When we launched Partner Advantage, we committed to making it predictable and easy for partners to drive business with us. Since launch, those commitments have been validated by channel experts like CRN, which gave Partner Advantage a 5-Star award for 2022, and by the fact that our partners have seen impressive growth* across virtually every facet of their business.

I am pleased to announce that our commitments endure today with the launch of Consumption Packs for Deal Acceleration Funds and Partner Services Funds (DAF and PSF for partners). Inspired by partner feedback, these new packages are designed to accelerate all stages of a customer’s journey to the cloud, and make it even easier and faster for partners to do business with us.

Consumption Packs are purpose-built so that partners can plan and initiate customer projects much more quickly, with predictable funding. They include assets and templates that allow partners to deliver Google Cloud designed and validated infrastructure, application migration and modernization plans to customers faster than ever–particularly for customers beginning their journey to the cloud. Based on learnings gathered from thousands of customer deployments, these turnkey packs have been designed by our partners and Google Cloud Partner Engineering and Professional Services’ teams.

Here’s a brief look at Consumption Packs in action:

• Consumption Packs offer pre-approved, curated templates and assets to simplify and shorten the process for most common projects.
• For Deal Acceleration Funds (DAF), packages include everything partners need to conduct assessments, workshops and proofs-of-concept so they can quickly meet customers where they are on their journey to the cloud.
• For Partner Services Funds (PSF), packages are structured so that partners can develop cloud ready foundation and migration plans that align with Google Cloud priority solution areas.
• Packages have pre-determined funding levels to enable faster deployments.

Partners still have the option to engage with Google Cloud Partner Advantage and their customers through customized requests, as they always have. This is ideally suited for projects that require a tailored approach to meet unique customer requirements.

We are launching nine consumption packs today focused on key enterprise workloads, with a vision toward introducing additional packages to cover more solutions. Partners can explore Consumption Packs now by visiting the Partner Advantage portal.

We welcome your continued feedback and suggestions, and look forward to helping our customers achieve new levels of growth and success, together.

See you in the cloud.

• The Google Cloud Business Opportunity For Partners, a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting, October 2021

The broadcasting industry has gone through many evolutions since its inception. From linear over-the-air (OTA) to digital & personalized, to standard to ultra high definition, these evolutions were driven by increased demand from viewers who want more choices. The next evolution is happening now, driven by the emergence in cloud computing in a globally connected world. Broadcasters are understanding that the key for long-term success is embracing technical agility while they innovate their business models. Google Cloud technologies can provide a path for continual transformation, empowering broadcasters a multitude of ways to chart their own growth.

As broadcasters evolve their business models and operations for a digital future, evaluating both financial alongside operational benefits will lead to the best outcome. Legacy and siloed media supply chains restrict the ability to deliver content quickly across multiple consumption platforms. By understanding how cloud capabilities can provide cost savings, allow for more efficiency and scale, and open new revenue streams, broadcasters can harness flexible cloud technologies while achieving cost savings and increasing revenue. 

Media workflows in the cloud

Over the last few years we have seen tremendous growth from media companies migrating their supply chains to the cloud. Today, there exists a whole ecosystem of media technologies that are built to take advantage of the cloud. “Does it work on the cloud?” is no longer driving the conversation. Rather, media companies now want to understand how Cloud can integrate with their business and drive better business outcomes. 

Over the last years we have partnered with leading media companies including Grupo Globo, TelevisaUnivision and others to not only migrate their content supply chain to the cloud, but also leverage cloud capabilities to innovate their services to:

1. Increase and streamline content production
2. Distribute personalized content at planet scale
3. Forge deep relationships with their audiences 
4. Identify new monetization opportunities 

Impact of Cloud on Performance & Financials

M&E companies need to be able to provide more content at a quicker pace, with experiences that are seamless and exciting to viewers to retain their attention and dollars. Moving legacy systems and processes to the cloud is an organization-wide commitment, and the journey can pay off financially, while providing M&E companies valuable industry capabilities. With Google Cloud business value engagement framework, we partner to identify where there are opportunities in cost, output, and impact that IT can have. 

Below are some examples of how we have worked with our customers to map organization optimizations  to business drivers

Working Together – How can Google help

Our focus with customers is to help identify and understand the challenges that Media & Entertainment companies have in moving to the cloud, and coming up with the plan and solutions that Google can do to overcome them. Together we commit to understanding your business, both where you are right now in your IT capabilities as well as the progress you want to make to continue providing the best digital capabilities to clients and employees.

As broadcasters move more processes and solutions to the cloud, the exponential effect of harnessing data and AI power will provide incremental business value across all lines of business. Combined, these impacts to a broadcaster allow both operational excellence while optimizing costs as they continue to expand offerings to customers and regions around the world. 

We recognize that every media company’s journey is different and so are expected business outcomes. Google Cloud works closely with customers – partnering every step of the way – to align technology, the media industry, and business outcomes. 

Bootstrap your Startup with our technical guided series

At Google Cloud, we want to provide you with the access to all the tools you need to grow your business. Through the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, leverage industry leading solutions with how-to video guides and resource handbooks curated for startups.

This multi-series contains 3 chapters: Start, Build and Grow, which matches your startup’s stage of growth:

• The Start Series: Begin by building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish.
• The Build Series: Optimize and scale existing deployments to reach your target audiences.
• The Grow Series: Grow and attain scale with deployments on Google Cloud.

Kick off with The Start Series

The Start Series is designed to help your startup begin building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish. The series contains 12 videos and is dedicated to those who are starting out their cloud journey with Google Cloud. From setting up your project, to choosing the right compute option, to configuring your networking to managing your databases, and understanding support and billing – the Start Series guides you at every step of the journey.

Check out our website and our Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups full playlist.

Coming up next – The Build Series

Launch into the next part of the journey continuing from the Start Series, with the upcoming Build Series, where we will be focusing on the optimization and scaling of existing deployments to help your startups reach your target audiences.

Join us by checking out the video series on the Google Cloud Tech channel, and subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

Over the last decade, financial service organizations have been adopting a cloud-first mindset. According to InformationWeek, lower costs and enhanced scalability were the biggest drivers for cloud adoption in financial services, and cloud-native applications allow access to the latest technology and talent, enabling adopters to rebuild transaction processing systems capable of supporting very high volumes and low latency.

Both Neo4j and Google Cloud have been using relationship-based data representations since the beginning, and we’re dedicated to using this technology to help financial services customers drive business transformation. We are excited about the prospects of financial services (FinServ) cloud systems and believe that graph data in the cloud can help solve significant challenges in the industry.

Data Challenge #1: Risk Management and Compliance

First among the top concerns for any CIO moving to the cloud is risk management and compliance. Disconnected, uncontextualized, or stale data create opportunities for fraud and financial crimes to occur. The fact is when it comes to FinServ, the question is not “if” but rather how often an attack will occur.  Unfortunately, incidents have been trending upward over the last decade, and COVID has only exacerbated this reality. Financial crimes affect the bottom line both in the remediation of these crimes and in intangibles like brand value.  

Add to this the complexity of international banking, which makes “compliance” a moving target. Penalties due to noncompliance are a constant concern to any FinServ organization.

The tabular representation of information with a fixed number of columns that never change prevents a description of an ever changing world with changing characteristics. Relational databases are great if the world you describe does not move fast but have limitations when data structures are highly interlinked and not homogeneous.

Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud provides a foundation for creating dynamic, futureproof, scalable applications that adhere to the security standards and protocols today’s financial services organizations require to meet the challenges of finding and preventing bad actors. This also includes enterprise scalability; reaching over 1 Billion nodes and relationships to streamline queries and provide solutions that meet regulatory and privacy compliance across geographies. Neo4j has helped some organizations save billions of USD in fraud in the first year of deployment alone.  

What makes graph technology the best choice for fraud detection use cases is that the relationships between the data-points are as important as the data-points themselves. Let’s take as an example, one John Smith approaches a multi-national banking institution to manage the primary account for his new holding corporation.  

While no one has any record of John R Smith Holdings LLC, the bank’s application built on graph technology understands that there are several well-known entities owned by John Smith Holdings. The application also identifies several well-known board members who bank with this institution. Due to this relationship-driven approach, the bank now understands John R Smith is not “John Smith,” who previously attempted to open an account for his holding corporation, which had no information associated with it prior to two months ago.

Data Challenge #2 Manual Processes and Inefficiencies 

The ubiquity of the cloud offers an opportunity to deploy automation at unprecedented levels to tackle the errors and inefficiencies that manual processing allows to creep into processes. When data comes from disparate, perhaps legacy systems – which may have become siloed and “untouchable” over the years – further complexity arises. As an example, if someone in sales types “John Smith” into a CRM system not knowing that John R Smith is the spelling in the customer data master, it may result in two separate and potentially conflicting records. Being able to join those records together in a mastered view helps to solve this problem. In addition, low data quality equates to an increase in risk, costs, and implementation times for new systems. 

Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud provides automation and artificial intelligence (AI) that reduces manual processes and the errors that accompany them. In this graph architecture each node, which can represent a person, will have labels, relationships, and properties associated with it. This allows for the use of AI which can easily understand that John Smith in the CRM is the same John R Smith in the customer master. The information contained in Neo4j can be connected bi-directionally to ensure consistency across applications and data sources. 

One of the benefits of this approach is that linking information allows organizations to keep the full value of the data, rather than forcing the data into predetermined tabular representations, with the risk of losing valuable information and insights.

Data Challenge #3: Customer Engagement and Insight

Another significant concern is the high expectations today’s customers have for every interaction. End users are accustomed to predictable experiences on their digital devices, and FinServ apps are no exception. Added to this, the “Covid economy” has driven digital adoption significantly across demographics; even among customers who might traditionally have used in-person services. This also equates to increased expectations for personalized, predictable experiences with every digital interaction. We know that latency has always been a key consideration for financial trading, but a recent ComputerWeekly study showed that every financial organization should ensure their visible latency is at 10 milliseconds or less. Customers no longer accept their broadband is at fault.

Finally, blind spots in the customer journey often result in dissatisfaction, which ultimately leads to increased churn. Without gaining actionable insights from your customers, there is no room to innovate and iterate on what they are looking for in your products and services. And this translates to losing market share and competitive advantage.

The NoSQL architecture, specifically the dynamic schema and structure of Neo4j Aura gives you the ability to take charge of your data and make changes according to your development cycles or newer data models. This equates to faster builds, more comprehensive releases and a wider, richer data-set that can be contextualized and understood instantly. Graph technology is the logical choice for building a Customer 360 application. Under this approach organizations not only get valuable insight into the individual client’s behavior and patterns, but also those of their family, friends and colleagues. This allows for stronger personalization, targeted campaigns and successful execution, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and retention levels.

Graph Technology on Google Cloud

Neo4j is a recognized leader in graph database technology and the only fully integrated graph solution on Google Cloud, helping to fill a common need for Google Cloud customers. Both Neo4j and Google Cloud are invested in continuing to grow our partnership and mutual product direction.  

You can find and deploy the Neo4j graph database straight from the Google Cloud marketplace, whether you want to download the software for an on-premises deployment, use the virtual machine image, or use the hosted solution, Aura on Google Cloud, the graph database-as-a-service. In any deployment, you get the same enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and connectivity along with successful, repeatable use cases you can rely on to resolve your particular challenges and integrated billing. 

For a real-world example of how graph technology can optimize financial services, you can read our Case Study with fintech Current. Current, a leading U.S. financial technology platform with over three million members, used Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud to create a personalization engine based on client relationships. 

To learn more about Neo4j Aura on Google Cloud for FinServ organizations, register for our webinar on Thursday, December 16 with Jim Webber, Chief Scientist, CTO Field Ops at Neo4j and Antoine Larmanjat, Technical Director, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud. 

Click here to Register