At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.

We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.

Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.

Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice

We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs. 

AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing. 

Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.

Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.

Launching new Global Delivery Centers

Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.

The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.

In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.

Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint

In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich. 

These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation. 

Adding new leadership to enable customer success

Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.

Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.

Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.

You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.

Editor’s note: Meet Gareth Walkom, an entrepreneur dedicated to helping others with speech disorders.

Turning life experience into innovation

Did you know that 3% of Americans have a speech disorder, while 1% of the world’s population have a stutter? Just getting what they need in everyday interactions can be stressful, which intensifies when the stakes are raised during job interviews, presentations, public speaking, and other activities. As a result, some people with speech disorders may avoid conversations and relationships, and risk being denied jobs because of a difference in how they speak.

As a person who stutters, I know firsthand the ableism that people with a speech disorder can encounter in wanting to use their voice in a judgemental world: the frustration of sometimes not being able to say exactly what you want to say and therefore speaking less in speaking situations. And the educational and career opportunities are lost when doors remain closed to us, especially when employers advertise their jobs as requiring someone who speaks the language ‘fluently’.

While researchers still don’t definitively know what causes stuttering, emerging technologies are giving us new and promising pathways for improving the quality of life of people with speech disorders. 

That’s why after years of researching and testing potential therapeutic uses of virtual reality, and with the support of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, I founded withVR on International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22) in 2020. The mission of withVR is to prepare people with speech disorders for real-life speaking situations by utilizing the power of virtual reality. 

Working through it

One of the difficulties in adapting to any disability is the opportunity to work through it in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. withVR provides a virtual space for individuals, in collaboration with their speech therapists, to practice real-world speaking scenarios in safe, controlled environments. 

Imagine being able to raise your hand in class and give your opinion without hesitation, ordering the meal you want rather than something that’s easier to say, or sit across the table from an avatar of an employer and explain why you are the right person for your dream job. Then further customize the speaking situation and its surroundings to challenge yourself and be ready for anything. That’s what withVR offers individuals and their speech therapists.

Making VR come to life

To bring the withVR vision to life, we are developing applications using the Unity game engine on Google Cloud with integrated Firebase services including authentication, web hosting, storage, and database. It’s a powerful combination that’s enabled us to build industrial-strength applications that we’ve rapidly deployed on a global basis. Today we are already collaborating with 80+ labs, clinics, and hospitals in more than 20 different countries worldwide.

These organizations help us to test and refine a virtual reality application to support people in achieving their speech goals and build comfort through immersive VR experiences using easily available viewers like Google Cardboard. 

The application works in conjunction with a web app through which speech therapists configure customized VR scenarios for their patients to use. As no real-life speaking situation is ever exactly the same, customization of VR scenarios is vital. They can construct different scenes, create and script avatars, and through the Google Text-to-Speech API can even choose from hundreds of different voices in a variety of languages. This gives them the flexibility to create many unique speaking situations for their clients no matter where they are in the world.

Progress from the practice sessions is presented through a dashboard that provides therapists with a tool to monitor their clients’ progress and provide feedback and encouragement.

No shortage of support

My founder’s journey has been supported by many passionate people. The Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental in helping us come so far in the first year, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. There are many capabilities in Firebase and Google Cloud that we have yet to explore, and through the startup program I now have a Google Mentor who can help guide that exploration. 

We also joined the 2Gether-International (2GI) Tech Cohort, which is supported by Google for Startups and is built for and run by entrepreneurs with disabilities. At the end of the 10-week cohort, we finished with a pitch competition, where I was one of six selected founders to pitch in just three minutes. I was very fortunate to win the Best Overall Pitch Award, gaining 10,000 USD in seed funding. This award not only highlights the potential of withVR, but also showcases that anyone can pitch their idea in a short amount of time no matter their difference. 

Working with 2GI also gave me the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other founders who have disabilities. It’s a safe space where I don’t have to explain my everyday challenges and can focus on the all-important task of advancing the vision of withVR, while seeing how others use technology in their domain. 

Building on a strong foundation

I’m amazed to look back and see what we’ve accomplished in just one year and humbled by the thousands of lives we’ve touched. Every day we receive valuable real-life feedback from people in the field—both clinicians and those with speech differences who benefit from VR therapy. That knowledge tells us that we are heading in the right direction and opening our eyes to new possibilities for where to take withVR. And inspiring us to keep moving ahead.

If you’d like to participate in testing or if you are speech therapist or researcher, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to show you how you can contribute to a world where anyone with a speech disorder can truly use their voice in any situation. If you’d like to take part, contact us at hello@withvr.app.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

As an IT leader, you’re asked to do it all: innovate and optimize your tech stack for business outcomes — all while being secure and compliant. It takes heroic efforts to achieve innovation and progress while also tightening budgets and teams. This is why many of you are considering migrating applications to Google Cloud, for benefits like scalability and flexibility, security and compliance, disaster recovery and business continuity, and cutting-edge technologies at lower costs.

To help you do this, we suggest using Google Cloud’s Migrate to Virtual Machines – part of Migration Center. This managed cloud service lets you lift and shift workloads at scale to Google Cloud Compute Engine with minimal changes and risk.

And recently, we rolled out our latest release which introduces support for workload migration from AWS to Google Compute Engine. With this addition, you can now migrate both your on-prem and AWS workloads at scale. This means centralized management for your end to end workload migration journey from both sources via Cloud Console or APIs. 

Simple and easy migrations from AWS and VMware sources to Google Cloud

Migration of AWS EC2 instances directly to Google Compute Engine using Migrate to Virtual Machines follows a well established and easy journey, which means a minimal learning curve for users who are already migrating workloads from VMware. Workload migration is agent-less, which means you do not need to access or alter workloads as a prerequisite for migration, allowing you to execute zero-touch migrations. Migrate instance data with no interruptions to the running workload at the source for a fast cutover to Google Cloud. In addition, our end-to-end cloud console interface surfaces your AWS EC2 inventory, migrations, and groups so you can execute migrations without ever leaving the cloud console interface. 

Large-scale migrations 

Completing a large-scale migration project in a timely manner calls for careful planning and streamlined migration sprints. The Migrate to Virtual Machines’ Groups construct enables you to group source VMs together in the planning phase. When it’s time to execute the planned migration, VM Groups let you execute migration operations on a group level, or on a subset of the group, streamlining the process at scale.

Minimal downtime and risk

Application uptime is key to keeping your business running. Every migration with this latest release of the service periodically replicates data from the source workload to the destination without manual steps or interruptions to the running workload, minimizing workload downtime and enabling fast cutover to Google Cloud. You can also launch non-disruptive migration tests — referred to as test-clones — to help you validate that these workloads will work properly in the cloud before cutting over. This helps avoid issues that might have otherwise been costly or disruptive to your business. 

How the service works

Migrations simply work, at scale, in a managed service fashion. With Migrate to Virtual Machines, there’s no requirement to provision or manage migration-specific resources in the cloud. The service uses replication-based migration technology to lift and shift workloads from source environments to Google Cloud. The Migrate Connection replicates source VM disk snapshots in the background with no interruption to the source workload. Replicated data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and when you instantiate a migrating VM using a test-clone or cut-over, the service seamlessly adapts your source VM operating system to boot and run natively in the cloud — including configuring network settings and deploying Google Cloud guest packages. 

The migration journey of an EC2 instance — or VMware VM — to Google Cloud is comprised of the following steps:

1. Onboarding a source VM for migration: Onboard one or more VMs for migration from the source environment fleet.

2. Configure landing zone target: You can migrate an instance to any Google Cloud project in your environment and update landing zone details at any time before executing a test-clone or cutover.

3. Initiate VM data replication of source workload: Migrate to Virtual Machines periodically replicates instance disks to the cloud with no interruption to the source instance. You can control replication frequently and pause or resume at any point in time. 

4. Test migrating instance: Test-clone creates a copy of your source instance in the defined landing zone to validate the migrating instance in the cloud before executing a cut-over. You can repeat the test-clone multiple times to multiple landing zones for thorough validation

5. Cutover migrating instance: Cutover operation shuts down your source instance and then performs the short final sync to Google Cloud. Migrated VM is instantiated in the target landing zone.

Getting started with Migrate to Virtual Machines 

It’s quick and easy to start migrating your AWS EC2 instances and on-premises VMs today:

1. Enable the vmmigration API in a Google Cloud project 
2. Create an AWS source in your environment
3. Onboard and initiate replication of instance data from source 
4. Set migrating instance target details. 
5. Perform non-disruptive tests of your migrating instance using test-clone
6. Cutover your instance to the cloud with minimal down time

You can also visit our website to learn more about Migrate to Virtual Machines. If you know you have to migrate in 2023 but aren’t sure how to get started, you can sign up for a free discovery and assessment of your current IT landscape so we can help craft the ideal migration plan for you and your business.