Cloud

This week we hosted Google Cloud Next in San Francisco! It was great to be back together in-person with the Google Cloud community and ecosystem. Highlights included the opening keynote, packed with breakthrough product announcements and customer stories, which you can also watch in just 13 minutes.  Also check out the fun and inspirational developer keynote, complete with an original song and cool demos. We hosted 250+ educational breakout sessions, and thousands of developers were buzzing around our Innovators Hive. On top of that, we loved having partners integrated throughout Next, from the show floor to the sessions, to the evening parties throughout the week.

Generative AI was a big focus throughout, particularly the many new offerings across Vertex AI and Duet AI, highlighting all the new ways to cloud.

Too much happened this week to share it all here, but we’ve pulled together a summary of all of the announcements so you can feel like you were there. Read on for the complete list of 161 (!) announcements. 

Data and AI Cloud

AI platforms and tools

1. Duet AI in Google Cloud is now in preview with new capabilities, and general availability coming later this year.

2. Vertex AI Search and Conversation, formerly Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder and Conversational AI on Generative AI App Builder, are both generally available to make it fast and easy to build generative chatbots and custom search engines.

3. New multi-turn search in Vertex AI Search supports follow-up questions without starting the interaction over. 

In addition, we built out the Vertex AI platform:

4. We added new models to Vertex AI Model Garden including Meta’s Llama 2 and Code Llama and Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon LLM, and pre-announced Anthropic’s Claude 2. 

5. The PaLM 2 foundation model now supports 38 languages, and 32,000-token context windows that make it possible to process long documents in prompts.

6. The Codey chat and code generation model offers up to a 25% quality improvement in major supported languages for code generation and code chat. 

7. The Imagen image generation model features improved visual appeal, image editing, captioning, a new tuning feature to align images to guidelines with 10 or fewer samples, and visual questions and answering, as well as digital watermarking functionality powered by Google DeepMind SynthID. 

8. Adapter tuning in Vertex AI is generally available for PaLM 2 for text.

9. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is now in public preview. 

10. New Vertex AI Extensions let models take actions and retrieve specific information in real time and act on behalf of users across Google and third-party applications like Datastax, MongoDB and Redis.

11. New Vertex AI data connectors help ingest data from enterprise and third-party applications like Salesforce, Confluence, and JIRA.

12. Grounding in Vertex AI roots generative outputs in your enterprise data, to increase confidence in your generative AI search and conversational applications. 

13. Vertex AI now supports Ray, an open-source unified compute framework to scale AI and Python workloads. 

14. We announced Colab Enterprise, a managed service in public preview that combines the ease-of-use of Google’s Colab notebooks with enterprise-level security and compliance support capabilities. 

15. Next month, we’ll make Med-PaLM 2, our medically-tuned version of PaLM 2, available as a preview to more customersin the healthcare and life sciences industry.

And to enhance MLOps for generative AI, we announced:

16. Automatic Metrics in Vertex AI lets you evaluate a model based on a defined task and “ground truth” dataset.

17. Automatic Side by Side in Vertex AI uses a large model to evaluate the output of multiple models being tested, helping to augment human evaluation at scale. 

18. A new generation of Vertex AI Feature Store, now built on BigQuery, helps you avoid data duplication and preserve data access policies. 

Data analytics

We announced a wealth of features across our data analytics offerings:

19. Duet AI is in preview across a variety of products in the data analytics portfolio such as Looker, BigQuery, and Dataplex. 

20. BigQuery Studio, in preview, is a single interface for data engineering, analytics, and predictive analysis to simplify end-to-end data workflows.

21. We announced enhanced support for open source formats like Hudi and Delta Lake within BigLake, and added performance acceleration for Apache Iceberg. 

22. BigLake can now be your single lakehouse, with cross-cloud materialized views and cross-cloud joins in BigQuery Omni.

23. Spark integration on Google Distributed Cloud extends the power of fast analytical query processings to on-premises to support data residency requirements. 

24. New governance capabilities in Dataplex for data lineage, quality, and metadata management help users understand what data to analyze, and train ML models on trusted data sources to help improve accuracy. 

25. BigQuery data clean rooms can help you understand your Google and YouTube campaign performance.

26. Now you can access Vertex AI foundation models, including PaLM 2, directly from BigQuery. 

27. New model inference in BigQuery lets you run model inferences across formats like TensorFlow, ONNX, and XGBoost, and new capabilities for real-time inference can identify patterns and automatically generate alerts. 

28. For model tuning, we added vector and semantic search in BigQuery. 

29. You can automatically synchronize vector embeddings in BigQuery with Vertex AI Feature Store for model grounding. 

30. Now you can access thousands of datasets from hundreds of providers including Acxiom, Bloomberg, Equifax, Nielsen, and Zoominfo directly in BigQuery. 

Databases

Transactional and operational databases are the lifeblood of the organization. 

31. AlloyDB AI is available in preview via downloadable AlloyDB Omni to help you build enterprise gen AI applications everywhere. 

32. AlloyDB Omni, the downloadable edition that runs on Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, on premises, and on your laptop, is moving from technology preview to public preview. 

33. Duet AI in Database Migration Service provides AI-assisted code conversion to automate the last mile conversion of Oracle database code to PostgreSQL. Sign up for the preview.

34. Duet AI in Cloud Spanner is in preview to help with generating code to structure, modify, or query your data using natural language. 

35. Support for Oracle in Database Migration Service with Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL as the target is now GA.

36. Cloud Spanner Data Boost, now GA, lets you to analyze your Spanner data via services such as BigQuery, Spark on Dataproc, or Dataflow with virtually no impact on your transactional workloads.

37. Support for auto-generated keys in Cloud Spanner allows schema authors to push down critical identity logic into the database. 

38. A new BigQuery Export to Bigtable Reverse ETL feature in preview lets you serve analytical insights from your applications without having to touch any ETL tools. 

39. The fully managed Memorystore for Redis Cluster is available in preview. This is an easy-to-use, open-source compatible Redis Cluster service that provides up to 60 times more throughput than Memorystore for Redis, with microseconds latencies.

40. The new Google Cloud Ready for Cloud SQL program recognizes partner solutions that have met integration requirements with Cloud SQL.

41. The Bigtable change streams feature allows you to capture data changes to a Bigtable table as the changes happen, letting you stream them for processing or analysis, and is now GA.

42. Cloud Bigtable request priorities, in private preview, let you execute large workloads that are not time-sensitive e.g. analytical queries, as low priority jobs on a Bigtable cluster, thus minimizing the impact of batch processing on serving workloads. 

43. You can now create a copy of a Cloud Bigtable backup and store it in any project or region where you have a Bigtable instance, and retain your backups for up to 90 days.

Business Intelligence

We extended our Looker business intelligence ecosystem and showed that the future of Looker is powered by AI.

44. Duet AI in Looker is now in preview. 

45. The Looker semantic layer is now open to Tableau in preview, and to Microsoft Power BI in general availability.

46. Looker Studio users now have native access to the Alteryx Designer Cloud for data preparation, and enhanced cloud connectivity, starting with Microsoft Excel and CSV files from storage platforms including Sharepoint and OneDrive.

47. An integration with Looker partner Sisu Data will be generally available later this quarter, helping customers determine the root cause of changes, spot data outliers, and identify next steps for analysis.

Dev Cloud

Google Cloud’s Dev Cloud covers all our infrastructure — compute, network, storage, regions, etc. — as well as platforms and developer tools.

Compute

We talked about chips that are optimized for AI workloads:

48. A3 VMs, based on NVIDIA H100 GPUs and delivered as a GPU supercomputer, will be generally available next month.

49. The new Google Cloud TPU v5e, in preview, has up to 2x higher training performance per dollar and up to 2.5x inference performance per dollar for LLMs and generative AI models compared to Cloud TPU v4. 

50. New Multislice technology in preview lets you scale AI models beyond the boundaries of physical TPU pods, with tens of thousands of Cloud TPU v5e or TPU v4 chips. 

51. Support for Cloud TPUs in GKE is now available for Cloud TPU v5e and Cloud TPU v4. 

52. Support for AI inference on Cloud TPUs is in preview.

We enhanced our general-purpose Compute Engine families with new models and features:

53. The Arm-based C3A, powered by AmpereOne processors will be in preview next month. 

54. A preview of AMD-based C3D VMs is coming next month, and will offer the largest instance sizes in our general-purpose portfolio, with up to 360 vCPUs and 2.8TB of DDR5 memory. 

55. We unveiled Titanium, a system of purpose-built, custom silicon and multiple tiers of offloads that enables offerings like Hyperdisk and our 3rd generation C3 VMs.

56. C3 VMs support for Hyperdisk Extreme is now in preview and supports 500K IOPS.

57. The SSD-based Hyperdisk Balanced is now in preview, with up to 2x the performance of previous generation Persistent Disk SSD. 

58. Hyperdisk Storage Pools is now in preview, allowing customers to provision capacity and performance in aggregate Pools, and then thinly provision Hyperdisk volumes from those pools.

59. Our VMs have new uptime SLAs: a 99.95% uptime SLA for memory-optimized VMs, and 99.9% (up from 99.5%) for all other VM families. 

60. Future reservations, now in preview, is a new Compute Engine feature that allows you to reserve compute capacity for a future date. 

61. C3 is now certified for SAP.

62. Workload Manager has new capabilities for securing and deploying SAP workloads, in preview.

63. In preview in October, we’ll offer a new VMware Engine node with 2TB RAM and options from 64 – 128 vCPUs and up to 50TB storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine, as well as three new storage options: NetApp Volumes, Filestore, and Storage-only (VSAN) nodes. 

Networking

64. We announced Cross-Cloud Network, an open and programmable global cloud networking platform. 

65. Private Service Connect now supports 20+ different Google and partner managed services. 

66. The Cloud Firewall Plus tier is in preview, a cloud-first next-generation firewall, or NGFW.

67. The new Network Service Integration Manager simplifies the setup and operation of partner NGFWs from Checkpoint, Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. 

68. VPC Spokes support in Network Connectivity Center in preview lets you scale VPC connectivity, providing reachability between a large number of VPC spokes. 

69. The internal Application Load Balancer now supports global access, which allows private clients from any Google Cloud region to access internal load balancers residing in any other Google Cloud region, and global backends, which allow internal Application Load Balancers to health-check and send traffic to globally distributed backend services. 

70. New Service Extensions callouts for Cloud Load Balancers let you customize services such as specialized monitoring, logging, traffic steering, or authentication.

71. A new automation solution toolkit for the Google Cloud Load Balancers global frontend lets you integrate and automate products including Cloud Armor, Cloud Load Balancing, and Cloud CDN into popular CI/CD platforms. 

72. Cloud Application Load Balancers now support cross-project service referencing. 

73. New mTLS client-side authentication is available for global external Application Load Balancers.

74. Auto-deployment for Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection is now generally available.

75. Palo Alto Networks is integrating its Prisma Access natively in Google Cloud.

76. Broadcom is integrating its Secure Web Gateway natively in Google Cloud. 

77. The Titanium Network Adapter, part of our Titanium system of offloads and available in A3, C3, and H3 VMs, delivers up to twice the throughput and three times the packet processing speed of prior VM generations.

Hybrid and multi-cloud

We added capabilities and features to our Google Distributed Cloud family, GDC Edge and GDC Hosted:

78. GDC Hosted now offers pre-trained models for speech, translation, optical character recognition (OCR), and Workbench. 

79. Vertex Prediction and Vertex Pipelines are coming to GDC Hosted in preview in Q2 2024, as is Document Translation API service. 

80. Database Service for GDC Hosted will now support AlloyDB Omni as a new managed database engine in preview. 

81. GDC Edge will support Dataproc in preview in Q4 2023. 

82. The new GDC hardware stack features the 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and high-performance network fabrics with up to 400 Gbps throughput. 

83. We introduced new hardware configurations for GDC Edge that are ruggedized and optimized for retail stores and restaurants.

84. GDC Hosted now offers support for new guest operating systems, customer-managed VM images, a package repository for VM runtime configuration, simplified networking, backup and restore tooling, a CLI and streamlined APIs. 

85. The new GKE Enterprise will be included in all Google Distributed Cloud deployments at no additional cost.

86. ElasticSearch, MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, and SAP on Google Distributed Cloud are available through Google Cloud Marketplace.

87. Boundary proxy on GDC Edge in preview provides visibility and auditability by inspecting and logging all management traffic between Google Cloud and GDC Edge (in preview). 

88. New Bastion host on GDC Edge, in preview, enables you to easily view and control Google Cloud’s access to GDC Edge for troubleshooting purposes, supporting you with operational sovereignty and compliance requirements.

89. Now you can automatically create and provide the resource mapping for all your managed keys with key tracking on GDC Hosted, in preview. 

90. BYO-certificate on GDC Hosted enables you to upload certificates issued by a third-party certificate authority, in preview.

91. With new survivability mode on GDC Edge, you can continue on-prem operations on GDC Edge even if you lose connectivity to Google Cloud, now in preview. 

Platforms

92. GKE Enterprise, a new premium edition of our flagship container orchestration platform, lets platform teams can manage large Kubernetes deployments across multiple clusters and multiple teams around the world, all from a single management console. 

93. GKE now supports Cloud TPU v5e, A3 VMs with NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and Google Cloud Storage FUSE on GKE (GA). 

94. Duet AI in GKE (preview) provides generative AI assistance specifically trained on GKE documentation to help platform teams cut down on time it takes to learn and operate Kubernetes. 

Developer experience

We took our commitment to an exceptional developer experience up a notch:

95. Jump Start Solutions application and infrastructure solutions, are now GA.

96. Application Integration — a no-code integration platform as a service (iPaaS) designed to empower you to weave together your applications — is now GA. 

97. We partnered with GitLab to offer a secure DevOps solution with integrated source management, artifact management, CI/CD, and enhanced security features. 

98. Duet AI is available console-wide, including in GKE, Cloud Run, and Cloud operations suite. It will also be available in Apigee API Management and Application Integration in preview for trusted testers here.

Migration and Management

99. We’ve revamped (re-RaMPed?) our Rapid Migration Program, including the new Cloud Capability Assessment (CCA) for RaMP online assessment and a detailed new migration-planning dashboard.

100. Migration Center, a unified migration service within Google Cloud console, is now GA, and includes the new SAP Cost Estimator.

101. Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in 18 regions, most recently in Turin, Italy (europe-wst12), Santiago (southamerica-west1), and Delhi (asia-south2). 

102. The new flexible ve2 node platform powered by 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (formerly named Ice Lake) and next-generation VMware Engine networking are now available for Google Cloud VMware Engine.

103. Event-driven transfer in Storage Transfer Service is now GA. 

104. Storage Transfer Service now offers support for transferring data from on-premises Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS) sources to Cloud Storage, currently available to trusted testers. 

105. SAP Security Validation, now available in public preview for Google Cloud Workload Manager, provides SAP-specific infrastructure and application-level security checks. 

106. Workload Manager’s Guided Deployment Automation service is now available in public preview and generates custom automation code to modernize to S/4HANA.

Geo and sustainability

107. The Google Maps Platform team introduced a suite of Environment APIs for solar, air quality, and pollen.

Security Cloud

108. Duet AI in Mandiant Threat Intelligence in preview helps surface the most prevalent tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors against organizations by summarizing our frontline threat intelligence.

109. Duet AI in Chronicle Security Operations in preview aids in threat detection, investigation, and response for cyber defenders by simplifying search, complex data analysis, and threat detection engineering. 

110. Duet AI in Security Command Center in preview offers near-instant analysis of security findings and possible attack paths.

111. Mandiant Hunt for Chronicle, now in preview, provides continual threat hunting by Mandiant experts on Chronicle data. 

112. Agentless vulnerability scanning, powered by Tenable, has been integrated into Security Command Center to detect operating system, software, and network vulnerabilities on Compute Engine virtual machines, now in preview.

113. Security Command Center now allows organizations to design their own customized posture findings (GA) and threat detectors (in preview).

114. Confidential Computing running on 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs with TDX technology is now in private preview.

115. We expanded the coverage footprint of our Sensitive Data Protection offerings with enhanced integration for Dataplex and Dialogflow (now GA), and in preview for Cloud SQL.

116. Assured Workloads Japan Regions is now in preview, offering customers controlled environments that enforce data residency in our Japanese regions, options for local control of encryption keys, and administrative access transparency.

117. The official Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam Guide is now available. 

Collaboration Cloud: Google Workspace

118. Duet AI for Google Workspace is generally available, and you can get started with a no-cost trial. 

119. Duet AI for Google Workspace can create a whole new presentation in Slides, complete with text, charts, and images, based on your relevant content in Drive and Gmail. 

120. Duet AI in Google Meet helps you look and sound your best with new AI-powered enhancements, including studio look, studio lighting, and studio sound, as well as dynamic tiles and automatic face detection so remote attendees can see everyone in a meeting room, with each in-person attendee getting their own video tile with their name.

121. Duet AI in Google Meet can capture notes, action items, and video snippets in real time with the “take notes for me” feature, and send a recap to attendees after the meeting. It can even catch latecomers up with “summary so far,” or attend a meeting in your place with “attend for me.”

122. We’re enhancing smart reply in Gmail with Duet AI, allowing you to draft longer personalized replies with a single tap.

123. The enhanced Google Chat experience is available with powerful new features, including Duet AI in Google Chat. To help you keep up with messaging, we’re bringing direct messages and spaces together into a unified conversation list, with a chronological home view, @-mentions, and starred conversations, with intelligent prioritization of your messages, based on your communication patterns, coming early next year.

124. Google Chat will soon support up to 500,000 participants in a single space, to help build thriving communities, even in the largest organizations.

125. Huddles in Chat are a new way for teams to communicate in real time, using quick-to-join audio and video conversations, powered by Google Meet. With huddles, instead of jumping out of the conversation into a meeting, the meeting integrates directly and smoothly into the Chat experience. 

126. More third-party and Google Workspace apps are supported in Chat, including an updated Google Drive app that lets you respond to comments and sharing requests, as well as new support for Workday, Loom, Zoho, and LumApps. Mio will provide support for message interoperability with other major platforms.

127. In the lead up to Next, we announced new capabilities, including those powered by AI, to help prevent cyber threats, provide safer work with built-in zero trust controls, and better support for our customers’ digital sovereignty and compliance needs.

Customers 

128. We announced the winners of our Google Cloud Customer Awards.

129. AdoreMe, a direct-to-consumer brand, uses generative AI in Google Workspace to improve customer experiences, create production-worthy marketing materials, and speed up innovation.

130. Bayer Pharmaceuticals is working with Google Cloud to use gen AI, including testing Med-PaLM 2. 

131. Canoo, a leading advanced mobility company, will deploy a range of Google Cloud’s AI, data management and security technologies to maximize the value of the data coming from its electric vehicles.

132. CAPCOM is harnessing Google Cloud’s infrastructure to support its global player base for AAA game launches like Street Fighter 6.

133. Dun & Bradstreet is collaborating with Google Cloud on gen AI to drive innovation across multiple applications. 

134. The Government of El Salvador announced a multi-year deal with Google Cloud to digitally transform the country with Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Edge, as well as to establish an office presence and Center of Excellence (CoE) in the country.

135. The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (ELC) and Google Cloud announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to pioneer new uses of gen AI for online consumers.

136. Fox Sports will use Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities to quickly search footage from more than 1.9 million videos and create custom video content in near-real-time to delight and engage its audiences.

137. GE Appliances (GEA) is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud to enhance and personalize consumer experiences, like recipe creation and appliance maintenance, with gen AI.

138. General Motors and Google Cloud will share new details on how the two companies are collaborating to bring conversational AI technology into millions of GM vehicles.

139. Ginkgo Bioworks, which is building the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, and Google Cloud announced a five-year strategic cloud and AI partnership, intended to enable Ginkgo to develop and deploy AI tools for biology and biosecurity. 

140. Hackensack Meridian Health will leverage Google Cloud’s gen AI technologies to develop and deploy solutions that will help clinical staff to focus more on care, improve overall decision-making, and better personalize the patient experience.

141. HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud will improve workflows on time-consuming tasks such as clinical documentation so physicians and nurses can focus more on patient care with gen AI. 

142. Huma will use Google Cloud’s gen AI to enhance its regulated disease management platform.

143. Infinitus is using Google Cloud’s gen AI to streamline provider-payor interactions, simplify resource-intensive operations, and improve response times. 

144. Meditech is working with Google Cloud to empower employees, and ultimately better serve its healthcare provider customers with gen AI, including Med-PaLM2. 

145. MSCI is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate the development of gen AI solutions for the financial services industry. 

146. Runway has chosen Google Cloud to build, accelerate, and manage model deployment and bring gen AI to more creatives.

147. Six Flags will use Google Cloud’s gen AI to create an in-park app that helps improve visitor experience and park operations in real time. 

Startups and Public Sector

148. Eleven more leading generative AI startups have chosen Google Cloud to develop gen AI and bring their products to market.

149. The new Google for Startups Startup School: AI is a six-week in-depth online AI training course that will launch in January 2024. 

150. A new VC AMA ebook, Startup Advice from VCs: 10 Lessons from the Trenches, for startups contains valuable takeaways from the VC AMA Series, and is available for download.

151. Nine startups in the Startup Lounge announced new products based on Google Cloud in the Startup Lounge.

152. We announced the winners of the 2023 Google Cloud Customer Awards in Government and Education Congratulations to: Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), United States Postal Service (USPS), United States Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), State of Hawaii DHS, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT), New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NY DEC) and Minnesota Department of Public Safety (MN DPS).  

Partners

153. We recognized our annual Partners of the Year.

154. A new Google Cloud Generative AI Partner Initiative provides partners with AI journey maps and learning assets, and separate “Services” and “Build” tracks for partners working with gen AI.

155. DocuSign is working with Google Cloud to pilot how Vertex AI could be used to help generate smart contract assistants that can summarize, explain and answer what’s in complex contracts and other documents.

156. SAP is working with us to develop new solutions utilizing Google Cloud foundation models via Vertex AI and SAP data, beginning with solutions to enhance customers’ sustainability initiatives and improve safety and manufacturing processes for the automotive industry. 

157. Workday’s applications for Finance and HR are now live on Google Cloud, and they are working with us to develop new gen AI capabilities within the flow of Workday. 

158. We forged new or expanded partnerships with data providers such as Acxiom, Bloomberg, CoreLogic, Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, NIQ and TransUnion to provide access to their datasets from BigQuery. 

159. Technology and solutions in the new Data and AI Cloud for Supply Chain helps customers build data-driven supply chains.

160. The new Industry Value Networks (IVN) initiative combines expertise and offerings from systems integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and content partners to create comprehensive, differentiated, repeatable, and high-value solutions that accelerate time-to-value and reduce risk for customers.

Next ‘24!

Last but not least, we’re excited to do it all over again, but even bigger next year so please save the date:

161. Google Cloud Next ‘24 will take place April 9-11 in Las Vegas. 

That was a lot! A huge thank you to our Google Cloud team, customers, and partners who came together to make this all happen. Together, we’re building the new way to cloud.

Across almost every vertical, organizations of all sizes are recognizing the immense value of their first-party data stored in Google BigQuery. From operations to marketing and personalized experiences, this data holds the key to unlocking success in an evolving advertising world that is rapidly moving away from third party cookies.

Historically, marketing and advertising teams have relied on packaged Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to collect, store, and model customer data and then push that data into downstream tools. Thanks to the rise of the AI lakehouse and Google BigQuery however, the separate processes for data collection, modeling, and storage in CDPs have become redundant. This can leave a company operating with multiple sources of truth–with marketing teams looking to their CDP while the rest of the company runs off of a richer store of data residing in BigQuery. 

Enter Hightouch, the data activation platform that empowers organizations to fully leverage their BigQuery data. By integrating Hightouch with BigQuery, companies can create a composable customer data platform, capitalizing on their existing data investments and the robust capabilities of their data warehouse. With Hightouch and BigQuery, businesses can build audiences and synchronize data with over 200 tools and destinations. This convergence empowers organizations to craft a unified and versatile platform that meets all their business use cases, all while maximizing the potential of their data assets.

In this blog post, we will delve deeper into the concept of composable CDPs, explore the benefits they offer, and provide practical guidance on how to unlock the true potential of your data with a composable CDP built with BigQuery and Hightouch.

Use cases for a composable CDP built with BigQuery

Use case 1: Building a Customer 360

Data teams can build Customer 360 directly in BigQuery, allowing a company to understand the full engagement of that customer across all channels, devices, mediums, and engagements (including offline interactions). This 360 profile is the basis for effective analytics, personalization, and good customer experiences. 

Hightouch provides a Customer 360 Toolkit that enables organizations to create multiple identity and entity resolution models directly in BigQuery, without writing any code or complex SQL. 

Use case 2: Activating data with Reverse ETL

Data teams can sync data to downstream business tools like CRMs, ESPs, and ad platforms by using Reverse ETL.

Business operations that use these tools will improve with this data, driving better results and ensuring that everyone operates from the same source-of-truth data in BigQuery. This feature set saves data teams the manual effort of building and maintaining one-off pipelines, integrating with APIs, and delivering ad-hoc CSVs to other business teams.

Use case 3: Driving personalization across channels

Marketers can achieve better results by personalizing the content of their outreach to customers. 

Lifecycle marketing improves when companies serve relevant and personalized experiences via push notifications, SMS, email, mobile, and web. In order to do this, organizations need to first collect and store customer information, model predictions from that data, and then deliver that data and insights to their tools and marketing channels.

Use case 4: Improving Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and increasing ad efficiency

Marketers can improve the efficiency of their campaigns by syncing customer data into advertising platforms. 

Marketers can build suppression audiences of customers who they do not want to target, such as current subscribers, to reduce wasted advertising spend. Marketers can similarly build lookalike audiences from their current customer base to identify new customers to acquire. They can also provide conversion data to these platforms to optimize their automated campaigns. All of these advertising efficiencies depend on the ability to sync data from BigQuery to advertising destinations easily. 

Solution

Hightouch’s Composable CDP, built with BigQuery, allows organizations to store, model, and activate their customer data from the data warehouse. Companies like Gorgias, Prestashop, and Chalhoub have attained substantial revenue and cost savings benefits by activating their BigQuery data using Hightouch. 

Hightouch sits directly on top of BigQuery, giving data teams and marketers a suite of no-code tools to automate data syncs and build and manage audience cohorts for activation in minutes. Notable features and benefits of this architecture include:

1. Reverse ETL – Data and marketing teams can sync data from BigQuery to 200+ downstream tools with visual editors or languages such as SQL and dbt.

2. Customer Studio– Marketers can easily build audiences, add custom traits, run tests, analyze performance, run omnichannel campaigns, and coordinate all of their audience campaigns.

3. Customer 360 Toolkit – Data teams can organize and prepare their BigQuery data using Hightouch’s native identity resolution, schema organization, and warehouse enrichment capabilities.

4. Personalization API – Teams can access data in real-time using a fully managed API to power personalized customer experience.

5. Match Booster – Marketers can enrich audience syncs to ad destinations like Facebook and Google Ads with third-party data to improve match rates. This leads to larger audience reach in each platform for use cases like suppressing existing customers or building lookalike audiences, ultimately improving ROAS.

Solution architecture

Collect data into BigQuery from any source

Wherever you collect customer data, you can add it directly into BigQuery. Event collection solutions like Google Analytics can stream data into BigQuery, while ETL and ELT solutions like Fivetran can load in all other data your organization relies on. 

A single source of truth across the entire organization

Google Cloud provides a variety of tools to centralize all customer data in one place. Google Cloud Storage delivers a scalable and durable object storage solution, enabling businesses to store and manage their data in a centralized location. Additionally, BigQuery allows businesses to analyze large amounts of data quickly and easily, providing a unified platform to analyze data with SQL queries, built-in machine learning models, and data visualization tools. This provides a single source of truth across the entire organization, enabling all teams to have access to the same data, regardless of their function or location. Hightouch never stores this data separately, and syncs directly from BigQuery to other tools the organization uses. 

Easily and quickly modeling data and compute

Google Cloud provides several compute options, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and App Engine, allowing businesses to run their applications and workloads in a scalable and efficient manner. Google Cloud’s AI and machine learning tools, such as AutoML and TensorFlow, allow businesses to build and deploy custom models without the need for specialized expertise, making modeling and compute easier and faster than ever before.

Monitor infrastructure with unified dashboards

Google Cloud’s operations suite provides a unified dashboard for monitoring and managing cloud services. It allows businesses to monitor their applications and infrastructure in real-time, set up alerts, and troubleshoot issues. This unified dashboard provides a comprehensive view of the entire organization, making it easier to identify and address any issues.

Customer privacy

Google Cloud provides a flexible data platform, enabling businesses to adopt a first-party customer data approach. Products like Google Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Data Catalog help businesses protect sensitive data and maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Google Cloud also provides tools for identity and access management, ensuring that customer data is accessed only by authorized personnel. Hightouch never stores data outside of BigQuery, maintaining all governance rules and regulations. 

Hightouch Composable CDP vs. packaged CDPs

The Hightouch Composable Customer Data Platform, built with BigQuery, enables anyone in any organization to fully leverage their customer data in all of their tools. Marketing teams have access to unified customer profiles for personalization and can leverage any data models built in BigQuery. Data teams can perform all of their work within the secure BigQuery environment, knowing that Hightouch will then pass those data investments downstream to all other organization tools. 

Packaged CDPs offer all-in-one solutions for data collection, modeling, storage, and activation. A company that may choose to pursue a CDP because of the completeness of this implementation and the built-in data schemas and modeling it institutes. Ultimately, however, the separate data storage of packaged CDPs is a critical weakness: CDPs operate as their own separate entities, and don’t benefit from data investments made across the organization. 

Assembling the Hightouch Composable CDP is a better option for companies than buying a separate packaged CDP because this approach offers several benefits:

Data completeness: Packaged CDPs only capture and/or copy a portion of a company’s data, such as clickstream data. BigQuery can instead be the source of truth for all company data, from all customer interactions. BigQuery lets organizations use data from disparate sources like POS systems, data science models, and offline data to build Customer 360s and activate that customer data to downstream tools. 

Data flexibility: Data teams have flexibility in how they can model data within BigQuery. All of these models and data investments then flow downstream into the tools Hightouch syncs to. The Hightouch CDP easily keeps up with an organization’s ever-evolving needs and requests. Packaged CDPs, on the other hand, provide rigid solutions that require significant effort to modify or re-implement. 

Accessibility: Data teams can configure BigQuery and Hightouch easily with their existing tools and workflows like SQL and dbt. Less technical teams can use Hightouch’s no-code features to perform Identity Resolution, build audiences, coordinate multichannel campaigns, sync data to their downstream tools, and more. Packaged CDPs don’t offer the same level of control and access across technical skill sets.

Security: BigQuery’s many features allow companies to build a data warehouse that is secure and compliant with their privacy needs. Hightouch never stores data, relying on the data governance and management in BigQuery. Packaged CDPs store data within their own separate cloud environments, intoducing security risks.

Better together

A composable CDP with Hightouch and built on BigQuery offers organizations a best-in-class customer data architecture that capitalizes on existing data investments, empowers marketing teams, and brings customer data to the places you need it. Write your data to BigQuery once, and then use it anywhere with Hightouch.