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From August 29-31, Google Cloud hosted 1,500 people in San Francisco for Google Cloud Next ‘23. The event touched on several changes coming to Google Cloud that are sure to help businesses and organizations across the world, as well as noteworthy changes to AI platforms like Duet AI. The event was also home to the Google Cloud Partner Awards, presented to standout Google Cloud partners who have achieved significant success in a given field or technology. The partners listed below are this year’s winners in each award category.Global Partners of the Year With an already impressive history as an established leader in cloud consultancy and technical services, SADA has won the Global Partners of the Year award for the sixth year in a row. The company was awarded for its significant accomplishments in the Google Cloud ecosystem, including adding more than 566 new customers to its portfolio in 2022 alone. Another award in this category went to Deloitte in recognition of its positive impact on the private sector. From tax services and business consultation to mergers and acquisitions, Deloitte has carved out a space where its cloud-based services can be a powerful tool for its global customers. The momentum is noticeable, with the company reporting a record-breaking 14.9% growth in 2023 and a global workforce that just recently reached 457,000. Service Partners of the Year Deloitte - North America also picked up the award for Service Partner of the Year, presented to partners who continue to provide unparalleled Google Cloud services and solutions to customers. Deloitte continues to demonstrate a vast knowledge of Google Cloud and understands the right combination of cloud services to tailor to a client’s needs. Sales Partners of the Year (Regional Winners) Searce (Asia Pacific) and Devoteam (Europe, Middle East, Africa) both took home awards for Sales Partners of the Year in the regional category, which is awarded to partners who have seen remarkable success in building strong customer relationships, identifying customer needs, and selling Google Cloud products.A 15-year partner with Google Cloud, Searce Inc. has dedicated itself to ensuring that businesses across various industries are modernized and ready for the future of tech. Along with cloud modernization, Searce Inc. leverages AI, software engineering, and data intelligence to help businesses keep up in the ever-evolving modern world of technology, ensuring no one is left behind. Devoteam was named Sales Partner of the Year for the fourth year in a row, further proving the company’s commitment to understanding current technologies and the needs of its customers. Devoteam is working to change the technology we use for the better, with service offerings ranging from digital and cloud products for businesses to cybersecurity and even digital sustainability.  Sales Partners of the Year (Sub-Regional Winners) A multi-award-winning startup with exceptional cloud-based experience, DoiT added another award to its roster for sub-regional Sales Partner of the Year. DoiT offers the support of over 150 senior cloud architects who live and breathe cloud service technology. This dedication to learning and understanding the cloud has allowed DoiT to position itself as a top-performing sales partner.  Technology Partners of the Year The Technology Partners of the Year award is presented to partners who are able to think creatively about customer needs, allowing them to deliver innovative solutions to problems and ensuring customer satisfaction. Winners in this category included Gitlab, Quantum Metric, NetApp, Palo Alto Networks, and Dialpad. Gitlab won the award in the Application Development (DevOps) category for the third year in a row. Their work in tech development, security, and operations has paved the way for new customer solutions and applications, while continuously driving AI-powered features that place the utmost importance on privacy and security. Quantum Metric received the award in the Technology (Collaboration) category for its willingness to go above and beyond for customers. Quantum Metric strives to thoroughly understand its customers, and in doing so has created a process called Continuous Product Design that allows a high-level overview of a customer's data to show how it's being used and how it could be used more effectively to meet the needs of the customer. NetApp won two Technology Partner of the Year Awards, one for Infrastructure–Storage and the other for Infrastructure–Marketplace. NetApp is a pioneer in cloud storage solutions which allows customers to fully realize their data management strategies in a streamlined process. The solutions that NetApp offers allow for seamless integration and scalability, giving customers a new level of flexibility in day-to-day business operations. Palo Alto Networks also brought home several awards, winning in the categories of Marketplace Security ISV Partner, Security Infrastructure, and Security Configuration, Vulnerability Management & GRC. With an emphasis on helping organizations grow digitally through cybersecurity, Palo Alto Networks continually explores new ways to disrupt the cybersecurity industry with cutting-edge research and innovation. Dialpad took the award for the remaining category, Productivity and Collaboration. Known primarily as a digital communication tool for businesses, the company’s work with AI technology has not only allowed for easier software integrations across all platforms but has also helped customers find new and fast solutions to their needs. By placing an emphasis on optimizing conversational AI, Dialpad has solidified itself as a leader in upcoming AI technologies. Industry Solution Services Partners of the Year Industry Solution Service partners are those who have found new ways to create service solutions that have had a significant impact on one industry across regions. Deloitte received its award in the Generative AI category, having consistently demonstrated an ability to adapt to the continuous evolution of generative AI. Deloitte’s vigilance in staying ahead of these industry trends has allowed the company to provide fresh and effective customer solutions that yield strong results. Publicis Sapient won for the Sustainability category, which recognized the company's dedication to working with organizations to fulfill their sustainability commitments. Google and Publicis Sapient recently partnered with Renault on Plug Inn, a new initiative that aims to add 475,000 new electric charging stations in remote regions. Specialization Partners of the Year Searce, Devoteam, and Deloitte all picked up additional awards for Specialization Partners of the Year. This award is given to partners who have earned a specific Specialization and have gone on to excel in that area, resulting in significant success for their customers. With a specialization in location-based services, Searce works with customers to deliver real-time insights on location-based data. From automated routing and tracking services to actionable Google Maps data, Searce has proven to be an expert in location data technologies, earning it the Location-Based Services award. Devoteam is an expert in AI utilization for a variety of industries and continues to study new AI trends with workshops and hackathons to find new features and implementations. Devoteam then selects the most valuable use cases to push into production. This approach earned the company the Machine Learning Specialization award, and has had a positive impact on both customers and Devoteam itself, strengthening brand representation externally and team productivity internally.  Deloitte was recognized with a  Specialization in Security award. Cybersecurity is constantly evolving, and its best practices are always changing. Deloitte continues to evolve with these trends to ensure that it continues being recognized as a trusted cybersecurity partner offering unmatched security solutions to customers. Breakthrough Partner of the Year Aiven was awarded the Breakthrough Partner of the Year award, recognizing the company’s dedication to providing customers with the tools they need to fully harness the power of open-source technologies. By leaning into Aiven’s knowledge of managing cloud data infrastructure, customers have seen positive results on a global scale.  Interested in learning more about our partner program? Visit our partner page today. 

How Much Does GenAI ACTUALLY Cost?! This week we dive into research from McKinsey & Company which offers 3 archetypes and a cost framework you can apply.  We also discuss what's required and how enterprises can unlock the power of generative AI with details in a piece by Matt Marshall called "From data chaos to data products".   As usual, the video only covers highlights of the rich research, resources and examples you'll find in the blog.   This week's CarCast covers:The Best Practices of Data Leaders like Wendy's, Orange, Carrefour and Sabre. Is the IPO Market Back?! How Much Will GenAI Cost….REALLY Data chaos VS data products: How enterprises can unlock the power of generative AI Twelve Summer special highlights from How to Train Generative AI Using Your Company’s Data to Doing WPP is doing data differently!Have a great week!  Bruno 

From August 29-31, C2C will be onsite at Google Cloud Next ‘23 to meet face-to-face with the Google Cloud community and help our members connect with their peers and leaders in the cloud ecosystem. C2C is excited to take this opportunity to bring the C2C Board of Directors together in front of our broader network. For our members who will be joining us, as well as those of you who will be following along remotely, the Board Moods series is our effort to make our board members more accessible and available to the members they serve. In this installment of the series, we speak with Bronwyn Hastings, Corporate Vice President, Global ISV Partnerships and Channels, Google, about neurodiversity, regional diversity, and all things horsepower. Tell me about something important to you outside of your career in technology.I very much like to invest in younger people early in their careers. I don't call it mentoring, because I don't actually like that word. It's more to do with helping people understand early in their careers about not feeling like they have to be empowered. Soft skill development is as important as domain development. A role or a job description is just what's described versus how you make the job come to life. So really spending time with young or early-career people envisaging the potential of how they can build careers in different domains.I spend a lot of time on neurodistinction and neurodiversity, the reason being my daughter had a very serious brain injury as a young adult, and it was very eye-opening. The journeys that anyone goes through, whether it's autism, or unseen injuries. My daughter now is a veterinarian. We do things like run help for autistic children with horse therapy. So it's trying to give back to the community in a way that also supports the younger people coming up to learn to be in the world with these unseen disabilities that quite often are very hard for them, because people don't see them to have that disability.The third, fun thing is, I like anything with horsepower, whether it's horses, motorcycles, or cars. What do you think peer-to-peer professional communities can do to accommodate neurodiversity in their memberships?At Google, what we did was we brought on some neurodistinct people and allowed them to talk from their perspective about what helps them be really productive people in the working world. They talk about how to make the workplace available, how to play to people’s strengths.I'll give you one story: I was in a different company where we were doing neurodiversity, and I remember so distinctly this young man came up, and he was so excited. He was talking to me and the CEO at the time. He was so excited, because he delivered something so impeccably well, and on time. Think about that. Why would someone get so excited about that? Because he had the space to do his best work by having by people allowing him to have what he needed to be neurodistinct and actually use his strengths rather than look at his gaps.We are joining forces with a lot of the partnerships that we have, and we actually have formed a cohort that's focused on neurodiversity as a topic, and how we can bring common thinking to how neurodiversity can be supported in the workspace. Like, when people are being recruited, can you actually help them understand how to interview someone that is neurodiverse? You know, usually they won't get the interview process right in the same way. So how do you interview, and then when they're in the workplace, how do you allow for the neurodistinction? Some people might just need a quiet space. It's simple little things that can build up this neurodiverse inclusion process to make them feel like they're part of being able to contribute their best work.This neurodistinct person that I was describing for you, he's an advocate at Google. There's an actual role on neurodistinct advocacy, and he works with the cities on how to bring this into syllabi. There's so many things you can do. We just try to chunk it down into, “how do we partner with purpose to have neurodistinction as a core element of how we can actually work as a cross-company team to bring these things to a real live environment, using some actual neurodistinct people to give us the guidance?” Not us thinking that's what we need to do, but actually letting them have the voice to guide us.One of the business strategies you use is called Partnering with Purpose. Was Partnering with Purpose something that you personally developed? Did you bring it to Google?I was part of creating Partnering with Purpose at SAP. While what we’re doing at Google is different, the concept is similar. The concept was, two companies come together and are more purpose-driven in the core values of each company, and in what they do the business itself is always elevated and performs better. That was a concept at SAP, and Google has some underlying value systems with diversity, but also inclusion, and we took it a step further to say, suppose we break it up into buckets. One is the people side, and the other is sustainability, making sure you’re creating a world that is continually doing good. We've linked it to things like what we call a Jumpstart Program. Underrepresented children coming out of college get put into these programs that allow them to learn the skills that would be relevant. Some of our partners are contributing to that.In the Google context, we try to connect all of these things that are fundamental value systems to Google, and also bring partners into that, so it isn't an adjustment. It's something that I had been part of developing somewhere else and then took on board in Google to make it a priority for us as the way that we look at partnering as well, underpinning our relationships at the same time, not just business relationships but more purpose-driven relationships as businesses.You’ve worked in a number of different global regions. What was the arc of your career journey, and how did you end up where you are today?I’m originally South African. I went over to Australia, and in fact changed industries. I was actually an industrial chemist. I started from building a multi-route go-to-market business with some international companies that were coming into the APAC region. I started helping them build their presence. Logically, a lot of them started with some direct selling, but a lot of partnering. So that's where my domain and partnering strength came in, because APAC is such a partnering region.Through that, I ended up in Oracle for a number of years, and in my Oracle journey, I went from a country-based role to a regional-based role to a global role, but also did 65 acquisitions at the global level, which gave me the best grounding in how other companies run. After that, I moved into SAP, where I did actually go from the global role back to a regional role when my daughter had her brain injury. I needed to actually step back a little bit, and Oracle was wonderful. They gave me the opportunity to be able to do that and supported me in that journey. And when I went to SAP, something happened. I was in an APAC role. I went into Singapore and ran Asia-Pacific, ran greater China partnering and growth strategies.So, I lived in Hong Kong, and I have lived in the US twice on each coast. I spent a huge amount of time in Germany, and a lot of time in LATAM. So I'm very international in my thinking and understand how to bridge between global requirements and regional requirements. My personal thought process is, people in regional roles need to be able to bridge between the global strategy and the regional. It's always good business, but you have to have the nuance of how business is done on top of that, and be very cognizant of the cultural requirements. In my career, whenever something's in growth, in transformation, or in new areas of innovation, usually I would step into and help establish those high-growth areas. What are the regional requirements in APAC that C2C should be aware of as they're trying to build those connections? If you look at APAC, it is a very relationship-based environment. When we go in, usually we’re going in straight. Here's the business. Here's what we need to do. What's important to understand is the challenges they face in a region that is unique that have to be incorporated, and those challenges could be anywhere.If we talk about credit, we think about 30 days as standard. Going to China, 180 days is standard. How do you find those pieces that are so different, that you actually have to make part of the way you tell the story? How do you take care of the four to five things that are unique in China? I would represent the same baseline, but I add color. That makes it relatable for them. You've got to know the actual country norms, the norms of how business is done. And then find your connection to those country norms.Coming from another country anyway when I started in APAC, I was very conscious of not necessarily feeling comfortable that I knew how all the businesses ran. I knew the business economics and knew good business models, but I could see the distinction straight away between even South Africa and Australia. You realize there is a difference, and you have to actually acknowledge that, because if you don't, you think you’re saying the same thing, and you absolutely are not. So, it's not something that was automatic, but it was conscious. Because I was from another country. Extra Credit:  

From August 29-31, C2C will be onsite at Google Cloud Next ‘23 to meet face-to-face with the Google Cloud community and help our members connect with their peers and leaders in the cloud ecosystem. C2C is excited to take this opportunity to bring the C2C Board of Directors together in front of our broader network. For our members who will be joining us, as well as those of you who will be following along remotely, the Board Moods series is our effort to make our board members more accessible and available to the members they serve. In this installment of the series, we speak with Dan Stuart, CIO of Southwire, about partnership, family, and bringing tech to underserved regions through community. Tell me about something important to you outside of your career in technology. An important part of my life outside of work and everything else I do is really my family. We try to spend a lot of time together due to the fact that I work a lot of hours, so when I have the time, it’s really all about the family. You’ve been at the CIO level for quite some time now. What were your early career experiences that helped you grow into that role? My experiences go back pretty far, so let me jog my memory a little bit. I started when they still had big computer rooms. I started my career at Sperry New Holland in New Holland, Pennsylvania, back in the early 80s. I’ve been very fortunate to work for a lot of great companies, but also through my career have moved into different positions going up the chain. I really think that has helped me in my career when I look back at it, going from way back when computer operators were a big thing to programmer, to project manager, director, right up to the VP level into the CIO levels. Having that complement of working in different roles within IT and working within different industries has been a big help in my career. You might look at my career and look at so many different industries and say, “Well, they’re pretty different form each other,” but there’s a lot of similarities in business when it comes right down to it, especially when it’s in the IT sector. Obviously manufacturing is where I’m at today. It’s kind of where I started my career, so it’s pretty nice to be back in a big manufacturing organization like Southwire. You’re also on the board of ASUG, our sister community. What unites these two communities, and what makes C2C a unique value prop? Obviously, being on the ASUG board, the SAP client members that we have at ASUG, there’s a good number of them that are Google customers as well. Google and SAP have a great partnership in a number of areas, so I think having that ASUG and C2C connection is really huge. What brings value both from ASUG and C2C is that networking. That networking between different organizations, whether they’re in your industry or outside your industry, is critically important for anyone at my level, because you can learn so much from different organizations. C2C brings a lot. That networking brings a lot. The awareness that C2C brings around what google is doing is very important for everyone. You’ve been a proponent of SAP for a long time. What makes you as an IT leader feel similarly invested in Google Cloud? We’ve been on Google Cloud since 2020, and talking with the Google team probably since 2019, and one of the things that really attracted us to Google Cloud for our SAP environment––and by the way, more than just our SAP environment now here at Southwire––has been the teamwork and the partnership we have bonded with Google. We’re leveraging Google not only through Google Cloud, but also for other things around AI. Obviously, Google is a big player in AI. They’ve been doing it for years, and so you look at the strengths of your partners, like what Google has in that AI space, and I think that’s something that I was leaning on a lot from the Southwire side. You’re a part of a White House project devoted to promoting technology jobs in rural America. How do you think customer communities can contribute to the growth of the tech sector in rural and less developed areas? Google plays a big role in delivering technology to communities that have not had it before. At the White House, I was there with one of our partners at the time, and it was really to promote rural development of technology in areas that were losing their workforce to one change in life or another. This is where organizations like Google I think are very strong, in helping out in certain geographical areas of the US. When we were at the White House we were looking at areas like West Virginia, Arizona, New Mexico, areas that you don’t probably think of as high tech areas, but they have the skill sets. They have the universities. Why aren’t more people investing in those area? That has changed a lot since I was at the White House, but with all the stuff Google has done over the last three to five plus years, I think they’re probably playing a bigger role in those areas than they ever have been before. In a community like C2C, what’s a lesson that IT business leaders today can take away from their conversations with their peers? What we leaned in on from the Southwire side was the partnership with an organization the size of Google, and the breadth and depth of what they have to offer. I can tell you that our journey had a lot to do with being able to be scalable, secure, and flexible to grow quickly, and all of that has come into play for us at Southwire, so I have to say my journey has been pretty successful with Google. Extra Credit:  

From August 29-31, C2C will be onsite at Google Cloud Next ‘23 to meet face-to-face with the Google Cloud community and help our members connect with their peers and leaders in the cloud ecosystem. C2C is excited to take this opportunity to bring the C2C Board of Directors together in front of our broader network. For our members who will be joining us, as well as those of you who will be following along remotely, the Board Moods series is our effort to make our board members more accessible and available to the members they serve. For the first installment in this series, we sat down with Paul Novak (@paul_novak), CIO of Community Health Systems, to discuss his journey from consulting to organizational leadership, the reputation and changing role of IT, and the importance of education and family. Tell me about something important to you outside of your career in technology. The thing that’s driven most of my decisions over the last twenty, twenty-five years has been family. I’ve been married to my wife now for almost thirty years. It’ll be thirty years in two years. I’ve got three kids, two boys who are twenty-four and twenty-two, and a girl who’s nineteen. I used to work for Accenture, that’s where I first started my career. In the age of consulting, and especially back in the nineties when I started, you were flying out Sunday night and flying back Friday evening, and so your ability to have those kinds of relationships outside of work was limited at least to the weekend. When I quit Accenture, mainly it was because of my ability to live my life and support my family as I thought was the right way to do that. For me, that’s always been a driving decision: what’s going to allow me to have the relationships with my wife and my kids, and do the things that I did growing up with my parents, and have that kind of life outside of work. In your own words, walk me through your background and your journey to where you are in your career today. When I started, it was Anderson consulting. I spent fourteen years there, and halfway through it moved over to Accenture. Other than the travel, I really enjoyed working at Accenture. I thought the people that I worked with were extraordinary. I got to go from project to project to project, and typically I was given significantly more experience than I probably had had in the past. That was the way it worked in consulting. As soon as you got comfortable in a role, they’d move you on to the next role, or the bigger role.I had started out in the SAP space so most of my career was spent doing ERP and SAP work and really helping to build that capability within Accenture. After fourteen years, I decided to go on to corporate. We were in Chicago at the time. We moved back to Minnesota, where I grew up, and I went to work for a company called Ecolab. They were starting up a brand new SAP implementation and needed someone who could help run their center of excellence and the program. That started my stint in the corporate world. I spent a couple years at A.O. Smith and spent a number of years at Target as a senior director. That was my first push into a non-ERP or a non-SAP space. I was supporting all of HR and legal and store security, so I had a number of different business units that I was supporting at the time, and that was the first time I started to get more into partnering with the business, working with the business. Up until then I was more on the technical side.I started my own company called Novacon Solutions out in Minnesota, and that was basically doing SAP consulting at a pretty high level. I did that for a number of years and was successful at that. I had a couple subcontractors that were working for me, and really had somewhat of a growing business. Then the kids were starting to get to that middle school range and we said a couple things: one, let’s get back into corporate, for a little bit more security as college is coming up, and two, we really want to move down South. My wife is from Indiana, I’m from Minnesota, and we got tired of the winters. I opened up my search and found a job with A.O. Smith out of Nashville. A.O. Smith’s a very large water heater manufacturer. They were just starting an SAP program and looking for someone to come in and be a vice president of their infrastructure and operations, as well as help run their SAP implementation.We moved the family down to Nashville. My son was starting high school and my kids were in the middle school, elementary range. I spent eight years at A.O. Smith helping to build and grow their company and really manage their entire environment. When I left, I took a job at Community Health Systems, back in 2020, in the middle of COVID. I started as their CTO, and after about a year the COO had left, and they offered me the CIO job. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last two years. How do you think C2C’s mission aligns with your guiding principles? Something that I’ve told my team since I started, both as the CTO and the CIO, is one person is never as smart as a group of individuals. There’s a reason why crowdsourcing of certain things has become so successful in social media, and that is: when you get a number of different brains together with different experiences, different ideas, things that have worked and not worked, you can tap into that experience, and you can actually get much farther much faster and be more successful. The things that I have told my team are: I want to rely on them to make decisions. I want to rely on the people that are actually down there doing the work at the ground level. They’re the ones that know the most about what’s actually happening at that level and can help influence and work the right decisions in the long run. I think you run into problems where you have someone who’s sitting at the top thinking that they know everything making those decisions, and I think that feeds right into this type of community.Being in the SAP space, I was at the forefront when ASUG started, and helping to build what that community was. When you had this growing community of SAP clients as SAP started to really take off in the nineties, there were a lot of questions. You had code documentation that was in German, and so you had no idea what was happening. Starting out, it was very immature in certain ways. By taking groups of people, pulling them together, and talking about issues, you found solutions, best practices. Pulling those people together really helped speed up the problem resolution, time to market, new ideas, innovation, all of those things that you want, that you say, “Oh, this is what a successful team looks like.” Pulling together that information is just as important as running your own team. When I got more involved in the Google space and I heard about this organization, that’s when I started to get excited again to be at the forefront of creating something that can really help a lot of different companies. What makes you as an IT decision-maker feel particularly invested in Google Cloud? In some ways it was the decision that was handed to me when I started. When I started as CTO, the company had already moved off of the Microsoft productivity suite and moved over to the G-suite, so we were already there. We had made our decision to go with Google Cloud for our enterprise data warehouse. When I came in as the CTO, I was the owner of those two spaces, so I said, “Well, if I’m going to own this space, I’m going to make the most of it and ensure that we can be successful,” not only with not as mature a public cloud environment as you’ve seen with AWS or Azure, but also taking what had traditionally been more of a retail or individual customer product and turning it into an enterprise product. Helping not only to be successful at CHS, but also to help build those products and make sure that they’re as successful as we are. You’re a member of several boards, including the board of Lipscomb University in Nashville. Do you see education as a part of your role as an IT decision-maker? I think so. I’ve seen so much when it comes to education. Typically when students are going into college, and especially when they’re going into computer science (my degree was in computer engineering), it’s a very academic view of the world. I felt that with all my years of experience both within consulting and within the industry or the corporate world, I was able to provide some insight, whether it was curriculum or being a mentor. They used to do things called office hours, where you’d go sit in an office, and so you had a vice president or a CIO of a company sitting in there if you wanted to ask some questions about things. Those types of things were very powerful and helped lead people in the right direction. They’re not only getting insight from their professors about specific educational topics. They’re also getting insight into how the world works. What do you hope to see happen in terms of IT and business transformation in the future? Transformation’s always been something that I’ve been a part of. Back in the consulting days, we were transforming every company we were going to. From a C2C perspective, there’s a couple things about transformation in terms of what we’re trying to do. We are trying to take advantage of cloud technology to be able to make better business decisions in a more efficient and effective manner. Taking advantage of Google’s data warehousing capabilities, not only can we present data and information in a way that’s easy to read, in a way that’s fast and responsive, but we can also scale up and scale down in a way that we never could have before. For instance, as we’re running financial reports, the vast majority of our financial data warehouse reporting is at month end, so our ability to ramp that up during a month-end process and then ramp back down gives us the ability to close our books faster and to make better decisions.There’s the ability to transform the way we’re making decisions and getting data out from a cloud perspective, as well as taking advantage of today’s technology to make data, presentation of data, and access to data easier to use, better to use. Making smarter data. Then you suddenly fold in all of the AI capabilities that you can take on top of that, so now not only are we giving people data, but we’re actually processing some of that data to help make better decisions. We’re making recommendations based on the data that we’re seeing. It goes from seeing data to seeing relevant information that’s going to help our business users be more effective on their end. To me, the IT transformation is doing things that more effectively to help the business. IT never has a great reputation, because the only time people talk about IT is when it’s not working. By presenting new tools, new capabilities, better availability, faster speed, suddenly you’re getting people looking at this and saying, “Hey, wow, this is actually good. This is helpful. We hadn’t seen this type of data, this type of presentation in the last fifteen years.” We’re getting a lot of these little wins based on some of the newer technologies that we’re putting in place, and to me that’s transformational just in terms of how IT is looked at, the morale of the team. We as a team get used to getting beat down quite a bit, and now suddenly we’re showing that we can present wins to the business. Register now for Google Cloud Next ‘23 on the official Google Cloud Next website.

In March 2023, we fielded the C2C Member Pulse to observe trends, skill gaps, and challenges in Google Cloud and how our members use community to enrich their cloud experience. This infographic highlights a portion of the findings. Communities exist everywhere. Choosing the right one and getting value from participation can be confusing for members. For community professionals, keeping up engagement numbers is a struggle—every community experiences never-ending effects of the 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality. Overcoming the rule isn’t going to happen, but the inequality curve can be shaped by lowering the barrier to entry in ways members want to participate. The results from the 2023 Member Pulse help us better understand what else our members need and how we can prioritize the evolution of C2C’s online experience.We know our members' top priorities when it comes to Google Cloud, digital transformation efforts, and that respondents are gaining skills from a mixture of in-person events and online learning. Through our research findings, we also have gained valuable insights into the motivations and priorities of our members for participating in communities. To make members feel safe in their choice to spend their most precious resource—time—on us, we can look at all the factors in our control that impact community participation behavior. Which topics we feature and who we invite to the stage can all be adjusted accordingly. Joining Communities Networking emerges as the top driver for community engagement across all job roles. The desire to establish connections, build relationships, and expand professional networks is a common thread that unites our community members. The opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, share experiences, and foster collaborative endeavors holds immeasurable value.Almost equally important are training and educational opportunities. C2C members seek to enhance their skills, broaden their understanding, and stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in the field. By participating in third-party communities, they gain access to a wealth of knowledge, particularly from Google Cloud experts. These experts, known as Google Cloud Developer Experts, form a trusted and vetted global network. Their hands-on experience and working knowledge of Google Cloud products enable them to provide community members with invaluable best practices and insights.When it comes to choosing the platforms for community engagement, the landscape showcases diverse preferences. Platforms like LinkedIn foster active participation, providing a professional environment conducive to networking and knowledge sharing. In contrast, platforms such as Reddit and Facebook generate limited community building within our context. The inherent anonymity and casual nature of Reddit may not align with the professional networking objectives sought by our members. Education from the Stage Content and agenda topics, costs, and distance to event are the top three factors that impact respondents’ decision to attend events. Factors that impact decisions to attend events are consistent across event type attendance.Across various job roles, respondents express a strong desire to hear from product managers of the specific products they use, such as Google Cloud employees or technology implementation partners. This preference stems from the members' eagerness to gain firsthand insights and practical knowledge related to the technology they employ in their organizations' digital transformation endeavors. These product managers serve as a direct link to understanding and maximizing the potential of the tools and solutions driving their digital journeys. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) play a crucial role in the cloud technology industry. With the industry's growth and impact on our daily lives, it is vital to reflect the diversity of the communities it serves. DEI promotes equal opportunities, fosters innovation and creativity, and encourages diverse perspectives and ideas. Collaboration among people from different backgrounds and experiences leads to unique solutions, enhancing the quality of services and products. Inclusivity in the cloud technology industry fosters a productive and fulfilling work culture, where everyone feels valued and respected. Ultimately, DEI is critical to creating a more equitable and just society through the cloud technology industry.We asked respondents to rate their perception of DEI in the technology industry overall and within their own organizations. Every organization has their own DEI policies in place—or some not at all—but nothing spans the entire tech industry. Respondents rate DEI as much more favorable within their organizations than in the technology industry. Visualizing It All Take a look at how the community ranks the options they were given for participating in communities, who to connect with, and DEI perceptions. View image as a full-scale PDF here. Get the Most of Community As members of our community, your voices shape our initiatives. While we learned a lot about you collectively in this survey, we also want to meet your needs as an individual. Take a moment to update your profile today, and ensure you're receiving the most relevant and valuable content tailored specifically for your interests. Update Your Preferences

In March 2023, we fielded the C2C Member Pulse to observe trends, skill gaps, and challenges in Google Cloud and how our members use community to enrich their cloud experience. This infographic highlights a portion of the findings. As a valued member of the Google Cloud customer community, we understand that each of you is on a unique journey with Google Cloud. Some of you may be well-versed and advanced in your Google Cloud usage, some are exploring and building business cases, and others may be anywhere in the middle of that spectrum. We recognize that not all cloud investments are the same, considering the wide range of products and services offered by Google Cloud.We also understand that respondents’ overall level of investment in Google Cloud—whether their own choice or their company’s choice—changes to meet digital transformation needs. These findings shed light on the investments made, talent needs, and solution usage patterns within our community, which helps us prioritize how to grow our network, foster connections, and curate content in our community. Investments in Google Cloud The survey results indicate that the majority of respondents, regardless of organizational size, are making increased investments in Google Cloud. Overall, respondents are either maintaining or expanding their investments in Google Cloud. The primary reason for increased investments is the integration and consolidation of systems on the Google Cloud platform, closing in on a digital-native or cloud-first approach. On the other hand, some respondents have reported decreased investments due to transitioning to other cloud vendors, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure being the most commonly mentioned alternatives. It's worth noting that a percentage (21%) of respondents were unsure about the changes in their investment levels, possibly indicating limited involvement in the decision-making process. Google Cloud Talent As organizations increase their investments in Google Cloud, it becomes evident that there is a growing need for skilled Google Cloud talent. Interestingly, the most common way organizations find skilled talent is by having their permanent staff learn Google Cloud skills on the job. This was also consistent across all organization sizes—no matter how many people may be available to work on these products, they’ll all be learning as they go, emphasizing the ongoing learning and development required for effectively working with Google Cloud products. Solution Area Usage Among the technologies respondents use most, identity and security, as well as data cloud products, take the lead. This aligns with the challenges faced in data maintenance and integration, highlighting the significance of these solution areas.Although AI and ML are among the least currently used technologies, they are the top Google Cloud products that respondents are planning to use at their organizations. This reflects how AI will be increasingly sought-after in the future. AI-enabled software was also noted as a top technology that will be needed for future digital transformation efforts.Respondents are least aware of startup and SMB solutions from Google Cloud. More guidance may be needed to support this solution, as it is the solution most respondents have no plans to use (16%). That said, many more respondents who belong to organizations that have been active for less than one year are currently using Startup and SMB solutions (48%) with 87% awareness and 23% planning to use. Visualizing It All Take a look at how the community ranks the options they were given for Google Cloud investment levels, nurturing Google Cloud talent, and solution area usage. View image as a full-scale PDF here. Get the Most of Community As members of our community, your voices shape our initiatives. While we learned a lot about you collectively in this survey, we also want to meet your needs as an individual. Take a moment to update your profile today, and ensure you're receiving the most relevant and valuable content tailored specifically for your interests. Update Your Preferences

In March 2023, we fielded the C2C Member Pulse to observe trends, skill gaps, and challenges in Google Cloud and how our members use community to enrich their cloud experience. This infographic highlights a portion of the findings. Whether someone’s role is in business or IT, there’s no denying the organizational impact of constantly evolving and emerging technologies in the cloud and beyond. As the Google Cloud customer community, we want to ensure we’re matching our members’ needs in upskilling and staying on top of the latest in cloud.Organizations are feeling the pressure to either cultivate internal skills to manage new products or risk falling behind their competitors. At the same time, employees are running their own skills-boost race against the demands of their employers for incredibly complicated areas of study. That's why we conducted a comprehensive survey to uncover invaluable insights about the tools driving transformation, the skill gaps organizations encounter, and the avenues individuals and companies pursue to expand their knowledge. Digital Transformation with New Tech Consistent with top focus areas, cloud infrastructure, data analytics and dashboards, and AI-embedded software are the top technologies respondents expect to impact their digital transformation efforts in the next two years. This mix of technologies appeal to cloud practitioners as well as those in roles with less technical acumen and are fairly consistent across industries. More emerging forms of technology, like IoT, blockchain, and AR and VR are all noted as a potential impact by less than 30% of respondents.Interestingly, preparing for AI and ML is currently perceived as the lowest digital priority, with only 37% of organizations currently utilizing AI and ML tools from Google Cloud. However, it's worth noting that these tools are projected to become the number one choice for future adoption. As these technologies are relatively new, bridging the skill gap in training and deploying models is a crucial area of focus, with 41% of companies lacking in-house talent.On the other hand, AI-enabled software is incredibly popular, being used at 56% of organizations. Organizations clearly see the benefits of AI, infusing their workforce with smart tools like virtual assistants or other line-of-business tools. Rather than immediately venturing into building their own AI and ML products and services, they’re opting for empowering their employees with readily available solutions. Skills Organizations are Missing Among the internal skill sets that organizations find lacking, cloud security and data protection take the top spot, closely followed by the training and deployment of machine learning models and cloud architecture design and scalability. Because respondents expect cloud infrastructure to be the top technology to impact their digital transformation efforts in the next two years, we can expect these skills will be in even higher demand in the future. How Organizations and Individuals Acquire Skills When it comes to skill acquisition, Google Cloud training emerges as the preferred choice for organizations to enhance their expertise. That said, hiring—whether for permanent or temporary staff and either virtual or in-person consultants—is still a popular approach overall.How and where individuals acquire or improve skill sets aligns with organizations’ methods—Google Cloud training and certifications top the list. Notably, an equal number of respondents selected educational conferences and events, as well as massive open online courses (MOOCs), signaling that our community values both in-person events and online learning resources as valuable avenues for skill development. Visualizing It All Take a look at how the community ranks the options they were given for areas of focus, challenges, and who is responsible for making technology purchase decisions. View image as a full-scale PDF here. Get the Most of Community As members of our community, your voices shape our initiatives. While we learned a lot about you collectively in this survey, we also want to meet your needs as an individual. Take a moment to update your profile today, and ensure you're receiving the most relevant and valuable content tailored specifically for your interests.   Update Your Preferences 

In March 2023, we fielded the C2C Member Pulse to observe trends, skill gaps, and challenges in Google Cloud and how our members use community to enrich their cloud experience. This infographic highlights a portion of the findings. Understanding priorities and challenges faced by organizations using cloud technology is vital for optimizing C2C’s efforts in content programming. Hearing directly from our members helps us tackle the now and the here—it’s all specific to our community, not generalized based on tech hype in various news outlets.Plus, cloud topics are big. It's crucial that we cover topics that truly meet your needs. While we may already cover data and analytics, for example, if we overlook challenges related to master data and governance that you've highlighted, we miss a valuable opportunity to support you effectively. Areas of Focus Based on the survey results, it's clear that cloud management, data and business analytics, automation, security, and optimizing business processes are top priorities for members this year. The overall digitization and adoption of cloud solutions are significant areas of focus, while less technical and more topical or people-oriented areas like sustainability, training, and supporting remote workforces are of lesser priority but still on the radar for some respondents.Respondents not focused on sustainability expect to be in the next 2 to 5 years. Unless sustainability is embedded in the organization respondents work for, this focus is being pushed further down the road. For example, sustainability is important for certain industries, most often as noted by respondents in the energy and travel industries. Organizational Challenges When welcoming new priorities, challenges are a given. Data-related issues—such as integration, master data maintenance, and governance—are the top challenges respondents’ organizations are currently experiencing. We can observe challenges aligning with focus on cloud management, data analytics, and automation. More than 30% also cite challenges with budget, internal skills to manage new products, gaining actionable insights from data analytics, and cybersecurity and data protection.  Influence Over Technology Purchases The survey also looked into the decision-making process for technology purchases. C-level executives most often hold the responsibility for these decisions, but in other cases, IT staff and buying committees play a significant role. It's worth noting that the size of the organization influences the decision-making approach, with smaller organizations relying more on C-level roles and larger organizations involving buying committees. Visualizing It All Take a look at how the community ranks the options they were given for areas of focus, challenges, and who is responsible for making technology purchase decisions. View image as a full-scale PDF here. Get the Most of Community As members of our community, your voices shape our initiatives. While we learned a lot about you collectively in this survey, we also want to meet your needs as an individual. Take a moment to update your profile today, and ensure you're receiving the most relevant and valuable content tailored specifically for your interests.   Update Your Preferences 

C2C is very excited to offer free tickets to Google Cloud Next '23 to five valued community members! These tickets will grant winners access to one of the most exclusive and sought-after experiences available to the Google Cloud ecosystem.Tell us what you’re looking forward to seeing at Next ‘23, and you’ll be entered into a raffle to receive one of five free tickets!Google Cloud will host Next ‘23 at the beautiful Moscone Center in San Francisco from August 29 to August 31, 2023. Get excited for an extraordinary conference that will empower you with knowledge, connect you with industry experts, and inspire your professional growth!We believe in providing you with a platform to learn, engage, and solve for the future of the cloud. To learn more about NEXT '23 and its agenda, speakers, and sessions, visit the official Next ‘23 website.Seize this incredible opportunity to be a part of NEXT '23 now. To enter the contest and be qualified to win, comment below to tell us why you’d like to attend NEXT ‘23.  Contest Information US-based entrants only Tickets are non-transferable Travel and lodging not included Contest opens: June 1, 2023 Contest closes: July 28, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. EST Winners: we will announce the 5 winners on July 31, 2023 at 5:00 p.m. EST   Contest Instructions Become a C2C member. Comment below this post and tell us what you’re looking forward to seeing at Google Cloud Next ’23. Pssst: Share our post on LinkedIn for an extra entry into the raffle! Please Note Please note that while the conference ticket is complimentary, it does not cover any hotel or airfare costs. We encourage you to make your own travel arrangements to ensure a seamless and enjoyable visit to San Francisco. *This promotion is exclusively available to US residents, no Visa (job, travel, student, etc.) will be provided. No purchase necessary. Must be 18 years or older to win. Tickets cannot be redeemed for cash. Travel and lodging not included. Drawings are at random. Terms and conditions may apply. 

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, cloud technology has become an indispensable tool for organizations seeking to streamline operations, scale efficiently, and drive innovation. Our recent study—the C2C Member Pulse—collected 461 responses in March 2023, from which we examined trends in the role of Google Cloud for our community members. Our analysis sheds light on the prevalent skill gaps within organizations and their priorities and challenges concerning cloud technology adoption.We also recognized the significance of the role of community in supporting and enriching the overall cloud experience. A vibrant and supportive community is pivotal for knowledge sharing, problem-solving, and collaboration. The perspectives we collected—from customer and partner members across various roles—will be instrumental to how C2C addresses member concerns, improves community programs, and empowers individuals.Whether you are an IT professional, a business leader, or simply curious about the future of cloud technology, the key takeaways in this article offer an excellent insight into what’s most relevant to a community full of Google Cloud users. By exploring what others are doing with Google Cloud, C2C members can gain a competitive edge, make informed decisions, and drive successful cloud initiatives within their organizations. Key Takeaways Based on the feedback and insights we gathered from community members like you, we have identified key areas where we can enhance your experience and foster a stronger sense of connection within the community.  One of the top priorities highlighted in the report is the need for more guidance on cloud management and integration support. For 2023, respondents identified their top area of focus as cloud management, including cloud costs, optimization, and governance. We also recognize that navigating cloud integration can be challenging, though we believe the community will benefit from more members sharing success stories that include integration best practices such as data consolidation and dealing with incompatibility between products.  Upskilling to meet digital transformation goals is crucial, and respondents rely heavily on Google Cloud training and certifications for this purpose. This is true for organizations filling skill gaps and for individuals seeking professional development. C2C has an opportunity to support members with more skills-based content, mainly because almost all respondents' organizations are relying on permanent staff learning Google Cloud skills on the job for projects. Key areas where skills are missing include cloud security and data protection, ML model training and deployment, and cloud architecture design and scalability.  ​​AI is on respondents' radar—it’s the top Google Cloud product area members are considering for future exploration. With generative AI making waves across the industry at all organizational levels, we can expect that members will continue to show interest in these topics. However, in-house development of AI tools is a low priority, and training ML models isn’t a skill every organization has. When it comes to AI, most organizations will benefit from preparing to begin the discovery phase.Identity and security, however, are at the top of the list of respondents' current needs as the most used solution area. Within Google Cloud, products for access management, security operations and automation, and monitoring will be more immediately important.  When it comes to events, we want to emphasize the invaluable opportunities we provide in all the areas members identified as reasons they attend: networking, training, and direct access to other customers, partners, and product managers. By participating in C2C events, you can connect with fellow community members and gain insights directly from the experts behind the solutions you use. Most members will be attending a mixture of both virtual and in-person events in 2023. Join us in making the most of these incredible experiences. Who Participated in the Survey We saw a fairly even split between respondents coming from customer and partner organizations located in key geographic regions for C2C: North America, EMEA, Latin America, and JAPAC. Historically, our largest active member bases have been in the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, corresponding with the representation of responses we saw in this survey. Job role was one of the most impactful factors in the choices respondents made to behavioral questions about community and events. Understanding our members’ job roles and each of their requirements is crucial to identifying the professional development opportunities and networking events that most align with their career goals. View image full-scale here. Get the Most of Community As members of our community, your voices shape our initiatives. While we learned a lot about you collectively in this survey, we also want to meet your needs as an individual. Take a moment to update your profile today, and ensure you're receiving the most relevant and valuable content tailored specifically for your interests.   Update Your Preferences 

On March 23, 2023, C2C hosted its second Cloud Adoption Summit in Toronto, Canada. The event, one of C2C’s most well-attended to date, featured a full day of interactive live sessions, including breakouts hosted by C2C partners, a customer panel on lessons learned from the cloud adoption process, and a keynote address from Google Principle Developer Advocate Kelsey Hightower. Feedback from attendees has been unanimous: this was a standout event hosted by a one-of-a-kind community in the cloud space, where guests are free to discuss challenges openly and the opportunities to make authentic, meaningful connections are unmatched. The only way to take full advantage of the Cloud Adoption Summit experience is to attend on site, but for those who couldn’t, or want to relive it, we’ve collected video recordings of the live sessions below: Welcome from C2C and Google Cloud  Opening Keynote Session with Kelsey Hightower  Partner Panel: Industry Insights  Deloitte Keynote  Breakout Session: Automation Anywhere  Breakout Session: Pythian  Breakout Session: Palo Alto Networks  Customer Panel  Extra Credit:  

Fun fact: Google Cloud announced its first product, App Engine, on April 7, 2008, making Google Cloud as a whole the pioneering, go-getter zodiac sign that is Aries. To honor C2C’s roots with Google Cloud, we're launching a new series of weekly horoscopes during Aries season, the first sign in the zodiac calendar. As the customer community, we want to enable connections between members, and sometimes that works best when we get to know ourselves first.But learning about the practice of astrology can be intimidating, so we’re here to put it in simple terms that anyone can understand—Google Cloud products!You can find your sun sign according to your birth date. From there, read on and let us know if you resonate with your Google Cloud product match. AriesMarch 21 to April 19 The Aries in your life is the one who is never at rest. An Aries is always at work on a project, absorbed in a game, or battling it out in an argument. Activity is an Aries’ comfort zone, and preparation and delay are their kryptonite. With Google Kubernetes Engine, your containers and clusters can automatically run and scale with no time lost on management or operations. Just like the Aries in your life, GKE is like a fire that burns until the fuel (or your per-pod billing budget) runs out.  TaurusApril 20 to May 20 If there is one thing a Taurus cares about, it’s comfort. A Taurus likes to make a firm plan and follow through without any interruptions or last-minute changes. You can count on a Taurus to be there for you when they say they will, but whatever you do, don’t flake on them. A Taurus is basically a human Security Command Center. With a Taurus, everything is always compliant, nothing is ever too vulnerable, and all threats are identified and eliminated immediately. That way, all your Taurus ever has to do is kick back and chill.  GeminiMay 21 to June 20 Like most air signs, that Gemini friend or family member will want to talk your ear off as they have a passion for intellectual conversations. They are rooted in the exchange of ideas, and the need to express themselves is not a trait they shy away from. This sign is just as interested in collecting information as they share it, which is why there is no surprise that a Gemini would be closely associated with Google’s Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech products that convert natural-sounding speech to text and vice versa. Geminis—as symbolized by twins—and these two Google products have a strong sense of duality and are associated with effective communication.   CancerJune 21 to July 22 The sensitive and emotional ones of the water signs, Cancers enjoy comfort and a sense of familiarity around them. They prefer to blend with their environments, making a hybrid or multicloud management platform like Anthos perfect for a Cancer’s complexity. Often thinking about nostalgic moments in life, Cancers are often caught up in reminisce, and likely appreciate the ability to bring their existing apps onto Anthos to scale and modernize their roots. Cancers and Anthos operate through consistency and routined patterns to achieve their goals.    LeoJuly 23 to August 22 Leos are people with ambitious goals and idealistic beliefs. They honor their commitments and work long and hard to see them through. When it comes to initiatives like sustainability, Leo is the sign you want in charge. That’s why Google Cloud’s Carbon Footprint is the product that suits Leo most. As Carbon Footprint reduces workload emissions and tracks footprint data, Leo is free to focus on the hard work of saving the planet, which will bring us that much closer to what Leos love most: a long, luxurious rest.  VirgoAugust 23 to September 22 For Virgos, knowledge is power. A Virgo needs to be in the know, up to date, and without a doubt at all times; otherwise, they’ll feel too out of touch to focus on what they need. That’s why a product like Cloud Monitoring feels like such a natural complement to the Virgo in your life. The last thing any Virgo wants is stress. With the uptime monitoring and metrics Cloud Monitoring offers for your applications’ performance, availability, and health, Virgos have all the insight they need to be their best selves.  LibraSeptember 23 to October 22 One weekend they’re reading their favorite novel and cooking a home-cooked meal, the next they may be off in Las Vegas with their closest friends partying up a storm. We’re talking about the social butterfly, Libra. Represented by the scales, Libras are all about balance and doing a little bit of everything, so they’re always ready for the unexpected. Libras and Cloud Load Balancing platform can juggle a large amount of tasks and activities at once. Whether it’s HTTP or TCP balancing, this tool ensures seamless deployment of deliverables. Similarly, the Libra in your life is multi-dimensional and may have a diverse set of interests or hobbies.    ScorpioOctober 23 to November 21 If you want a burst of fiery energy, just talk to any Scoripo. Though they are a water sign, Scorpios are known for their intensity and have no problem throwing themselves into unfamiliar situations. With their confidence and ability to handle confrontation, they are intrigued by the darker side of life. Scorpios aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and can harness their own power even when operating behind the scenes, like Google Cloud’s Firewall. This Google product delivers granular control and ensures protection through networking fabric that is implemented throughout each workload. Scorpios and Firewall aren’t afraid to tackle threats head-on while still keeping their composure.   SagittariusNovember 22 to December 21 Sagittarius is the second most impulsive zodiac sign. Sagittarians are outgoing, unafraid to take risks, and quick both to anger and to forgive. If a Sagittarius was an app, therefore, it would almost certainly be no-code. A Sagittarius is not one to put painstaking thought into design and planning; a Sagittarius simply acts. Luckily, when a Sagittarius takes a shot, it usually hits the mark, making the Sagittarius in your life as reliable as the no-code development platforms available from AppSheet.  CapricornDecember 22 to January 19 A Capricorn is a sign with a strong awareness of its place in the world. Like all Earth signs, Capricorns are grounded, but more so even than other Earth signs, Capricorns want to remain rooted in their surroundings and respond to them accordingly. Consequently, a Capricorn—the most resourceful of the signs—would likely feel very comfortable with a product like Cloud Run, which allows you to run code in any language on a fully-managed platform and access resources in any of your network projects. That Cloud Run is pay-per-use also makes it a practical option any Earth sign would appreciate.  AquariusJanuary 20 to February 18 Looking forward to growth and personal progress comes naturally to an Aquarius. If you engage with an Aquarius, you’ll be quick to notice their wit and intellectuality. With advancement constantly on their minds, Aquarians are always searching for ways to self-improve and to share their knowledge with others. This makes an Aquarius like Looker, which organizes the world’s information and makes it accessible to all users. Don’t be surprised if you see them researching the latest fitness trends, online shopping to improve their aesthetic, or delivering insights to make the best business decisions. Aquarians and Looker are always striving to find out new pieces of information and determine new methods to get the job done!  PiscesFebruary 19 to March 20 Being receptive, spiritual, and impressionable, Pisces has an open mind and an open heart. Represented by two fish swimming in opposite directions, a Pisces will often feel as though they are being pulled by changes in their environment. However, this is what also makes them great at adapting, much like Vertex AI, which is able to scale machine learning models faster with fully managed tools. Both Vertex AI and Pisces are fluid and are able to operate quickly with new information or, perhaps, new ML model training and APIs. 

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from February 2023. C2C’s in-person events returned with plenty of energy and excitement in February of 2023. Our 2Gather events in Sunnyvale, Munich, Zurich, and New York City brought together dozens of Google Cloud customers for the kinds of unique networking and collaboration opportunities that only a community like C2C can offer. Read on below to hear stories from each of these events. SunnyvaleFor our first in-person event of the year, we returned to Silicon Valley, where Google was born, for another event in Sunnyvale, California. The event included a fireside chat with C2C partner NetApp and a customer panel featuring speakers from NetApp, Lytics (another partner), Exabeam, and Cisco Systems. Bruno Aziza, Senior Director, Outbound Product Management, Google Cloud, introduced and hosted the event––one of many events Bruno will be joining in the coming months. According to Dylan Steeg (@Dylan_Steeg), Vice President of Business Development at Aible, “The event had extremely thought-provoking insights stemming from the issues of modern-day data analytics and how it impacts a customer base, as well as a panel that discussed their personal experiences with data.” Read more about the event here:  Munich2Gather: Munich was a customer-led event featuring sessions with Volkswagon, Soravia, and Nagarro. First, Kiran Francis (@kiranfrancis), Google Cloud Foundation Services Product Owner at Volkswagon, led a session about the company’s Group-wide Google Cloud Landing Zone. Then Hannes Gutemeier of Soravia and Jörg Weis of Nagarro sat down for a fireside chat about VDI modernization. Andy Hardy (@Andy Hardy) of Workspot, a regular at C2C events in the EMEA region, was particularly pleased. “Brilliant event!” he said. “Thanks for great organization, and a fascinating ‘Customer 2 Customer’ agenda!" Zurich2Gather: Zurich was the second of three events C2C hosted in February featuring guests from our partners at NetApp. At this event, NetApp chatted with Dentsply Sirona about using Cloud Volumes ONTAP to manage a hybrid deployment. The event also included a conversation with ParaShift AG about using Google Vision AI for intelligent document recognition. Oliver Ruf, Head of Middleware at Coop, Switzerland, told C2C afterward, “The community meetup was an incredibly insightful and inspiring experience that also allowed me to meet new people. The diverse range of perspectives and ideas shared by attendees, combined with the opportunity to make new connections, left me feeling energized and motivated to continue exploring new ideas and expanding my network.” New YorkOur most recent 2Gather event in New York City doubled as a formal launch party for the C2C Financial Services community. Michael Beal (@MikeBeal), CEO of Data Capital Management, who hosts the group on our platform, appeared alongside speakers from OpCo and PaerPay and partners Publicis Sapient and NetApp. The sessions and the networking at the event continued conversations that began the night before at an executive dinner for companies in and adjacent to the financial services industry, where customers like Deutsche Bank and Vimeo made valuable connections and explored new opportunities to collaborate and build on existing relationships. “Being able to see the community, it’s a lot of fun,” said Derek Canton, CEO of PaerPay. “I see the people in the space more than all the cool tech. There’s tons of cool tech and things that we’re talking about, but there’s so much depth behind that that I think is really important.” Read our report from the scene here:  Are you looking for more, including recordings from virtual events? Browse All Articles  We are excited to feature some special guest speakers from Google Cloud at our in-person events in March. Bruno Aziza in Paris and LondonTuesday, March 14 and Thursday, March 16Bruno Aziza, Head of Data and Analytics, specializes in high-growth SaaS, enterprise software, and everything data, analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence. Bruno, alongside customer speakers at both events, will host panel discussions about overcoming data challenges. Each event will also explore other unique challenges cited by speakers from the consumer packaged goods, retail, and financial services industries.Sign up for Paris.Sign up for London. Kelsey Hightower at the Cloud Adoption Summit TorontoThursday, March 23Kelsey Hightower, Principal Developer Advocate, has helped develop and refine many Google Cloud products, including Google’s Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Functions, and Apigees’s API Gateway. Kelsey will be joining us for our first event in Canada where the agenda includes various perspectives on optimizing cloud adoption plans. Topics include a shift from “cloud first” to “cloud also,” data center migration, cloud transformation, and cybersecurity. Sign up for this event. You can also find Kelsey speaking in upcoming Let’s Talk Tech events this April in Chicago and Atlanta. Find those and more by browsing our full events calendar. Sign Up for an Event   ConversationsWhether C2C members are sharing their opinions, trying to troubleshoot—or help others troubleshoot—Google Cloud tech, or having casual career conversations, we love to see excellent threads like these. Our online communities are a great way to find new connections with fellow Google Cloud users. Want to start connecting with the community? Start a Conversation   Want to make sure you’re in the loop? Don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything C2C by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver you the most relevant news in real time.

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from January 2023. We stayed inside this month as the C2C team emerged from a short, wintery hibernation. But as many of us have learned over the past few years, “inside” doesn't mean “inactive.” Our virtual connections are here to stay—January was full of them, and we have some of our partners to thank for that! Partners Coming TogetherFour of our partners—all fast-growing startups with a goal of enabling companies with data-driven software options—took turns sharing their success stories using Google Cloud’s BigQuery. Here’s what they shared:Tinyclues discussed reliance on implicit versus explicit signals as a measure for predicting consumer behavior, using AirFrance’s first-party data as an example. Aible’s case study with Overstock.com demonstrated how AI-first approaches accelerate time-to-value. Connected-Stories and its latest platform launch, NEXT, rely on BigQuery to deliver personalized ads and creative intelligence. Snorkel AI focused on high-quality training of datasets and ML models for document intelligence, conversational analytics, and more.The full recording from their session is available to watch now. Cloud VolumesThat's the name of NetApp's proprietary solution for data storage on Google Cloud. Brian Wink, Director of Google Cloud Architects at NetApp, gave us some background on this tool ahead of the Google Cloud partner joining C2C at 2Gather events in Sunnyvale, New York City, Zurich, and Paris.In this interview with C2C’s @Content Stephen, Wink explains how Cloud Volumes brings NetApp's network-attached storage to the cloud using container technology. Wink also discussed access management and encryption considerations for the solution's security model, a necessary part of the foundation for building storage solutions in cloud environments.You can find the full interview here and read on in this recap to find some of the C2C events he’ll be joining. Are you looking for more, including recordings from virtual events? Browse All Articles  Alongside many more virtual chats and learning sessions, we're looking forward to meeting up again in person in February. Here’s where we’re going: Sunnyvale, CaliforniaThursday, February 2Discover how to use your data and storage options to optimize operations at scale at this 2Gather event. Take advantage of the experience of our speakers to learn best practices around platform development, scaling data processing pipelines, and more.Sign up for this event. MunichTuesday, February 7These days, whether you've decided to move to the cloud and are wondering "what's next?" or you're still debating your future, cloud adoption is likely on your mind. At 2Gather: Munich, we'll be hearing from Volkswagen, Soravia, and one of our newest C2C partners, Workspot, who will provide valuable input into your cloud adoption journey decisions.Sign up for this event. New York CityThursday, February 9At this event, we’ll explore industry solutions with speakers from top financial services organizations. Come to hear how they use Google Cloud to monetize data in new and innovative ways, develop a plan to create value from customer data, and much more.Sign up for this event. ZurichThursday, February 9This event features a mix of Google Cloud strategies from across industries. Parashift, a Swiss software company, uses cutting-edge technologies to extract valuable metadata from documents and vastly reduce processing time and effort. NetApp will be joined by Dentsply Sinora, a dental supply manufacturing companywhich uses Cloud Volumes as part of their hybrid deployment to streamline their data management on Google Cloud.Sign up for this event. Plus, you can find regional events hosted in a local language by browsing our full event calendar. Sign Up for an Event   ConversationsWhether C2C members are sharing their opinions, trying to troubleshoot—or help others troubleshoot—Google Cloud tech, or having casual career conversations, we love to see excellent threads like these. Our online communities are a great way to find new connections with fellow Google Cloud users. Want to start connecting with the community? Start a Conversation   Of course, the beauty of everything we do is having one central place for all Google Cloud users to come together to solve problems, connect and re-connect, and get access to everything from C2C. We strive to continually improve the experience of our online community, so here's the latest on what we've delivered. New Group: Financial ServicesThe C2C Financial Services group is a space for C2C members working in the financial services industry to explore challenges and brainstorm solutions, whether they’re looking to migrate legacy systems to the cloud, innovate in the world of decentralized finance, or generate the ideas that will lead to the next major development in this rapidly evolving field. Members who belong to this group are invited and encouraged to participate in specialized networking opportunities, including face-to-face events and virtual conversations. These opportunities are designed to unite participants with contacts across our extensive ecosystem of Googlers, partners, and customers. To get involved and meet your other industry colleagues, join the Financial Services group today. Want to make sure you’re in the loop and don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything C2C by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver you the most relevant news in real time.

The 2022 Cloud Adoption Summit at Google’s offices in London was the banner event of the year for the C2C community. The day-long conference featured over two dozen customer, partner, and Googler speakers and brought in well over a hundred guests. The networking at the event facilitated dozens of connections between organizations in attendance and sparked generative debate on topics ranging from sustainability in the cloud space to how employee upskilling impacts cloud adoption prospects. These connections were unique and irreproducible, but the content presented at the event spoke, and speaks, for itself.In December, we caught up with attendees to hear about their experiences at the event for an exclusive report from the scene. Now, full recordings of the sessions hosted at the event are available for viewing on YouTube. Check the embeds below to find the session you want to see––or see again! Welcome from C2C and Google and Opening Keynote  Industry Insights Panel and Discussion  Cybersecurity with GEMA and Palo Alto Networks  Industry Panel: Change Management with Deloitte  Infrastructure Modernization and Migrating VDI Workload to Google Cloud with Workspot  De-risking RAMP with Cloud IQ and Appsbroker  Customer Panel: What Do We Know Now That We Wish We'd Known When We Started  Extra Credit: Do you want to see more sessions like these and interact live with the speakers and other guests? Come the to the next Cloud Adoption Summit on March 23, in Toronto, Canada!

2022 was a year of continuing growth and change for the C2C community. New event formats, content campaigns, and community spaces allowed our team and our members to explore hot topics in the cloud ecosystem, from hybrid and multicloud strategies to sustainable cloud spend to intelligent automation. We relaunched our face-to-face events, created new communities for our global regions and industry verticals, and produced the first full-scale research study of our membership. Not to mention, we grew to over 30,000 members strong! 2023 is just beginning, and many more exciting developments are just around the corner, but for now, read on to take a look back at some of the biggest things we accomplished in 2022. Cloud Repatriation C2C’s first major event of 2022 was our executive panel on Cloud Repatriation, featuring Nick Tornow of Twitter, Keyur Govande of Etsy, and Rich Hoyer and Miles Ward (@MilesWard) of SADA. All of the guests left the conversation with new perspective on the concepts of repatriation and cloud strategy in general. As Keyur put it, “In the context of repatriation, especially for a product company, it is very important to think through the ramifications of doing the heavy infrastructural lift yourself. In my opinion, for most product companies, the answer would be to ‘keep moving up the stack,’ i.e. to be laser focused on your own customers' needs and demands, by leveraging the public cloud infrastructure.” Miles was also kind enough to finish off the discussion with a call to arms for solo Tuba:   Read our takeaway post to revisit the highlights:  Women In Cloud In March of 2022, for International Women’s Day, C2C Content Manager Alex Maksymec (@alex.maksymec) produced a five-part series of interviews with successful women in the cloud space. The interviews provided a necessary opportunity to explore the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion in depth. In the words of Lynn Comp, AMD, Corporate Vice President of Cloud Business Group, “When you look at environments that are more of a melting pot with greater diversity—points of view, origin, culture, or language—you end up having a lot more innovation. It’s challenging because it’s hard to understand others’ journeys, but once the team gels, it makes products and solutions better and more multi-purpose.” Read all of the interviews here below:  Clean Clouds, Green Earth C2C continued producing large-format virtual events with Clean Clouds, Green Earth, an Earth Day conference hosted entirely on the C2C platform, including Googler, partner, and customer-led sessions on hot topics in sustainability. The highlight was a panel discussion with AMD, HCL, and L’Oreal, hosted by Ian Pattison, EMEA Head of Sustainability Practice at Google Cloud. The most vital takeaway from the discussion was the notion of a holistic approach to cloud sustainability, reaching beyond specific technological fixes to a new perspective on energy consumption overall, which, according to Antoine Castex (@antoine.castex), L’Oreal Cloud Architect and C2C France team lead, comes about when companies like L’Oreal are able to “change the brain of the people.” Check the links below to explore the content from the various individual sessions:  Face-to-Face Events Early in 2022, the C2C team reintroduced face-to-face events, offering some of the most high-profile events of the company’s history, including multiple Google Next watch parties hosted in collaboration with C2C partners and the Cloud Adoption Summit in London, a day-long event featuring over two-dozen customer and partner sponsors and speakers. “I joined to check how the Google Community works especially compared to Azure,” said Robert Burton (@Rob Burton) of Bupa after the Cloud Adoption Summit. “I left knowing that Workspot might solve a problem that we didn’t know we had.” Read more stories from these events here:  New Communities In 2022, C2C also created new communities for numerous of our global regions and industry verticals. We created new spaces on the platform, hosted events, and brought on new community managers, moderators, and customer and partner collaborators in JAPAC, the Alps, and LATAM. We also introduced our Healthcare and Life Sciences community with a 2Inspire event featuring Steven Michaels (@Steven Michaels) of Intermountain Healthcare, Michael Ames (@michaelames) of SADA, and Paul Novak (@paul_novak) of Community Health Systems, who has since joined C2C as a member of our board. Take a look at the post linked below for takeaways from the event and a full recording of the conversation:  Community Research Last but not least, 2022 also saw the publication of the first large-scale research study of C2C’s membership. The long-form report collected insights on preferred cloud providers, most popular Google Cloud tools and products, and trends in provider and product usage. Insights gathered included that AI and ML tech is “look but don’t touch,” Google Cloud is #1 for “cloud native” development, and provider satisfaction and open-source tech go hand-in-hand. Read the full report below:  Do you want to be able to tell stories like these about your organization and the business and technical solutions you’ve developed on the cloud? Join C2C as a member today to take part in everything we have planned for 2023! 

“Until your event,” said Alejandro Lorenz, Lead Software Architect at IT4IPM, in a follow-up interview after attending C2C’s first Cloud Adoption Summit in London on November 30th, “I didn’t think that we had a problem.” Now, Alejandro says, after hearing from other companies at the summit about the investments they had made in their cloud migrations and their faster migrations’ impact on their overall management, he realizes that his own organization’s top management “must fully invest in the migration” to Google Cloud.The Cloud Adoption Summit was the first event of its kind for C2C: a day-long event featuring a keynote address, several industry panels and interactive breakout sessions, and numerous opportunities to network over meals and drinks with the one-hundred-plus guests and two-dozen-plus speakers in attendance. Many of the sessions were hosted by C2C partners, including Deloitte, Palo Alto Networks, Aiven, Workspot, and Appsbroker, but some of Google Cloud’s biggest customers, like Deutsche Bank and GEMA, also appeared to present and discuss their business and technical initiatives. Topics ranged from cybersecurity and infrastructure modernization to sustainability lessons from the last ten years of cloud adoption.Breakout session with Aivenand Elwood Technologies“Being at your event and hearing other companies and what they are doing helped me,” Alejandro said. Many of the attendees shared similar sentiments about the content of the presentations and the breakout sessions. “It was really important for me to attend Ellwood's CISO talk. We are a small team, as they are. And we need to go for full automation, to automate everything as they did,” added Tobias Hingerl (@THingerl), Alejandro’s colleague at IT4IPM. Tobias was referring to a session called “Scaling Fast but Secure,” a conversation with Daniel Jones of Elwood Technologies led by C2C partners Aiven. The kind of insight Tobias is describing––that increasing investment in transformative cloud technologies can present new opportunities for growth, efficiency, and security––is the kind of insight the Cloud Adoption Summit and the Google Cloud Customer Community itself exist to make possible.For many of the guests, the keynote by John Abel, Technical Director in Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO, provided not just insight but inspiration. “It was fascinating to hear John talking about Sustainability,” said Damien St. John, European Sales Engineer Lead at Appsbroker. “Not only for the impact we have on the environment...it helped me understand the marketing perspectives.” Jeremy Norwood, COO of Skytra Ltd., agreed. “John’s numbers made me think about the impact of our business on the environment. Sustainability is a big thing for sure. I have the sense that Google is a leader and they want to continue.” For Workspot Sales Engineer John Samuel (@C2Csamuelj), the call to action was immediate. “When I returned home, I went to my PC and changed my screen settings to dark mode,” he said. “I checked the energy consumption before and after. I was amazed. His talk gave us food for thought.” “Being at your event and hearing other companies and what they are doing helped me.” Other guests found the most value in the networking opportunities the event provided, which encouraged sharing ideas and making plans to follow up. Tobias and Alejandro are looking forward to catching up with Palo Alto about how their platform can help IT4IPM, and with Appsbroker about hiring new security engineers. John says Workspot made several new connections, and he’s excited to get in touch with Robert Burton (@Rob Burton) of Bupa about a solution for Workspot’s cloud desktops. Damien is anticipating a training opportunity with Google and more than one new business opportunity, including one with Mastercard.Guests networking between sessionsFor Daniel Vaughan (@daniel.vaughan) of Mastercard, the presentations and the networking at the event provided an entirely new way of looking at cloud adoption. In the conversations Daniel observed and joined, a major theme emerged: the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is employee skills. This theme was provocative enough for Daniel that he published an article on the C2C platform exploring his experience at the Cloud Adoption Summit and what he learned about the importance of skills in the cloud adoption context. “No matter how good the technology is,” he says, “without experienced people who are using it and, most importantly, can show others how to use it well, its adoption will be limited.”For the organizations who adopt it, the cloud makes storage and resources available all over the world, providing a solution to fit every need. A community like C2C does the same thing with people. At the Cloud Adoption Summit, the entire C2C community came together in one place to connect. Now those connections exist across the globe, and the people who made them can access them at any time. You and your organization can make and benefit from these connections, too. Join C2C as a member today to become a part of our global community. We’ll see you at the next Cloud Adoption Summit. Extra Credit:  

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from October 2022. October is a busy time for Google Cloud—Googlers, partners, and customers alike finally get to hear all the latest and greatest announcements coming out of Google Cloud Next. And as the community for Google Cloud customers, C2C is dedicated not just to sharing these announcements, but to creating spaces for you and your peers to discuss them and how they can help you solve your technical and business problems. Google Cloud Next: The DoiT International Director’s CutAt the Google Cloud Next ‘22 DoiT Director’s Cut, longtime friends of C2C at DoiT International hosted an exclusive watch party in collaboration with C2C and Exabeam. Guests gathered early at Charmaine’s Rooftop Bar & Lounge in San Francisco for coffee and introductions before convening to view the keynote. Next, DoiT Head of Global Alliances, frequent C2C event participant, and noted yellow labrador owner Spenser Paul (@spenserpaul) hosted a breakout session with colleague and Field Services Manager Maddy Kepple to break down the many announcements from the Google Cloud leadership and customers. Finally, Exabeam Global Alliances Sales Director Chris Archinal led an interactive session about improving security outcomes through data analytics and automation. The keynote screened early on the West Coast, so the program concluded by lunch, but guests happily lingered afterward for catering from Executive Chef Jason Fox. PythianAt C2C Partner Pythian’s Next on the Road watch party in New York City, C2C President Josh Berman (@josh.berman) appeared onsite to co-host a session all about taking the barrage of information provided during the next keynote and, as Pythian CTO Paul Lewis puts it, “making it real.” Josh, Paul, and Sami Akbay of Google led a lively discussion with the attendees in the room, touching on everything from out-of-the-box AI and ML to paying for cloud services in cryptocurrency. “Josh did great,” said Paul. “He caught everything and he answered in an amazing way.”Read the full story at the link: Next Announcements at IntelIntel had a big moment at Google Cloud Next: they announced their C3 machine series powered by the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and Google's custom Intel Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Learn more about this partnership in this virtual event recording. Chatting About Chat With SADAHere's one for our Google Workspace professionals and enthusiasts. Do you know how to get the most out of the chat app? Watch this recording to learn about everyday use cases and getting started. Looking for more? Browse All Articles   Trying to catch the wave of that energy? We're eager for more, and we hope you can join us as we add more cities to our list. Cloud Adoption Summit in LondonWednesday, November 30C2C's largest event yet, the Cloud Adoption Summit, features a full day's schedule packed with keynotes and breakout sessions. From broader cloud strategy lessons to detailed discussions of your choosing—like cybersecurity, cost optimization, or industry insights—we're holding a spot for you at the Google UK office. North AmericaMultiple DatesIf you're in the United States, you’ll have a few opportunities to get together with us at a C2C 2Gather! Our classic in-person events are in Austin (Thursday, November 3) and New York City (Thursday, November 10). Plus, our first face-to-face event for Google Cloud startups—Angels, Accelerators or Incubators - Which Should You Choose?—is happening in Sunnyvale, CA, on Tuesday, November 8. While we encourage you to get the most out of this event and network on-site with the C2C startups community, this event also has the option to sign up to virtually attend the panel discussion.These events are happening this week and next, so don't miss your chance to sign up! São PauloWednesday, November 9 - Thursday, November 10As we expand our team into Latin America with the help of C2C community managers @Alfons and @valdecir.carvalho, we're preparing to host a double feature in Brasil. These strategic 2Gather events in São Paulo include an option for the future of work at Culture and Collaboration and hybrid and multicloud at the SAP on Google Cloud Forum. If you can't join us in person, we have plenty of virtual connections coming up. Browse all our events to speak directly with presenters and share your thoughts openly with other C2C members.  Sign Up for an Event   ConversationsWe also want to highlight some other excellent conversations happening in the communities: Want to start connecting with the community? Start a Conversation   Of course, the beauty of everything we do is having one central place for all Google Cloud users to come together to solve problems, connect and re-connect, and get access to everything from C2C. We strive to continually improve the experience of our online community, so here's the latest on what we've delivered.Last month, we announced our new feature to find groups led by independent software vendors (ISVs). Learn more about these partners and click on their names to connect directly in their groups. AivenAiven provides fully managed open-source services like Apache Kafka®, PostgreSQL®, and OpenSearch®. Jump in and gain the insights you need to build innovative applications backed by the latest open-source technologies. Automation AnywhereWhat is intelligent automation? Automation Anywhere uses a combination of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI to deliver cross-industry solutions as the number one cloud automation platform. In this space, bring your intelligent automation questions and challenges directly to this partner filling this niche, yet crucial, answer to power up business processes. NetAppNetApp's data management solutions help customers reduce cloud storage costs and run scalable enterprise apps in Google Cloud. Learn from this partner to effectively tackle file sharing among Linux and Windows workloads in Google Cloud while optimizing storage to cut cloud costs. Palo Alto NetworksPalo Alto Networks is the world's cybersecurity leader. They innovate to outpace cyber threats so that organizations can confidently embrace technology. Whether you're deploying their products to enable the Zero Trust Enterprise, responding to a security incident, or partnering to deliver better security outcomes through a world-class partner ecosystem, Palo Alto Networks is ready for community questions. Want to make sure you’re in the loop and don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything C2C by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver you the most relevant news in real time.

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from September 2022.  Following a summer break, the C2C EMEA team jumped right back into the fray of in-person events, rejoining old friends in Paris for more customer stories and networking as well as expanding the C2C landscape to Zurich, Switzerland. The stories shared at these events are valuable across many industry solutions being created with Google Cloud technology, but we also have a focus on having fun! ZurichAt 2Gather: Zurich, C2C’s first in-person event in the Alps region, the main topics of the day were the cloud implementation options Roche used to accelerate their get-to-market and the advantages of Google Cloud Database services. Google Cloud Principal architect Andreas Heidekrüger (@aheidekrueger) moderated a fireside chat featuring two representatives of customer F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG: Analytics Chapter lead Tomislav Ilicic (@Ilicict) and Program Manager Dominik Berroth (@Dominik). Data Analytics Customer Engineer Nic Gibson (@nicgibson) followed up with a focused look at Database Services. As always, the networking reception following the program opened the field for numerous customer-to-customer connections. Google Cloud Customer Engineer Dominik Steiner (@DominikSteiner) joined several customers in attendance for exploratory discussions breaking down various challenges faced and overcome. “It was a great possibility to give customers a platform,” he said. ParisJust a few days after breaking ground in Zurich, the C2C team was pleased as always to return to Paris for a 2Gather event led again by C2C France team leads Guillaume Blaquiere (@guillaume blaquiere), Group Data Architect at Carrefour, and Antoine Castex (@antoine.castex), Group Data Architect at L’Oreal. Customer speakers included Cyrille Doumenq of Renault Digital and Adeline Villette of Decathlon Technology, and ADEO Tech Leader Matthieu Cornillon also led a session exploring the company’s partnership with C2C partner Aiven to accelerate its native cloud strategy. “The event was very good. What I particularly liked was the ‘C’ part of the ‘C2C’ and listening to the experience of true practitioners talking to other practitioners,” said Jonathan Jowett (@jjowett), Director of Strategic Alliances at Redis EMEA. “The challenge now is to get the community of end customers to grow and gain momentum,” he added. “From my perspective, this would be a great forum to try and encourage our customers to come to and present at too.” Looking for more? Browse All Articles   Trying to catch the wave of that energy? We’re eager for more, and we hope you can join us as we add more cities to our list. Google Cloud Next Watch PartiesTuesday, October 11The biggest Google Cloud event of the year is only a few weeks away. We’re gathering together for live streams of the Next keynote to learn about the future of Google Cloud.London Paris Berlin San Francisco (DoiT Director’s Cut) Next on the Road with Google Cloud PartnersWe aren’t the only ones preparing for the announcements—check out what some of our partners are doing! Plus, you might even catch a cameo from C2C President @josh.berman if you are able to join Pythian’s event in person.New York City with Pythian New York City with SADA Sunnyvale with Palo Alto NetworksBrowse all our events to speak directly with presenters and share your thoughts in open conversation with other C2C members.  Sign Up for an Event   ConversationsWe also want to highlight some other excellent conversations happening in the communities: Want to start connecting with the community? Start a Conversation   Of course, the beauty of everything we do is having one central place for all Google Cloud users to come together to solve problems, connect and re-connect, and get access to everything from C2C. We strive to continually improve the experience of our online community, so here’s the latest on what we’ve delivered. Events FinderThe world is big, as is Google Cloud. So for our global community of Google Cloud users, we want to help navigate the sea of information and opportunities available. When you browse through C2C events, try one (or both) of these new features:Filter by event type to find the best setting—virtual or in-person—for you. Filter by tags including Google cloud solution area and other hot topics, when available, based on upcoming events. Change the view between list and calendar. Para (l)a GenteSpeaking of global reach: C2C is live in Latin America! From our summer activities in São Paulo to our first Spanish-language event last week, we’re doing everything we can to build dedicated groups to support your conversations and community where ever you are.Junte-se à comunidade para o Brasil Únete a la comunidad para LATAM (Español) Connect with ISVsOne other new feature on the Connect page is a filter for groups led by independent software vendors (ISVs). The ISV groups give you a space to bring your questions and challenges directly to our partners, including Aiven, Automation Anywhere, NetApp, and Palo Alto Networks.If you are part of an ISV and are interested in partnering with C2C to lead a group, reach out to marcy.young@c2cglobal.com. Want to make sure you’re in the loop and don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything C2C by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver you the most relevant news in real time.

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from August 2022.  The C2C team has been on the move! We’ve been unveiling a number of events with the help of our partners, Google, and other members who have joined us to share their journeys and connect with each other. The stories shared at these events are valuable across many industry solutions being created with Google Cloud technology, but we also have a focus on having fun! New YorkAt Google’s office in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, C2C hosted a half-day event all about Google’s culture of innovation. Speakers from Google delivered interactive presentations on topics including Google’s core values and how to inform these values with the principles of DEI, culminating in an innovation workshop that prompted small groups to develop new products to meet emerging needs in the future of work. Afterward, an open networking reception catalyzed numerous customer connections. En Szu Hu-Van Wright of Chili Piper discussed virtual event planning with Boris Sotnikov (@bSotnikov), CEO of KraftyLab, and Kristian Smilenov (@kristian.smilenov) of Prime Holding made numerous new contacts, including Geoff MacNeil of Crowdbotics.“Typically when we talk to our customers, especially in a one-to-many format, it tends to be about product,” said Jessie Hochhalter, Google Cloud Global Culture & Recognition Lead. “So I really like the fact that we got to talk about the people, the processes, the culture, the DEI, those sorts of things, and not just talk about the product and what’s next with Google technology.” Read more below:  ChicagoC2C’s 2Gather event in Chicago––the first face-to-face event for the Google Cloud Customer Community in the Midwestern US––brought together speakers Paul Lewis, CTO of Pythian, Vrinda Khurjekar, Senior Director of AMER Business at Searce, and Meiling He, Senior Data Scientist at Rockwell Automation, for a conversation about cloud-hosted AI and ML solutions. Meiling had never heard of C2C when she was asked to fill in last-minute for her manager Francisco Maturana, but she found the experience to be a pleasant surprise. “I think it was so fun,” she said. “I learned a lot from the perspective, the questions, the answers. It’s so nice to be around people like Lilah and Paul. They’re so knowledgeable and outgoing.”The guests overwhelmingly agreed, including former C2C Executive Director Jeff Branham, now Director of Industry Alliances at Salesforce. “It’s a great place to connect with other professionals, business and also technical, and it’s a really wonderful experience,” said Henry Post of US Bank. “Great food, great presentation, and great people.” Read more here:  Healthcare and Life SciencesOn August 23, 2022, C2C welcomed longtime colleagues Paul Novak (@paul_novak), CTO of Community Health Systems, Steven Michaels (@Steven Michaels), Vice President of Technology Services at Intermountain Healthcare, and Michael Ames (@michaelames), Managing Director of Vertical Markets at SADA, for an inaugural 2Inspire event introducing the new Healthcare and Life Sciences community on the C2C platform. The guests unanimously agreed that the event and the group represent essential community-building opportunities for decision-makers in the HCLS space. “Having that type of collaborative capability to talk to people who have been there and done that, and to share ideas, and to share lessons learned, is so powerful,” said Paul.Michael echoed these sentiments via email in a follow-up after the event. “Customer-led, industry-specific communities are an essential complement to vendor- and technology-focused communities as Google Cloud pushes deeper into the enterprise. But it takes leadership from within the industry to make it happen in an authentic way. It was a pleasure to speak with Paul and Steven, two honest and forward-thinking health IT leaders about their experiences with Google Cloud. I look forward to C2C facilitating many more such discussions.” Read more about the event here:  Looking for more? Browse All Articles   Trying to catch the wave of that energy? We’re eager for more, and we hope you can join us as we add more cities to our list.  Thursday, September 8 C2C 2Gather: Zurich   Tuesday, September 13 C2C 2Gather: Paris  Not quite ready to travel and be part of an in-person crowd? We have plenty of virtual connections to join in on.  Thursday, September 8 2Chat France: Google Cloud   Thursday, September 8 Learn How to Forecast Your Spend on Google Cloud   Tuesday, September 27 2Chat France: Workspace   Tuesday, September 27 Building Looker Dashboards for the BR Radio App   Tuesday, September 27 Let's Talk About Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)   Wednesday, September 28 SAP on Google Cloud Forum  Browse all our events to speak directly with presenters and share your thoughts in open conversation with other C2C members.  Sign Up for an Event   C2C ResearchWe’re unveiling a piece that’s the first of its kind at C2C: a research report on our community! This is only a preview of what we learned, but you have the option to download the full report. Click the link to read an overview and key findings.  Congratulations again to our July C2Champions, @malamin, @JoeyMaller_UCC, and @sebastianmorenoe. Learn more about these outstanding community members in this post:  We also want to highlight some other excellent conversations happening in the communities:  Want to start connecting with the community? Start a Conversation   Of course, the beauty of everything we do is having one central place for all Google Cloud users to come together to solve problems, connect and re-connect, and have access to everything from C2C. We strive to continually improve the experience you have here in the online community, so here’s the latest on what we’ve delivered.You may have noticed some cosmetic changes around C2C as we continue to showcase our updated brand styles. We want the look and feel of the community to reflect the enthusiasm and ingenuity of Google Cloud users. New images, colors, and layouts are popping up throughout the community, but our big reveal is… … the new C2C home page! Take a look. It’s bright. It’s shiny. And most importantly, it’s featuring the community members who continue to shine as we deliver on our events, content, and conversations. With the update, you can navigate through what makes C2C the community it is. Want to make sure you’re in the loop and don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver to you the most relevant news in real time.

What a great day for our team at C2C Global as we officially launch our Healthcare and Life Sciences community! The new vertical will bring together healthcare leaders, technology experts, practitioners, administrators, and pioneers to share best practices, problem solve and develop new innovative solutions for the future of healthcare. Collaboration in this space is what leads to life-changing breakthroughs for billions across the globe, and we hope that the new community will be a place that serves as a catalyst for innovation for years to come.Read more here: C2C GLOBAL LAUNCHES NEW GOOGLE CLOUD COMMUNITY GROUP DEDICATED TO HEALTHCARE AND LIFE SCIENCES  New healthcare group will facilitate sharing of information, techniques, and best practices to solve problems and spur innovation across the sector   CHICAGO, IL – C2C Global, the largest worldwide community of Google Cloud users, announced today the launch of its newest vertical dedicated to Healthcare and Life Sciences. This latest offering from C2C will bring together healthcare leaders, technology experts, practitioners, administrators and pioneers to share best practices, problem solve, and develop new innovative solutions for the future of healthcare. “In recent years, the healthcare and life sciences community has been placed at the forefront of our lives like never before, and as a result has faced additional challenges. Collaboration in this space is what helps lead to not only industry solutions, but life-changing breakthroughs for billions of people across the globe,” said Josh Berman, President, C2C Global. “By launching a new, dedicated community for these practitioners, we want to provide a place that serves as a catalyst for innovation in an ever-changing, dynamic landscape.” In addition to diverse forums, in-depth case studies and a continuous sharing of the latest news, trends and solutions affecting the industry, the new community will feature executive panel discussions highlighting some of the problems facing the industry today and how practitioners can come together to solve these challenges. C2C recently hosted a discussion with senior leadership from Intermountain Healthcare and Community Health Systems to outline how they have leveraged Google Cloud to meet today’s healthcare needs, especially since the industry has seen a boom in innovation over the past few years in frontline caregiving, virtual care, and patient management.“Creating a community and having this type of collaborative capability to talk to others who have been there and done that and to share ideas, and to share lessons learned, is so powerful,” said Paul Novak, CIO of Community Health Systems. “It allows you to move forward quickly when you’re having problems or trying to innovate. Having this ability to connect is priceless.” The C2C Healthcare and Life Sciences Community will regularly host online and in-person panel discussions and will populate a continuous stream of conversations highlighting the most up-to-date needs facing the industry where members can come together to share best practices and solutions on a daily basis. About C2C Global C2C is the only peer-to-peer community built to support, connect, and educate Google Cloud customers across regions and industries so they can better harness the power of the cloud—and each other—to solve their biggest challenges and drive innovation.

C2C is a global community where Google Cloud customers and partners can explore new technical solutions and transform their businesses using Google Cloud products. What makes C2C so unique, however, is the opportunity for our members to meet, share their knowledge, and collaborate with one another. Learning which products to use and how to use them is important, but the chance to hear the story of another colleague who has done so successfully or tell your own success story is vital. To demonstrate this value to our membership, C2C has introduced a new program all about recognizing the individuals who make our community so dynamic and rewarding. Read on below to learn more about our monthly community C2Champions. Category: Platform Posts Mohammad AlaminMohammad Alamin (@malamin) has been an extremely engaged member of our community as of late. Mohammad posted 79 times in July, which might just be an all-time record. In his posts, Mohammad always tries to be as analytical as possible, offering sources and diagrams, explaining in detail, and spending a lot of time ensuring there are no questions left. Mohammad is an AI/ML solution architect at Aiiotsys, but his technology journey has been long and eventful. He has worked for the Bangladesh Election Commission and a property management company based in the United Kingdom, and has also taught in various schools and colleges, including at a computer training center he opened himself in his home town. In his spare time, he likes to hike, draw, and watch adventure movies. Mohammad is part of C2C, he says, because “Everyone here is a Google user. They are developing a unique solution with Google Cloud technologies. I may learn from their experiences and occasionally share my own. I may also expand my knowledge and gain confidence in my abilities.” Category: Attending Events Joey MallerJoey Maller (@JoeyMaller_UCC) has been elected a July C2Champion in the Attending Events category for faithfully participating in coffee chats and sharing his invaluable experience and know-how about Google Workspace. Joey is Vice President of Sales at UpCurve Cloud, where he specializes in Google Workspace solutions. A longtime C2C member, Joey has been attending C2C events and contributing to C2C content for almost as long as the Google Cloud customer community has been around. Joey is a mainstay of the C2C Workspace crowd and on the C2C platform in general, and also came out to C2C’s Spring 2022 face-to-face event in Los Angeles, where he connected with customers SADA and Sony and his old friend Jesse Nowlin (@Jesse). Category: Google Support Sebastián MorenoSebastián Moreno (@sebastianmorenoe) has been collaborating with C2C, sharing his knowledge on Google Partners, and presenting at C2C events for some time. Thanks to his recent participation and enthusiasm, our Community Managers have nominated him as a July C2Champion in the Google Support category. Sebastián is a Google Regional Partner Engineer in LATAM leading the development and technical enablement of Google partners. Outside of work, he is a music producer and a racing enthusiast. About C2C, Sebastián says “This is one of the biggest Cloud communities I know with a lot of different topics. I also like the different activities to share knowledge and collaborate.” Do you want to be a C2Champion? There are countless ways to engage on our platform or at our events, but the easiest way to get started right now is to join us as a member! We look forward to seeing you around our community.

Each month, C2C shares the latest news from the team and the best highlights from all of you here in the community. Read on for the most essential C2C updates from July 2022.  The C2C team has been on the move! We’ve been unveiling a number of face-to-face events with the help of our partners, Google, and other members who have joined us to share their journeys and connect with each other. The stories shared at these events are valuable across many industry solutions being created with Google Cloud technology, but we also have a focus on having fun! Speaker Panel at 2Gather: San FranciscoSan FranciscoThe C2C team has spent enough time in California over the past year that a NoCal roadshow was long overdue. At the end of July, C2C’s own Josh Berman (@josh.berman), Alesha Neely (@Aneely), Kathy Sullivan (@Kathy Sullivan), and Marcy Young (@Marcy.Young) made up for lost time by traveling West for two events in San Francisco and Sunnyvale. 2Gather: San Francisco brought speakers Peter-Mark Verwoerd (@PMV), Associate CTO of Infrastructure at SADA, Ethan Lo (@ethanwlo), VP of Infrastructure & Security at Premise Data, Kavish Seda (@kavseda), Manager of Customer Success in the Americas at Aiven, and Anthony Wang (@anthonyw), Infrastructure and Platform Engineering Manager at Bevy for a packed agenda.First, Peter-Mark and Ethan sat down for a fireside chat breaking down the custom solution Premise Data built on top of their Security and Command Center on Google Cloud. Kavish and Anthony followed with a second fireside chat about Bevy’s Google Cloud adoption. Finally all four speakers reconvened for a wide-ranging panel discussion before the crowd wound down with food and drinks. Andrew McIntyre (@amcintyre), a guest from MariaDB, particularly appreciated how the event brought customers together to share common interests and discuss the solutions helping their businesses. Lena Kannappan (@lena), Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at Healthcare Triangle, Inc., says he loved the community and conversation. SunnyvaleSpeaker Panel at 2Gather: SunnyvaleThe team continued their mini-tour with another stop in Sunnyvale, where speakers Tim Csontos, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Automation Anywhere, and Shalini Mayor (@smayor), Sr. Director of Enterprise Automation at Salesforce, grabbed time for a fireside chat and then a panel discussion with Allen Leibovitch (@Allen Leibovitch), Senior Manager of Cloud Solutions at AMD, and returning guest Spenser Paul (@spenserpaul) of DoiT. Of course, no panel featuring Spenser is complete without his yellow labrador Milton. As usual, Milton kept his comments brief.Anantharamu Suryanarayana (@Ananth), founder of Camphor Networks, had already attended some virtual events on the C2C platform, but he especially enjoyed networking in person with the other guests, and will be on the lookout for more events from our Google Startups team. Thomas DeMeo, Director of Product Management for Google Cloud Platform Developer Tools, was excited to be able to get actionable feedback from customers on the products he develops. He will be connecting with Yuval Drori of DoiT to discuss DoiT’s product challenges and help provide solutions.You can also find recordings from virtual events, interviews with Google Cloud thought leaders, and other news and content from C2C by browsing all our articles by solution area, industry, or hot topics in cloud.  Trying to catch wave of that energy? We’re eager for more, and we hope you can join us as we add more cities to our list.Not quite ready to travel and be part of an in-person crowd? We have plenty of virtual connections to join in on.Browse all our events to speak directly with presenters and share your thoughts in open conversation with other C2C members.   Congratulations again to our June C2Champions, @MoiGonzaga, @Vick, @MarkusK, and @Niaz Tadayyon. Learn more about these outstanding community members in this post We also want to highlight some other excellent conversations happening in the communities.  Want to start connecting with the community?  Of course, the beauty of everything we do is having one central place for all Google Cloud users to come together to solve problems, connect and re-connect, and have access to everything from C2C. We strive to continually improve the experience you have here in the online community, so here’s the latest on what we’ve delivered.New Group: Connected LeadersThis group features the Google Cloud Connected Leaders Exchange, whose purpose is creating an inspirational community for women, under represented groups and allies across Google, our Customers and our Partners. Their vision is to connect, make an impact and drive positive change for all through sharing stories, learnings and collectively making a difference to many through working as one community.Join the Connected Leaders group.  Want to make sure you’re in the loop and don’t want to wait for these posts each month? Stay up-to-date on everything by updating your profile and notification preferences so we can deliver to you the most relevant news in real time.

C2C is a global community where Google Cloud customers and partners can explore new technical solutions and transform their businesses using Google Cloud products. What makes C2C so unique, however, is the opportunity for our members to meet, share their knowledge, and collaborate with one another. Learning which products to use and how to use them is important, but the chance to hear the story of another colleague who has done so successfully or tell your own success story is vital. To demonstrate this value to our membership, C2C has introduced a new program all about recognizing the individuals who make our community so dynamic and rewarding. Read on below to learn more about our monthly community C2Champions. Category: Platform Posts Moises GonzagaMoises Gonzaga (@MoiGonzaga) started his career journey as an Analyst. He has since had the chance to work as a Senior Analyst and a Product Owner, and now serves as a New Technologies Engineer at Nidec-MCE, supporting on-site applications and proposing new technologies to improve daily activities. He loves learning and is always researching and trying new tools and platforms, but he also loves teaching, which has led him to serve on the faculty of two different universities in his home of Mexico, teaching about programming, databases, and other tech topics including cloud. Moises has been a very active user on the C2C platform, notably welcoming other users to the community, and contributing essential posts. For these efforts, our community managers have nominated him as a June 2022 C2Champion. Category: Solving problems Victor DicksonVictor Dickson (@Vick) started his journey in tech as a novice, coming originally from a non-tech background: the construction industry. In his words, Vick was able to make the pivot that transformed his career “through hard work and perseverence.” Now he is a DevOps Engineer and an Instructor at New Vision Institute of Technology. Apart from the work he does as a DevOps Engineer, he’s passionate about impacting knowledge and helping those who are new to tech navigate their way through. Because of this commitment to helping others, Vick responds regularly when member share their technical problems, which is why our community managers have nominated him as one of this month’s C2Champions. Category: Attending Events Markus KoyMarkus Koy (@MarkusK) is the founder of thefluent.me and a Google Build Partner and AI enthusiast based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Markus has 18 years of experience as a Business Analyst, IT Project Manager, IT Consultant, Strategic Controller, and Developer. Born and raised in Germany, Markus immigrated to Canada in 2008. His hobbies include fishing, snowshoeing, and hiking. Markus has been nominated as a June 2022 C2Champion for being a regular presence in our events since the beginning of C2C. Markus has also collaborated with the C2C team by presenting and giving demos in events, and is a well known entrepreneur in our community. Read our Member Spotlight on Markus here:  Category: Google Support Niaz TadayyonNiaz Tadayyon (@Niaz Tadayyon) works with strategic customers and partners to design and execute on their conversational AI and transformational customer experience visions. Her strengths include analyzing clients’ business requirements, ideation and qualification, developing business cases and defining digital strategy, articulating AI impact on business, designing a simplified architecture, data foundation and data science solutions, delivering challenging projects, and, finally, scaling AI to gain full value. She has a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics in Computer Science and a Master’s in Computer Engineering. Niaz was an engaging host and moderator at our in-person event in Irvine, guiding meaningful discussions and ensuring a successful and impactful event to bring the C2C community together, and has since expressed interest in presenting at future events. For this willingness to participate, our community managers have nominated her as our Google Support C2Champion for June. Do you want to be a C2Champion? There are countless ways to engage on our platform or at our events, but the easiest way to get started right now is to join us as a member! We look forward to seeing you around our community.