Until recently, most organizations’ shift to cloud computing was primarily focused on operational efficiency – to optimize IT infrastructure costs and to achieve scale. However, cloud computing is prominent in more and more conversations as companies are re-imagining their businesses and focusing on digital initiatives.

Google Cloud, a Burwood Group partner, was built with an understanding of both the business need to move fast and transform, and the IT need to modernize at different speeds. We sat down with Dan Speck, VP of Technology R&D, at Burwood Group, to learn more about the partnership.

Cloud computing is showing up in more and more digital initiatives. What is the value of Google Cloud for organizations looking for digital transformation?  

Many of our clients are increasingly looking to innovate and digitize their businesses. In the same vein, we’re seeing more initiatives to improve customer experience by building new platforms and products. There were three main factors that drove our partnership with Google Cloud. First, what we saw in Google Cloud was their strength in artificial intelligence and machine learning. For our customers this means being able to embed intelligence into their customer service experience and receive better insight into customer behavior and business data. This was one of the main differentiators of Google Cloud.

Looking ahead, our perspective is that organizations will be using not one, but multiple clouds. Google Cloud also really embraces the multi-cloud strategy. They have contributed a lot to open source. Organizations are not locked in when they move to Google Cloud. This aligns with our goal to ensure that Burwood customers never get locked into a particular cloud solution.

Lastly, we’re big fans of what Google Cloud is doing around security. They are providing a secure platform and continuing to add new capabilities to secure applications, data, and infrastructure.

Let’s talk more about security. Can you tell us how Google Cloud meets the increased demand for secure cloud capabilities?

Cloud security is high on the list of priorities for technology leaders who are planning migrations or have already moved to the cloud. What we have found with Google Cloud is that security is really built in to things like how you provision and deploy securely, how you manage container security, application security, and how you secure data. They have really thought through how a developer and/or end-user of their platform is going to leverage the Cloud. They have built in several security components that provide a secure way to authenticate and perform key management tasks, without slowing developers down. Google Cloud is continuously innovating and adding new security products and features every month.

Google Cloud has several industry leading products in each product category, are there any that Burwood is focusing in on?

Burwood is currently focused on four primary areas of the Google Cloud offering. The first is traditional infrastructure, for instance migrating to the cloud, compute, storage, and networking from customers’ data centers to the cloud. We’re also leveraging containers and Google’s Kubernetes service. Another priority area is data and analytics through AI, machine learning, and Google’s BigQuery service. Lastly we’re helping customers integrate that machine learning and AI into their customer service processes, such as, chat bots and contact centers strategies.

Has Burwood Group leveraged Google Cloud to support its own services?

We have such confidence in Google’s solution that Burwood actually migrated our own managed services over to Google Cloud. Our portal is moved over to containers, making it easy for our developers to use and integrate various data capabilities. The great thing is, we can manage Google Cloud with the team we currently have in place. It has allowed us to scale out the solution and be high-performing, globally. It has also opened up new opportunities for us as we are working on incorporating machine learning in our customer experience. In addition, Google Cloud gives us automated pricing recommendations. One recommendation led us to move to a smaller instance to save money and we were able to do so very quickly. Lastly, it integrates very well with Burwood’s multi-cloud orchestration platform.

What are some other notable Google Cloud use cases?

A few of the use cases we’ve been working on with clients on are backup and disaster recovery. Google Cloud provides a nice solution where customers can cost-effectively store long-term archiving data and backups.

There is also a strong use case around data intelligence and helping organizations incorporate machine learning into their overall applications and/or data pipelines so they can enrich the information that they’re capturing. For example, natural language processing to examine the sentiment of text or classifying text so that it makes it easier to search for what you’re looking for or enrich the overall analytics.

Customers are also able to use machine learning to automate. For example, in the transcription and translation of audio files and classification of images. It enables them to take processes that may have been done manually in a time intensive process in past and use machine learning to automation and save time.

With Google Cloud comes the Google DNA and perhaps a different kind of partnering model. What is unique about Burwood’s partnership with Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is extremely focused on building long-term customer relationships, which aligns very closely with Burwood’s own business philosophy and approach. They are not trying to pressure organizations, but strive to meet customers where they are and help them grow.

As a partner, they provide many great resources to help execute proof of concepts, as well as resources to help scale out capabilities on our team. Because we share the same perspective around multi-cloud security, helping our customers adopt technology, also both have a strong relationship with Cisco, it’s been absolutely great working with them in the field. We’ve experienced the benefits of the platform first-hand. We are excited to continue leveraging Google Cloud to help our customers solve problems and enable new business capabilities.

May 31, 2018