GCP – What happened week 2 of Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir

In our second week of Cloud Next OnAir, we highlighted our collaboration and productivity solutions to help organizations work better together and get things done. From G Suite VP and GM Javier Soltero’s opening remarks, to breakout sessions on G Suite and Chrome Enterprise product roadmaps, to technical demos, it’s been a week jam-packed with best practices, announcements, and customer stories. 

Key announcements from the week

Remote work has increased the volume of demands on everyone’s time: People are overloaded with too much information and too many to-dos across too many different tools. Rather than another new tool to learn, what we really want is for the tools we already use to be even more helpful, and work together, in an integrated, intuitive way.

Javier recently shared his vision for the future workspace and unveiled a better home for work in G Suite that intelligently brings together the people, content, and tasks you need to make the most of your time. It not only integrates core tools like video, chat, email, files, and tasks, it makes them better together, so that you can more easily stay on top of things, from anywhere. Read our blog post for details, watch Javier’s keynote, and read a recent article he wrote about the “new workplace.”

Javier also recapped several key announcements made over the past few months, including making Google Meet free for everyone, a host of new differentiated Meet features, and the introduction of G Suite Essentials, which includes Meet for video conferencing, and Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides for modern collaboration. G Suite Essentials works alongside other productivity solutions so teams can get started quickly with G Suite.

We also announced several new security features for Gmail, Meet, and Chat, including enhanced meeting knocking, advanced meeting locks, and abuse reporting and detection. In addition, we’re extending the strong phishing protections we have built within Gmail to Google Chat. Dig into the details in our blog post.

To wrap up the week, I shared some inspiring stories of customers that are using G Suite to re-imagine not only how their teams communicate and collaborate with each other remotely as they transitioned to work from home, but also how they continue to serve their own customers and support the communities they belong to.

For example, PwC, a global professional services organization, enabled over 275,000 people to work from home in response to COVID-19. With most of its people around the world needing to work from home, PwC reached nearly 10 million hours of video conferencing in Google Meet in a single month.

Demos to help you collaborate and be more productive

To give you the opportunity to roll up your sleeves and delve into the details of our solutions, we also launched several new demos this week. There’s a walkthrough of how to run a virtual all-hands with G Suite and Google Meet, a demo of how to build with G Suite Add-ons and other developer tools, and an interactive exploration of how Google Chrome Enterprise unlocks the business capabilities of Chrome OS, Chrome Browser, and Chrome devices.

See all the demos from productivity and collaboration week here.

Looking ahead: Infrastructure modernization

Next week’s theme? Infrastructure modernization. We’ll be taking a deeper look into the nuts and bolts—and servers, data centers, fiber optic networks—of the infrastructure that powers the applications that run on our platform. Check out the complete session catalog.

Google Cloud Platform’s unique infrastructure helps enterprises accelerate workloads and build planet-scaleable solutions. Listen to the keynote on Tuesday, presented by our VP of engineering Brad Calder, networking GM Shailesh Shukla, and compute GM June Yang, to learn about the latest enhancements to Google Cloud’s infrastructure, and how it enables businesses to build applications with global scale and reach. 

We’ll also bring you weekly live technical talks and learning opportunities, aligned with each week’s content. Click “Learn” on the Explore page to find each week’s schedule. Haven’t yet registered for Google Cloud ’20 Next: OnAir? Get started at g.co/cloudnext.