Welcome to a new way of exploring Google Cloud products. Finding your favorite products and discovering new ones requires a user interface that’s easy-to-use, clear, informative, and delightful. Google Cloud users have primarily used our side menu to navigate, but with almost one hundred products and growing, it’s safe to say our product list has outgrown the side menu. Over time, we have listened long and hard to feedback from Google Cloud users, who have highlighted challenges navigating the console to explore our products. We’ve heard over and over that it’s difficult and time consuming to scroll through the long list of products and remember what each one offers. 

That’s why we created a new All products page to help you easily navigate to your favorite Google Cloud products. This page showcases all of the Google Cloud products as well as our key partner products in one, easy-to-navigate place. With one click, you can discover the right product that is right for your solution.

Explore all Google Cloud products

The page is organized into different categories, including Management (ie. IAM, Billing), Compute, Storage, Operations, Security, CI/CD, Artificial Intelligence, Support, and more. Quickly jump to the category of interest through the panel on the left, or you can scroll the entire page. Then you can click each product name to navigate directly to the product homepage. Each product listing also includes a short and long description so you can quickly understand what a product does and whether it fits your needs. This lets you compare categories at-a-glance, saving you the hassle of digging up product overviews elsewhere. 

Under each product, you’ll also find a link to documentation and Quickstarts so you can understand it in more depth and try it out right away, removing the extra step of navigating to documentation in another tab.

Customize your navigation

To make navigation even easier, you can pin products directly from the All products page, and they will show up at the top of your side menu. You can also customize your navigation by reordering your pins in the side menu. That way, you can quickly access your most-used products directly from the side menu instead of scrolling through the panel or the All products page. 

Save time and get more done faster

With the new All products page you can save time scrolling and cut straight to the good stuff – finding your products, discovering new ones, learning, and getting hands on. Try it out for yourself by heading to the Google Cloud Console. Click the side panel and click “View All products,” or on the home dashboard you’ll see a call out to try out the All products page.

If you have any feedback about this new experience, I want to hear! Reach out to me on Twitter at @stephr_wong or on Linkedin at stephrwong.

Today we’re hosting our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit, a digital event dedicated to helping leading retailers and brands digitally transform their business. For me, this is a personally exciting moment, as I see tremendous opportunities for those companies that choose to focus on their customers and leverage technology to elevate experiences.

Our event includes breakout sessions to help retailers and brands become customer centric, embrace the digital moment and transform their operations. Some of my favorite sessions include: 

• Why Search Abandonment is the metric that matters, highlighting Retail Search, and featuring a conversation with Macy’s
• Driving Consumer Closeness in a Privacy-Centric World, discussing how retailers and brands can create a successful first party data strategy, featuring a conversation with P&G
• The Modern Store: 7 Innovation Hotspots, sharing how retailers and brands can approach store transformation to unlock the most value from technology, featuring a conversation with The Home Depot.   

I’ll be speaking in our Retail Spotlight session, discussing the current retail landscape and our industry approach, followed by conversations with Albert Bertilsson, Head of Engineering – Edge at IKEA Retail (Indga Group) and Neelima Sharma, Senior Vice President, Technology Ecommerce, Marketing and Merchandising at Lowe’s. 

Let me share a bit more about the topics we’ll discuss in that session.

In retail specifically, digital-first shopping journeys are blurring the lines between the physical and digital brand experience. Shoppers want to know what’s available before they visit your stores, and they expect fulfillment options like curbside pickup. We see this when tracking trends for interest in curbside pickup or in-stock items.

This has left many retailers asking how they can get smarter with their data, tackle the $300 billion dollar problem of “search abandonment,” move faster to create new customer experiences, and do a better job of connecting their employees and customers – with confidence.

Our team has been spending time thinking about how we can rise and succeed in this new era together. We continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to our retail customers around the world. And we’re focused on ways we can bring the best of what Google has to offer through cloud integrations.

Our goal is to help retailers become customer-centric and data-driven, capture digital and omni-channel revenue growth, create the modern store and drive operational improvement.

Let’s dig into each of these strategic pillars in a bit more detail. 

Become customer centric and data driven

Customers today expect experiences that are timely, targeted, and tailored for them and their needs, and reject experiences that can’t deliver these features. Data modeling, legacy technology, and siloed systems often prevent retailers from providing that level of personalized experience. 

At Google Cloud, we work with global retailers and our ecosystem partners to activate and bring value from first-party data, particularly in the field of customer data platforms (CDPs). This includes integrations from Google Cloud, such as our business intelligence platform Looker and other popular platforms to power one source of customer data through the organization. We also help retailers modernize their data warehouse with Looker for gathering business intelligence across their organization. This is important not just for consumer data, but inventory, supply chain, and store operations as well. 

Capture Digital and Omnichannel Growth 

We power some of the largest e-commerce sites in the world, helping them scale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday events. While scale is critically important, it’s also important to consider the quality of the online experience. How do your customers find products? How can you help deliver seamless online and omnichannel experiences? 

To help, we’re building product discovery solutions that bring together the best of our technologies that help retailers drive engagement with their consumers. Retail Search, for example, gives retailers the ability to provide Google-quality search on their own digital properties – search that is customizable for their unique business needs and built upon Google’s advanced understanding of user intent & context. 

The imperative is clear. Recent research found that retailers lose more than $300 billion to search abandonment — when purchase intent is not converted into a sale due to bad search results — every year in the US alone. 

Today, we announced that Retail Search is available to a larger set of retailers. If you are interested in learning more about Retail Search you can contact your sales representative for additional details.

Create the modern store  

With the rise of buying trends like curbside pickup and proximity-based search, our Google Maps Platform team is working on new products and features to help raise inventory awareness for your shoppers. We want to help you make it easier for them to understand what’s available to purchase in their channel of choice.

With Product Locator, each product page connects customers with information they need for local pickup and delivery options. This ensures customers are aware of pickup and delivery options throughout the buying journey—not just checkout. 

Awareness of local inventory can boost a wide range of key metrics for your business. Shopify recently shared that shoppers who opt for local pickup over delivery had a +13% higher conversion rate and that 45% of local pickup customers make an additional purchase upon arrival.

This is just one quick example of how our Google Maps Platform team can improve experiences for your shoppers.

Operational improvement

It can be challenging to operate in a world and at a time when consumer behavior and supply chains are so disrupted and volatile, and where entire retail teams had to go remote during the pandemic and beyond. 

We’re working with retailers to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve consumer experience through chat bots or conversational commerce that solves problems for customers from anywhere. You can learn more about these offerings in our Conversational Commerce with Google breakout session, featuring Albertsons.

As the need for digital transformation continues to accelerate, Google Cloud is helping retailers stay ahead of the curve with solutions for digital and omnichannel growth, data-driven and customer-focused experiences, and operational improvement. For every era of cloud technologies, from the past into the future, Google Cloud is committed to providing solutions to retailers.

Read more about our solutions for retail, and check out additional sessions, including the CPG Industry Spotlight Session How To Grow Brands in Times of Rapid Change – Featuring L’Oréal at our Retail & Consumer Goods Summit.

In September 2001, the first-ever German Google employee switched on their computer in Hamburg. Since then, we’ve grown to more than 2,500 employees in four offices across Germany. Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich have long been our home, and we continue to invest in the growth of the local economy.

Today, 20 years after the start of “Google Germany”, we are pleased to present one of our most important investment programs to date in this country. With the expansion of our Cloud Region in Frankfurt in a new Google-owned Hanau facility, a new Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg, and a broad investment plan in renewable energy, our commitment is clear: Google is investing in Germany’s potential and supporting the transition to a digital and sustainable economy. Between now (2021) and 2030, this investment in digital infrastructure and clean energy will total approximately 1 billion euros.

Expanding our Frankfurt cloud region to support growing demand from German businesses and organizations

In Hanau, only 20 kilometers from the DE-CIX Internet hub in Frankfurt, Google is proud to be nearing completion of an additional cloud facility that will be fully operational in 2022. This expansion of our existing Frankfurt Google Cloud region will serve the growing demand for Google Cloud services in Germany.

The 4-story building is ​​10,000 square meters and was sustainably constructed with energy efficient infrastructure and adherence to our circular economy model for waste. The symbolic handover of the keys from developer NDC-Garbe, together with local government officials, took place on site yesterday. 

A new cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg

In addition to the Hanau expansion of our Google Cloud region in Frankfurt, we are pleased to announce that a new Google Cloud region will be located in Berlin-Brandenburg, further extending our ability to meet growing demand for cloud services in the country. When open, this will be our second Google Cloud region in Germany, providing enterprise customers with faster access to secure infrastructure, smart analytics tools and an open platform. Designed and dedicated to providing enterprise services and products for Google Cloud customers of all sizes and industries in Germany, the Berlin-Brandenburg region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions and join the existing network of 27 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network. 

One of the cleanest clouds in the industry becomes even cleaner

Since 2017, Google has matched 100% of our global, annual electricity use with renewable energy. Last year, we set out to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere and at all times by 2030, enabling us to offer cloud customers one of the cleanest clouds in the industry, while helping Europe achieve its ambitious climate goals.

Today, we’re excited to announce that ENGIE Deutschland has been selected as Google’s carbon-free energy supplier in Germany. Under the terms of the agreement, ENGIE will assemble and develop, on Google’s behalf, a 140 megawatt (MW) carbon-free energy portfolio in Germany that has the ability to flex and grow with us as our needs change. This includes a new 39MW solar Photovoltaic system, and 22 wind parks in five federal states that will see their lives extended so they continue to produce electricity instead of being dismantled. This portfolio will ensure that the energy delivered to Google’s German facilities will be nearly 80% carbon-free by 2022 when measured on an hourly basis. This is a first but important step on Google’s journey to reach our goal of full electricity decarbonization by 2030. 

This is the first energy supply of its kind in Europe, with a focus on sourcing carbon-free energy for every hour of Google’s operations. Not only will this new agreement draw the roadmap for the industry and more 24/7 carbon-free energy contracts in Europe, but it provides our cloud customers with two more regions where they can lower their carbon footprint. And importantly, by working with our energy suppliers to transform how clean energy is delivered to customers, Google is supporting the broader decarbonization of the German electricity grid.

What customers and partners are saying

As companies continue to grapple with changing customer demands, technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions in Germany and around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg and the expansion of our Google Cloud region in Hanau will help our customers — such as BMG, Delivery Hero, and Deutsche Bank — adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working. 

“We are very pleased about the symbolic handover of the keys to the building here in Hanau to Google Cloud,” said Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky. “With Google, we have a strong partner at our side who is supporting us in setting up Hanau’s economic future, both digitally and sustainably. The data center facility of Google Cloud embodies this transformation: We bring the cloud to us in Hanau and thus support the digital transformation of companies and public authorities. Not only in our city and Hesse, but throughout Germany and Europe. The new building meets high sustainability standards and the clean energy initiative presented today by Google is in line with our aspirations for sustainable digitalization.”

“Sustainability is a central pillar of Deutsche Bank’s strategy and we have made strong public commitments to be part of the solution,” said Bernd Leukert, Chief Technology, Data and Innovation Officer and Member of the Management Board at Deutsche Bank. “We welcome the new Google Cloud region in Germany, which will enable us to deliver additional resilience and performance for our German client base.”

Ralf Bernhard, Senior Originator Renewables, ENGIE, said: “ENGIE is excited to collaborate with Google based on a first-of-a-kind agreement which will support the company with its sustainability goals and ambitious carbon-free energy target. Thanks to our expertise in energy and risk management, we can seamlessly integrate renewable energy from existing plants and develop new assets to design a tailor made product that meets Google’s needs and plans to go even greener.”

20 years since Google first touched down in Germany, our commitment to helping Germany continue to lead in technical innovation is stronger than ever. We are excited to continue working with our partners in Hesse, Berlin and Brandenburg and across Germany to advance infrastructure and clean energy projects, help accelerate digital transformation, and secure a sustainable future for German and European companies and organizations.