Google Cloud Summit London 2024 - GFT recognised as Highly Commended for UKI Services Partner of the Year
Like last year, tickets for partners and customers were limited due to the size and the need to protect the historic venue. It was still fantastic to be there amongst an enthusiastic crowd of Googlers, partners, clients, and those interested in all things Google Cloud.
Both Alex Selwood (UK Partnerships Director) and myself (Scott Holman - UK Head of Cloud) attended the event and met with a few of GFT’s strategic partners Palo Alto, Confluent and Harness, and discussed how their products can significantly benefit businesses with their workloads in Google Cloud.
We were proud that GFT was recognised as Highly Commended for UKI Services Partner of the Year for key projects within several GFT FSI customers in capital markets, retail banking and insurance. This success acknowledges GFT as an extremely competent services partner for Google Cloud as we continue to deliver fantastic results for our clients!
Focus on AI
It will surprise no one that AI was a big focus for the event. Google announced several enhancements to its existing data and AI services, all of which aligns with GFT’s current and future goals. For more information, see the new GFT AI.DA Marketplace.
Each day of the two-day event had a different focus with content that appealed to specific personas within a business.
Day 1 – Business transformation: The focus was on business transformation and designed for IT decision makers and senior business leaders. Google showcased its 2024 client and market successes and its 2025 vision, which, of course, has enterprise grade GenAI, data modernisation and security at its heart.
Day 2 – Innovator hive: The focus for day 2 was innovation and had more technical tracks and talks designed for developers, engineers and practitioners. There were many technical ‘deep dives’ into new products and services, the majority of which intertwined AI to further enhance the practical use cases of the services.
Digital and data sovereignty commitment
Google Cloud also announced several new product updates to enhance its data platform and improve AI offerings.
The majority of GFT customers operate within the financial services industry and will be pleased to note that Google announced its continued commitment to data sovereignty by giving UK customers the option to process Gemini 1.5 Flash AI workloads entirely within the borders of the UK. This builds upon the announcement last year that gave UK customers the choice to store their AI data at rest within the UK, which will make FSI compliance teams more comfortable with the use of GenAI for customer applications. This includes data stored for generative AI on Vertex AI, Codey and Imagen models, as well as text embeddings and multimodal embeddings’ APIs.
Google Cloud BigQuery benefits from greater integration with Vertex AI
Google Cloud BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse service, had several enhancements announced at the Cloud Summit. Perhaps of most significance is the news of Gemini in BigQuery that integrates Gemini models with BigQuery, allowing the use of natural language prompts to prepare and analyse data to generate greater insights.
As a result of the new Gemini in BigQuery integration, BigQuery Dataframes has a new synthetic data generation feature that makes it easier to run and train models within the BigQuery service.
BigQuery catalog semantic search, currently in preview, adds a natural language search feature to enhance data discovery.
Managed BigQuery workflows provide data engineers with a platform to build data pipelines, and the new BigQuery Engine for Apache Flink service makes it easier to migrate existing streaming workloads to Google Cloud without having to rewrite code of reply on third part services. When combined with the new Google Managed Service for Apache Kafka, it is much easier to migrate streaming workloads to Google Cloud. Another benefit of the new service is that it is fully serverless, which reduces the operational overhead of managing the supporting infrastructure.
The unified data catalog enables better organisation and management of data and metadata, which allows for easier discovery and use.
GFT customers preparing their applications to be EU DORA compliant can now use the new BigQuery cross-region disaster recovery and multi-factor authentication to improve business continuity, operational resilience and data protection.
Gemini integration with other Google Cloud services
Gemini in Looker adds a natural language interface that allows for conversational searching and analytics of data that enables businesses to gain greater business insights faster and with greater ease.
Google also announced its new Gemini Code Assist Enterprise service. The enterprise grade, AI-powered coding and development assistant comes with enhanced governance and security features. The new service allows for code customisation so that code suggestions are based on a business’s best practices and internal libraries, which generates code suggestions that are more accurate and relevant.
Finally, Google announced the availability of NVIDIA NIM on GKE that allows for the deployment of NIM microservices directly into GKE. NIM is a component of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise service and can be used to accelerate the deployment of foundation models on GKE.
We were also reminded of Google Cloud’s $1 billion investment in a new UK data centre in Waltham Cross that reinforces its commitment to the UK and AI innovation.
Discover more about GFT and our Google Cloud partnership here.
