ISG Provider Lens™ Google Cloud Partner Ecosystem - Data Analytics and Machine Learning - Australia 2022

The Google ecosystem differentiates with data insight

From humble beginnings in Mountain View, California, Google has completely reshaped how businesses, consumers or industries function. It has caused innovative disruptions beyond scale, induced by advances in digital technologies and deeper globalisation.

Like Amazon, Google has looked to parlay the roots of consumer technology and search to invest heavily in cloud and enterprise solutions at scale. After setting up Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it quickly joined the small club of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure to become the bona fide third member of the exclusive hyperscaler public cloud providers. It provides solutions for clients globally across various locations, with its expertise in B2B, B2C, B2G and G2B, G2C and G2G markets. By leveraging advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning and analytics, Google has been differentiating its capabilities in key markets, including Australia and across all industries and potential use cases.

In Australia, Google made a long-awaited entry in 2017 with the launch of its cloud platform in Sydney. In 2021, Melbourne was added to this mix. The company has a presence across the Asia Pacific, though its investments here are long overdue. The first Google Cloud investment for this region was in Taiwan in 2013.

The establishment of a data centre in the country was ahead in many respects, but it was in the wrong spot for generating a market impact due to poor connectivity. Google fixed this misstep by setting up a centre in Singapore later that year before finally entering Australia and expanding in other key markets in 2017.

GCP in Australia has been relatively successful in competing with the other two hyperscalers in terms of overall capabilities. However, suffers from a relative lack of awareness and visibility. This would somewhat pose a struggle for the company to cut through its differentiating capabilities and technical requirements for investment. This would require the support of third-party partners that are part of a proliferating ecosystem. Though less mature than other platforms, these partners belong to a whole gamut of global providers and local start-ups that can help drive this opportunity.

The Google partner ecosystem is an increasingly sophisticated blend of global system integrators (GSIs), service providers, independent software providers (ISVs), big data and analytics specialists and boutique consultancies. Some of these providers are exclusive to the Google platform, while others focus on a range of platforms, technology types, industries, company sizes and geography. With this ecosystem now approaching a critical mass in Australia in terms of both depth and variety of services, ISG is turning the spotlight on the ecosystem for the first time to provide IT and business decision makers with a clearer view of the relative strengths and weaknesses of different providers across four quadrants: implementation and integration services, managed services for GCP, data analytics and machine learning and SAP on GCP.

Enterprises are turning to GCP 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. It is worth noting that for many GCP customers, previous enterprise experience with Google is negligible, especially from a pure technology perspective. Thus, many customers are new ones for Google. It shares this attribute with AWS, but the Microsoft ecosystem is more familiar with the hyperscaler.

Enhancing value from data is a key factor for many enterprises when choosing cloud providers. While many enterprises have moved from on-premises to public clouds or hybrid clouds, they are still struggling to effectively marshal and extract value from their organisational data, either because it is trapped in siloes or can be too unstructured for effective aggregation. Google Cloud comes equipped with a vast arsenal of advanced data analytics and machine learning tools, notably BigQuery – a highly scalable, multicloud data warehouse that enables real-time and predictive analytics for business users across vast data spaces. GCP also brings integrated platforms for data scientists (Vertex) and machine learning modellers (Auto-ML), conversational AI tools such as Dialogflow, translation and video AI tools. For the budding citizen developer, it offers low-code applications such as AppsSheets.

Ecosystem providers build on these native data and machine learning tools in many ways. In some cases, it offers focused custom point solutions for clients to address a specific business need — for example, a customer marketing platform using geo-spatial data from Google Maps, or a visual inspection tool for a manufacturing plant. Some providers use the Google native tooling to help enterprises bring stronger governance and searchability to their organisational data, for example by moving beyond traditional data warehouses and data lakes to the creation of organisational-wide data meshes that allow domaindriven searching by individual business functions. Other providers help to integrate the Google tools with external, third-party data sources. Many providers offer data advisory and assessment services to provide assistance with datamaturity benchmarking and assessment, data strategy and roadmap creation, and data-estate modernisation. Irrespective of the model, the core goal is to help enterprises extract greater value from their data.

The second core strength of GCP relates to its role in helping organisations achieve their sustainability goals. Following the COP26 Climate Agreement in late 2021, the achievement of net-zero carbon emissions targets by 2030 has become the paramount sustainability goal for many large enterprises worldwide. Providers reported that their environmental performance has, over the past year, become a key consideration for enterprises looking to migrate from onpremises data centres to the public cloud. Despite massive increases in computing power, hyperscalers’ data centres have achieved remarkable improvements in energy efficiency over the past decade, and Google Cloud in particular stands out for its carbon-neutral data centres and commitment to sustainable computing. Providers are also creating workspace solutions to support remote and hybrid working, which again has a beneficial environmental impact through reduced travel.

The third core strength of GCP lies in its strong alignment with cloud-native technologies and ways of working. While containerised applications and Kubernetes orchestration platforms can be deployed across any public cloud, GCP is particularly suitable for such environments because of its highly scalable and composable architecture, rich range of cloud-native tools, and pioneering role in cloud-native operations and development of site-reliability engineering principles. Google Anthos provides a unique platform for enterprises that want to avail the Google native tooling across different hyperscaler environments. Ecosystem partners offer a range of implementation and integration services for GCP, from basic lift-and-shift approaches to full-scale modernisation on the platform. In addition, global system integrators typically offer a range of managed services, encompassing services such as multicloud management, operations support, observability, security, FinOps, reporting, predictive analytics, cloud automation and cluster provisioning.

The Google ecosystem continues to evolve at pace, growing in scale, depth and complexity. ISG has identified several key trends shaping this still emergent ecosystem:

First, we are seeing the emergence of Google-native industry clouds. Providers have started to craft Google-native industry clouds for sectors such as BFSI, healthcare and life sciences, retail, manufacturing, communications and utilities.

Second, ecosystem providers are using Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities to create highly targeted, persona-driven services and solutions. These could include, for example, CFO data analytics solutions that provide forecasting of cash flow or other financial metrics, or chief marketing officer analytics offerings that provide insights into customer behaviour or enable the optimisation of marketing spend across different social media channels.

Lastly, the Google ecosystem is helping to democratise access to powerful, machine learning-based technologies. With the emergence of Google’s lowcost, cloud-based AI tools, nearly every enterprise has access to similar machine learning capabilities.

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