all of that slow, expensive and error-prone,” said Ward, whose company is a Google Cloud Premier Partner specializing in technology consulting, IT services, application development, and managed services.

“Google Drive made it easy for consumers to share — what if Google could bring that kind of user-centered design to the hardest corporate data contexts?” Ward said. “We see huge potential for value creation. No other cloud provider is thinking this long-range about the applied needs of customers or has the scalable core tech to take them nearly as far. This is one example of why the market sees Google as such a stand-out leader on data.”