GCP – Helping European businesses grow and digitally transform in the cloud

As we welcome thousands of customers, partners, business leaders and developers to Google Cloud Next OnAir EMEA, our five-week virtual event, I want to take a moment to reflect on how inspiring it’s been to see organizations around the world pivoting and adapting to unprecedented circumstances. It’s why we’ve reimagined our event and taken it online to best serve our customers and partners, in the same spirit as our global Google Cloud Next OnAir conference. Throughout the next five weeks, Next OnAir EMEA will bring you key announcements, product enhancements, and best practices tailored specifically for organizations across Europe, Middle East and Africa. 

As with almost every aspect of our lives, things are a little different this year. The ongoing pandemic has changed the course of business in 2020, and likely the world in the long term. At Google Cloud, we have seen first-hand how important it is to keep our cloud up and running – enabling remote collaboration and scaling to meet changing customer demands. We continue to help businesses and their employees, as well as governments and schools, collaborate and learn during these challenging times. 

Growing with our EMEA customers and partners

It’s been a big year for us in EMEA. We announced new cloud regions in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Our Dunant cable has landed, crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to the French Atlantic coast, and we announced a new subsea cable, Grace Hopper, that will connect the U.S. to the U.K. and Spain. All these projects will provide further capacity and resilience to our network, so we can better serve customers who are taking advantage of all our Google Cloud solutions.

We are proud of our continuing work with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Carrefour, Lloyds Banking Group, Lufthansa Group, Renault, Telecom Italia and Telefonica, to name a few. And we’re exploring new opportunities as we partner with major industry players such as Deutsche Bank and Orange. 

Today, we’re also announcing our new collaboration with Reckitt Benckiser to drive stronger customer engagement as the consumer health, hygiene and nutrition company embarks on wide-scale digital transformation. 

We’re also excited about the findings of a new IDC study which shows Google Cloud’s ecosystem is thriving, growing and driving significant economic benefit for our partners in EMEA. According to IDC, the Google Cloud partner opportunity in Western Europe will increase more than 3.7 times by 2025. In addition, IDC expects Google Cloud partners to generate $5.49 USD in revenue for every $1 of Google Cloud products sold, increasing to $7.74 by 2025.

To support our growing customer and partner base within the region, we’ve also bolstered our EMEA regional senior leadership team, welcoming Laurence Lafont as vice president for EMEA Industries (exclusive of France), Pip White as the new managing director of the U.K. and Ireland, Daniel Holz as vice president of the DACH and Northern region, and Samuel Bonamigo as the vice president for Southern Europe. With these new leaders on board, we’re strengthening our focus on our customers’ success.

Building for the future, sustainably

While we continue to grow, our commitment to do so in a sustainable manner remains unchanged. Earlier this month, Google announced that we set our most ambitious energy goal yet: to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030. This means we’re aiming to always have our data centers supplied with carbon-free energy, and are the first cloud provider to make this kind of commitment. 

As we learn, we’ll help develop useful tools to empower others to follow suit. For example, we’re developing tools to help our customers measure the impact of migrating to Google Cloud, report on their emissions, and reduce them. We’re also building the Industrial Adaptive Controls platform in collaboration with DeepMind, which provides AI control of cooling systems in commercial and industrial facilities. 

In addition, we’ve been collaborating with our partners and customers on a wide range of sustainability initiatives. This includes working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and fashion brands, like Stella McCartney, to create an environmental data platform that helps create a more sustainable supply chain for the fashion industry. Additionally, we’re working with Unilever to leverage AI on satellite imagery to improve detection of deforestation, bringing a new standard to supply chain monitoring.

Committed to helping EMEA businesses 

At Google Cloud, we are committed to being a trusted partner to businesses of all sizes and industries across EMEA, and Google Next OnAir EMEA is just one of the ways we are investing locally. Over the course of the next five weeks, we hope you’ll join us as we help organizations grow and innovate for the future through digital transformation.

Find out more about the event here.