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

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

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

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

Eric Schmidt

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

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

Bruno Aziza

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

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

Cool things of the week


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


Interview


GCP Podcast Episode 266: Data Analytics Launches with Bruno Aziza and Eric Schmidt podcast
BigQuery site
Bringing multi-cloud analytics to your data with BigQuery Omni blog
Google Cloud Next—Day 1 livestream - WalMart video
Dataplex site
AppSheet site
Cloud Looker LookML site
Tableau site
Vertex AI site
Vertex AI Workbench site
TensorFlow site
Apache Spark on Google Cloud