Next cloud up

Google Cloud kicked off its Next '22 conference Tuesday, a curious mixture of a virtual event combined with real-world gatherings in several cities highlighting some of the newest products and strategies from the company. CEO Thomas Kurian delivered a livestreamed keynote address Tuesday morning designed to sell the cloud market on the progress Google has made chasing down more-established competitors in cloud computing, namely AWS and Microsoft.

Here are a few announcements and developments from the event that stood out to us.

Google Cloud has been doubling down on its cybersecurity business with several major acquisitions in 2022, and today, the company revealed what it's doing with them.

• The company announced Chronicle Security Operations, its most ambitious bid for cybersecurity market share so far. The platform for security operations teams integrates Chronicle’s preexisting security analytics with new capabilities for automated response to detected issues, such as remediation of a compromise, from its acquisition of Siemplify.
• According to Google Cloud executives, the usefulness of the updated Chronicle product will get a further boost from the integration of expertise and threat intelligence from Mandiant, which Google acquired for $5.4 billion in a deal that closed last month. Mandiant “gives us early access to the types of cyberthreats that are emerging,” Kurian said in an interview with Protocol.
• Chronicle Security Operations is now in preview and is expected to be generally available later this quarter (full story here). Google Cloud also announced a new option for confidential computing, Confidential Space, as well as a new set of software supply chain security capabilities, dubbed Software Delivery Shield.

Google Cloud’s new Dual Run is designed to help enterprises mitigate risk as they move their legacy mainframe systems to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Built on technology initially developed by Banco Santander, a Google Cloud customer, Dual Run enables parallel processing that allows enterprises to make digital copies of their legacy mainframe systems and run them simultaneously on GCP.
• Customers can perform real-time testing to ensure their cloud workloads are performing as expected, running securely, and meeting regulatory compliance needs without stopping applications and affecting the end-user experience.
• Once they’re comfortable with how things are running, customers can make the transition to GCP as their primary system and use their mainframes as backup or retire them.
• “At the core of our design philosophy, we think 'workload in,' so that everything we design is optimized for performance, security, manageability of those workloads,” Nirav Mehta, Google Cloud’s senior director of product management for cloud infrastructure solutions and growth, said in an interview with Protocol.

In private preview, the C3 VM is Google Cloud’s latest family of virtual machines that runs on Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon Scalable processor and a custom-designed Google chip based on Intel's infrastructure processing unit or IPU.

• As data center workloads have grown more complex in recent years, chip companies — led by Nvidia — started to break out the networking component into its own high-performance processor to prevent networking from becoming a bottleneck slowing performance.
• “The IPU is a special-purpose chip that offloads or delegates some of the functions that the main CPU in hardware would have to perform,” Mehta told Protocol.
• “It frees up the CPU to perform tasks for the customers' workloads while delegating certain functions to this new chip,” he said. “The end result is much higher performance for key types of high-performance workloads.”

In addition, Google announced some interesting partnerships and features for some of its key products.

• It’s hard to imagine too many enterprise customers taking this route — especially now — but Google forged a deal with Coinbase to accept cryptocurrency as payment for cloud services, a deal that will also see Coinbase move some of its workloads from AWS to Google.
• Google added support for two popular open-source data projects — Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg — to its BigQuery and BigLake products, respectively, and said BigLake will soon support Databricks’ Delta Lake tech.
• Google also added new features and integrations with third-party apps to Google Workspace, which is still far behind Microsoft Office when it comes to the enterprise office productivity market.

Also read Kyle’s and Donna’s full reports on Chronicle and Dual Run.

— Kyle Alspach (email | twitter) and Donna Goodison (email | twitter)

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Outside Intel

Intel is planning to lay off thousands of staff in an effort to cut costs because of the sharp decline in demand for PC chips, according to Bloomberg News.

The company is planning the layoffs for as early as this month, and Bloomberg said based on unnamed sources that the cuts would arrive when Intel reports third-quarter results Oct. 27 and amount to a “major reduction in headcount.” Some divisions, such as the sales and marketing operation, may see cuts of as much as 20%.

Intel declined to comment.

For years Intel has faced pressure from AMD across its PC business, but demand for consumer chips dropped off rapidly over the summer. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all suffered damage to their segments that included revenue tied to PC chips; however, demand for data center chips remains strong.

Intel has more than 100,000 employees, and warned in July that its 2022 sales would be billions short of what it had previously expected. The company’s gross margins have suffered significant declines too.

— Max A. Cherney (email | twitter)

Around the enterprise

At Meta Connect, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office and Teams would be coming to Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which … sure.

Thoma Bravo bought another identity security company, this time snapping up ForgeRock for $2.3 billion just one week after our Securing the Enterprise special report noted that identity-based attacks are the biggest problem in the enterprise right now.

Most of us can probably relate to this: Aer Lingus demanded compensation from Kyndryl, its IT services provider, after an hours-long service disruption forced the airline to cancel several flights. Presumably a $10 food court gift certificate won’t cut it here.

A MESSAGE FROM AUTOMATION ANYWHERE

Today, we expect instant results from our every action, from calling an Uber to ordering a t-shirt. Companies can no longer afford to not adopt technologies like automation. We are now living in the Automation Economy – a new world that requires agility and a complete reimagining of how we work.

Learn more