ISG Provider Lens™ Google Cloud Partner Ecosystem - SAP Workloads - Brazil 2022

Smarter Decisions with the Google Ecosystem

The Public clouds have been driving digital transformation for many years, providing companies with the flexibility to scale quickly, accelerate the launch of products and services, and grow their business without having to build their own infrastructure. There is a healthy competition among the top three hyperscalers — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — as they are uniquely well-positioned and have established their foothold in exclusive areas based on products, services and capabilities.

Google, the most innovative of hyperscalers, has become one of the most prominent cloud providers in the world, with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) underpinning the workloads of many of the world’s leading enterprises. Google has grown far beyond its original search engine and consumer technologies, with advanced AI, data analytics and machine learning capabilities. Therefore, the company is considered as a fundamental partner for business decision-making as it provides proprietary business insights ranging from customer prospecting to financial analysis and product design. At present, thousands of Brazilian enterprises of all sizes across industries have operations supported by Google.

Although cloud investments by enterprises in the region are still lower than the global spending, cloud use continues to grow in Brazil. This is because enterprises now understand that the cloud framework is aligned with the need for resilience in the Brazilian market. However, many enterprises in the region are still relatively new to Google Cloud Platform. With their lack of maturity, they struggle to capitalize on all the native features and resources of the platform. In this scenario, the existence of the Google ecosystem becomes critical. This ecosystem comprises a complex network of global systems integrators (GSIs), service providers, independent software providers (ISVs), big data and AI experts, and renowned consultancy agencies.

The Google ecosystem is now reaching critical mass in Brazil, by offering a wide range of implementation and integration services for workloads on GCP, from basic lift-and-shift approaches to large-scale modernization. GSIs often offer many managed services such as multi-cloud management, operations support, monitoring, security, FinOps, reporting, predictive analytics, cloud automation and cluster provisioning.

Given the expansion of the Google ecosystem in Brazil and the variety and depth of services provided, ISG decided to dedicate an exclusive study to the Google ecosystem to help enterprises identify the best providers that will assist them in achieving their business goals. Providers were assessed in five different quadrants, as summarized below.

Implementation and Integration Services: This quadrant assesses GSIs and IT providers that offer migration, implementation, modernization and integration services for data and application workloads on GCP.

Data Analytics and Machine Learning: This quadrant examines vendors that have strong capabilities to leverage big data and machine learning technologies, especially on cutting-edge deep learning algorithms and API libraries that are available and accessible through GCP.

Managed Services: This quadrant assesses managed public cloud service providers that offer professional and managed services that leverage Google’s built-in capabilities, including IaaS and PaaS.

SAP Workloads: This quadrant assesses service providers that offer provisioning and support for the ongoing operations of SAP systems such as SAP HANA on Google and its central management.

Google Workspace Services: This quadrant assesses GSIs and IT providers that offer consulting, migration and integration services for Google Workspace and Google’s productivity, collaboration and content suite tools for businesses.

• Enterprises are turning to GCP for many reasons, but fundamentally to take advantage of three core strengths and differentiators of the platform: data analytics; sustainability and environmental performance; and affinity for cloud-native architectures. Some of the capabilities of GCP and its ecosystem in Brazil include:
• Ability to collect and analyze data and take immediate actions based on the insights derived to strengthen the relationships with customers or partners and to enable organizations change faster in response to varying business conditions.
• Ambitious environmental commitments – Google is aiming to run its operations on carbon-free energy by 2030. The company is also committed to helping enterprises achieve their sustainability goals.
• Expertise in cloud-native architectures that enable enterprises to build flexibly coupled applications, which are resilient, manageable and observable.

GCP is particularly suitable for containerized applications and Kubernetes orchestration platforms deployed across any public cloud. This is because of its highly scalable and composable architecture, its range of cloud-native tools, and its pioneering role in cloud-native operations and development of site-reliability engineering (SRE) principles.

Currently, a plethora of data being is generated, and without the right tools, it is virtually impossible to extract value from organizational data. GCP has many advanced data analytics and machine learning tools, most notably BigQuery — a highly scalable multi-cloud data warehouse that enables real-time and predictive analytics. It also provides integrated platforms for data scientists (Vertex) and machine learning models (Auto-ML), frameworks for building conversational agents such as Dialogflow, translation and video AI tools and no-code building applications such as AppsSheets for developers.

Google is one of the more socially responsible companies, which can contribute toward the objectives of enterprises that prioritize sustainability. Some enterprises are focusing on migrating from on-premises data centers to the public cloud as they are under pressure to reduce emissions. Despite a massive increase in computing power, hyperscaler data centers have achieved remarkable improvements in energy efficiency over the past decade. Google Cloud, in particular, stands out for its carbon-neutral data centers and generating 100 percent renewable energy to run and maintain its services and products. Its offering and toolset play a critical role in helping enterprises across industries achieve their broader sustainability goals. Providers can leverage Google’s data and machine learning tools to improve ESG performance measurement, increase the accuracy of carbon emissions measurement, optimize processes to reduce water and energy consumption, enable real-time monitoring of the entire value chain and more.

Although most cloud providers offer application containerization and container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, GCP is a unique option due to its strong alignment with cloud-native technologies and working methods. Google’s pioneering spirit and experience allow it to provide an extensive portfolio of products and services in the cloud environment. Google Anthos, for example, is a managed application platform that extends GCP engineering practices and services into its environments so that users can modernize applications faster and establish operational consistency across applications.

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