By Joe Jablonski, Chief Product Officer at Ocient
I’m just back from a couple days in Sonoma with the Google Cloud ISV team and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities ahead for Ocient running in Google Cloud. For one thing, we talked about data as the heartbeat of every customer’s organization which, of course, speaks directly to a key passion of mine given I work directly with customers, engineering, and our technical sales teams to tackle some pretty tough data challenges.
Another trend from the conference that intrigued me was, despite how far many organizations and Google as a cloud provider have come, there is still a long road ahead with many opportunities to help customers navigate their longer-term cloud journeys.
From Digital Infrastructure to Digital Transformation
If we first look at why customers are migrating most or all their infrastructure to the cloud, it’s important to understand that this is not just because they don’t want to manage the infrastructure. There is a true desire to accelerate digital transformation that underpins this seismic shift. Working with leading cloud providers like Google enables organizations to focus less energy and effort on their digital infrastructures so they can instead focus on driving growth through the development of new products and capabilities. They must also optimize their overall cloud experience, drive efficiencies, and cut costs.
Digital Transformation as Digital Disruption
After two days among leading technology partners and the Google Cloud team, it’s clear that moving to the cloud does not entail waving a magic wand and seeing your organization digitally transformed. The work to transform digitally must still be done on a workload-by-workload basis, executed across lines of business, and by leveraging new technologies, adopting new business processes, and facilitating behavior change. In some ways, digital transformation is digital disruption within the enterprise, and the keys to success lie across Google’s vast partner ecosystem, their fast-growing customer base, and within the cloud platform itself.
Leveraging an Opportunity to “Buy” Not “Build”
Creating this ecosystem is essential. Customers who have the desire to transform their businesses often have the budget to invest heavily in the cloud and in new technologies, but they lack the time and talent to execute across every front of the business they need to transform.
At Ocient, we see this exact trend in customer conversations every day. Many customers are on their last band-aid with an existing solution – trying to maximize what it can deliver and often developing workarounds if the solution can no longer handle the high volume of data they need to ingest and analyze at the speed and cost that makes sense for their use case. These customers need to adopt new solutions quickly, and the opportunity to “buy” versus “build” a solution in-house becomes very attractive, particularly when mitigating risk.
For this reason, Google’s partner ecosystem and the Google Cloud Marketplace enable direct access to an extensive network of highly specialized providers who can drive transformation for customers that are more in the “buy” than “build” mode. For customers who require deep technical capabilities to quickly develop and launch new products, need some help visualizing the “art of the possible,” and may appreciate quick access to developer support to experiment, test, and validate new and innovative solutions, Google now has an army of technical partners to enhance their native offering and deliver on their commitment to rapidly enable digital transformation for the enterprise.
Exploring the “Art of the Possible” with Ocient in Google Cloud
In partnering with Google, Ocient now has the opportunity to help deliver that transformation and to drive significant impact given that we design and engineer hyperscale data analytics solutions. The challenges of operating at hyperscale require careful planning and consideration, expertise with ultra-large data sets, and exploring the “art of the possible” with customers who have hit a ceiling with legacy or other cloud-based solutions. Whether you’re migrating to the cloud for the first time or looking to upgrade the performance of a workload, developing a hyperscale solution often requires a complete rewiring of the workload and a high degree of expertise, engineering, and support.
To me, that’s an exciting opportunity for Ocient and our partnership with Google. We enable organizations to not only “move to the cloud,” but to embed digital transformation and technology throughout the company in a way that delivers incredible value, new growth opportunities, and a better future. At Ocient, we thrive when we’re challenged to solve problems, develop complex solutions, and remove barriers that were holding our customers back. It’s an honor to work alongside the team at Google to make digital transformation a reality for our joint customers. If you’re one of the many organizations challenged to analyze a fast-growing dataset, please reach out so we can help.