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Congrats to Colin Devlin, Outstanding Employee Award Winner

At Mirantis, our strength and success comes from the talent and hard work of our employees, and we believe in recognizing and rewarding excellence among our staff. Recently, our HR team asked managers across the company to nominate candidates for our Outstanding Employee awards who not only embody Mirantis’ core values but also produce outstanding … Continued
Quelle: Mirantis

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Introducing Intelligent Products Essentials: helping manufacturers build AI-powered smart products, faster

Expectations for both consumer and commercial products have changed. Consumers want products that evolve with their needs, adapt to their preferences, and stay up-to-date over time. Manufacturers, in turn, need to create products that provide engaging customer experiences not only to better compete in the marketplace, but also to provide new monetization opportunities. However, embedding intelligence into new and existing products is challenging. Updating hardware is costly, and existing connected products do not have the capability to add new features. Furthermore, manufacturers do not have sufficient customer insights due to product telemetry and customer data silos, and may lack the AI expertise to quickly develop and deploy these features. That’s why today we’re launching Intelligent Products Essentials, a solution that allows manufacturers to rapidly deliver products that adapt to their owners, update features over-the-air using AI at the edge, and provide customer insights using analytics in the cloud. The solution is designed to assist manufacturers in their product development journeys—whether developing a new product or enhancing existing ones. With Intelligent Products Essentials, manufacturers can:Personalize customer experiences: Provide a compelling ownership experience that evolves over the lifetime of the product. For example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profile.Manage and update products over-the-air: Deploy updates to products in the field,  gather performance insights and evolve capabilities over time with monetization opportunities.Predict parts and service issues: Detect operating thresholds, anomalies and predict failures to proactively recommend service using AI, reducing warranty claims, decreasing parts shortages and increasing customer satisfaction.In order to help manufacturers quickly deploy these use cases and many more, Intelligent Products Essentials provides the following:Edge connections: Connect and ingest raw or time-series product telemetry from various device platforms utilizing IoT Core or Pub/Sub and enable deployment and management of firmware over-the-air and machine learning models with Vertex AI at the edge.Ownership App Template: Easily build connected product companion apps that work on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Use a pre-built API and accompanying sample app that can incorporate product or device registration, identity management, and provide application behavior analytics using Firebase.Product fleet management: Manage, update and analyze fleets of connected products via APIs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Looker.AI services: Create new features or capabilities for your products using AI and machine learning products such as DialogFlow, Vision AI, AutoML, all from Vertex AI.Enterprise data integration: Integrate data sources such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and others using Dataflow and BigQuery.Intelligent Products Essentials helps manufacturers build new features across consumer, industrial, enterprise, and transportation products. Manufacturers can implement the solution in-house, or work with one of our certified solution integration partners like Quantifi and Softserve. “The focus on intelligent products that Google Cloud is deploying provides a digital option for manufacturers and users. At its heart, systems like Intelligent Product Essentials are all about decision making. IDC sees faster and more effective decision-making as the fundamental reason for the drive to digitize products and processes. It’s how you can make faster and more effective decisions to meet heightened customer expectations, generate faster cash flow, and better revenue realization,” said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President at IDC. “Digital offerings like Google’s Intelligent Product Essentials potentially go the last mile with the ability to connect the digital thread all the way through to the final user.”Customers adopting Intelligent Products EssentialsGE Appliances, a Haier company, are enhancing their appliances using new AI-powered intelligent features to enable:Intelligent cooking: Help cook the perfect meal to personal preferences, regardless of your expertise and abilities in the kitchen.Frictionless service: Build smart appliances that know when they need maintenance and make it simple to take action or schedule services.Integrated digital lifestyle: Make appliances useful at every step of the way by integrating them with digital lifestyle services – for example, automating appliance behaviors according to customer calendars, such as oven preheating or scheduling the dishwasher to run in the late evening.“Intelligent Products Essentials enhances our smart appliances ecosystem, offering richer consumer habit insights. This enables us to develop and offer new features and experiences to integrate with their digital lifestyle.“ —Shawn Stover, Vice-president Smart Home Solutions at GE Appliances.Serial 1, Powered by Harley-Davidson, is using Intelligent Product Essentials to manage and update its next generation eBicycles, and personalize its customers’ digital ownership experiences. “At Serial 1, we are dedicated to creating the easiest and most intuitive way to experience the fun, freedom, and adventure of riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle. Connectivity is a key component of delivering that mission, and working together to integrate Intelligent Product Essentials into our eBicycles will ensure that our customers enjoy the best possible user experience.”— Jason Huntsman, President, Serial 1. Magic Leap, an augmented reality pioneer with industry-leading hardware and software, is building field service solutions with Intelligent Products Essentials with the goal of connecting manufacturers, dealers, and customers to more proactive and intelligent service.“We look forward to using Intelligent Products Essentials to enable us to rapidly integrate manufacturers’ product data with dealer service partners into our field service solution. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud as we continue to push the boundaries of physical interaction with the digital world.” — Walter Delph, Chief Business Officer, Magic LeapIntelligent Product Essentials is available today. To learn more, visit our website.Related ArticleWhat is Cloud IoT Core?Cloud IoT Core is a managed service to securely connect, manage, and ingest data from global device fleetsRead Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Google Cloud expands CCAI and DocAI solutions to accelerate time to value

Virtually all companies face two broad challenges: to marshal data for smarter decision making, and to deliver more personalized and convenient experiences for customers. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help, but the path from AI investment to business outcome can be difficult to chart. To fast-track time to value, today, we’re pleased to announce new additions to two of our core AI-powered solutions:Contact Center AI (CCAI) Insights, now generally available, provides out-of-the-box and custom modeling techniques to make it easier for contact center teams to better understand customer interaction data. CCAI Insights extends the impact of Google Cloud’s CCAI solution, which lets businesses enable rich and conversational customer experiences via capabilities such as AI-powered virtual agents and Agent Assist. Contract DocAI, now in preview, adds to Google Cloud’s Document AI solution, a scalable cloud-based AI platform to help businesses efficiently scan, analyze, and understand documents. Contract DocAI brings new features purpose-built for the most important and complicated documents of all: contracts. It lets users extract insights from the unstructured text in contracts, helping to accelerate contract lifecycles and reduce the cost of contract processing. These announcements build on the momentum we’ve been seeing with our AI solutions in delivering business value to our customers. According to a 2020 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, “New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Google Cloud Contact Center AI,” CCAI can help customers save millions by efficiently directing customers between self-service resources and human agents, reducing average call times, and decreasing manual data entry.  Call center teams using Google Cloud’s CCAI for Chat have been able to manage up to 28% more conversations concurrently, for example, all while responding 15% faster to customer inquiries and increasing customer satisfaction by 10%. Likewise, leveraging DocAI, our customers are able to improve document processing and better serve customers—such as mortgage company Mr. Cooper, which increased the efficiency of mortgage document operations by 400%, improving the experience for both team members and their more than 3 million customers.With today’s announcements, we are pleased to continue on this journey of meeting customers where they are and putting ready-to-use AI solutions directly in their hands, to fast-track the path from AI investment to transformative business outcomes.Deepen customer understanding with CCAI InsightsCCAI Insights helps teams offer better customer experiences by using AI to mine raw contact center interaction data for actionable information, regardless of whether that data originated with a virtual or human agent. It provides a number of out-of-the-box analytics on customer conversations, including:Smart Highlighters: Automatically highlights important conversation moments, such as when an agent authenticates, a customer confirms their issue has been resolved, or an agent puts a customer on hold.Cloud Natural Language Processing (NLP) Integration: New Customer & Agent Sentiment functions within CCAI score each portion of a conversation so teams can understand any positive or negative sentiment; and Entity Extraction identifies and labels various entities within a conversation by types such as date, person, contact information, organization, location, events, products, and media, so teams can report on data to improve script or train agents to resolve resolution rates. Beyond out-of-the-box capabilities, CCAI Insights also helps teams categorize their conversations with Custom Highlighters — Defines rules, keywords, and natural language training phrases to help teams understand things like when customers mention a competitor or a recent promotional offering. Topic Modeling— Leverages advanced NLP technologies like BERT so teams can create an unsupervised model of their data to define the taxonomy of conversation drivers.Reviewing trends, searching, and filtering data to find conversations in CCAI Insights consoleAs part of Google Cloud’s CCAI solution, CCAI Insights also seamlessly hands off calls and chats handled by Dialogflow (CX or ES) and Agent Assist, letting it pull in advanced data from either. CCAI Insights also brings together the best of Google with native integrations to BigQuery and Looker, so customers can create more powerful and accurate data visualizations. TELUS, a Canadian communications technology company, sees great potential for CCAI Insights to empower its analyst teams to provide value back to the business.“With CCAI Insights, TELUS is looking at processing 20 million voice calls for analytics. This will help agents resolve customer inquiries faster and with less effort, which will lead to significant savings via agent effort reduction in the first year of production. Our goal is also to save our customers tens of thousands of hours by using AI to guide them to the channel that best supports their needs and allows for quicker resolutions such as self-serve and digital applications, making it easier to perform transactions on-line. This leads to customers spending reduced time with customer care and improved customer experiences.” —Mike Kellner,  Director, AI Data & Analytics, TELUS Accelerate contract lifecycle management with Contract DocAIAs part of Google Cloud’s DocAI solutions, Contract DocAI leverages a variety of AI technologies — including NLP, knowledge graph technology, and optical character recognition (OCR) — to accurately parse contracts at scale for key terms, such as those involving start and end dates, renewal conditions, parties involved, contract type, venue, or service level agreements. By automatically discerning important terms and the relationships among them, Contract DocAI also helps human reviewers work more efficiently, leading to faster and less expensive contract processing, while providing new semantic lenses to categorize and analyze contract content. Ironclad, a leading provider of contract management services, was among the earlier adopters of Contract DocAI.“With Contract DocAI, we built Smart Import for existing contracts, which has helped customers gain more access, visibility, and insights for all their contracts. Our customers can now upload contracts 75% faster while saving up to 40% on costs. Smart Import also unlocks contract data that was previously inaccessible and enables other parts of the business to make better, faster decisions. With the power of Google Cloud’s Contract DocAI, we’ve been able to focus on unlocking greater value for our customer, instead of having to spend time, effort, and money pursuing AI innovation ourselves.”—Cai GoGwilt, CTO, Ironclad Accelerate business results with AIAll of these new additions will help transform businesses by making the power of AI more accessible and more focused on achieving business outcomes. To learn more about CCAI Insights, click here, and to learn more about Contract DocAI, click here.For an even deeper dive, don’t miss these sessions at Google Cloud Next: “Using CCAI Insights to better understand your customers,” in which Dinesh Mahtani, Director of Data Analytics at TELUS, discusses how to leverage insights from customer interaction data to deliver better products and service; and “Google Cloud ad Ironclad partner to accelerate document workflows,” in which Ironclad CTO Cai GoGwilt explores how AI can turn contracting into a business hub instead of a process blocker.Related ArticleSopra Steria uses Google Cloud, Cisco, and ACTIVEO to power new generation of Virtual AgentsEuropean technology consulting firm, Sopra Steria uses Google Cloud, Cisco and Activio for virtual agentsRead Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud

Now more than ever, organizations are looking to accelerate their cloud adoption. They want easier development, faster innovation, and efficient scale, all while simultaneously reducing their technology risk. However, some of their workloads cannot move to the public cloud entirely or right away, due to factors such as industry or region-specific compliance and data sovereignty needs, low latency or local data-processing requirements, or because they need to run close to other services.To ensure these workloads can still take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, today at Google Cloud Next ’21 we are announcing Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of solutions consisting of hardware and software that extend our infrastructure to the edge and into your data centers. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can run Google Distributed Cloud across multiple locations, including:Google’s network edge – Allowing customers to leverage over 140+ Google network edge locations around the world.Operator edge – Enabling customers to take advantage of an operator’s edge network and benefit from 5G/LTE services offered by our leading communication service provider (CSP) partners. The operator edge is optimized to support low-latency use cases, running edge applications with stringent latency and bandwidth requirements. Customer edge – Supporting customer-owned edge or remote locations such as retail stores, factory floors, or branch offices, which require localized compute and processing directly in the edge locations. Customer data centers – Supporting customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities to address strict data security and privacy requirements, and to modernize on-premises deployments while meeting regulatory compliance.Google Distributed Cloud is built on Anthos, an open-source-based platform that unifies the management of infrastructure and applications across on-premises, edge, and in multiple public clouds, all while offering consistent operation at scale. Google Distributed Cloud taps into our planet-scale infrastructure that delivers the highest levels of performance, availability, and security, while Anthos running on Google-managed hardware at the customer or edge location provides a services platform on which to run applications securely and remotely. Using Google Distributed Cloud, customers can migrate or modernize applications and process data locally with Google Cloud services, including databases, machine learning, data analytics and container management. Customers can also leverage third-party services from leading vendors in their own dedicated environment. At launch, a diverse portfolio of partners, including Cisco, Dell, HPE, and NetApp, will support the service.Our first products under this portfolio include Google Distributed Cloud Edge and Google Distributed Cloud Hosted.Google Distributed Cloud Edge Available in preview today, Google Distributed Cloud Edge is a fully managed product that brings Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services closer to where your data is being generated and consumed. Google Distributed Cloud Edge empowers you to run 5G Core and radio access network (RAN) functions at the edge, alongside enterprise applications, to support mission-critical use cases such as computer vision and Google AI edge inferencing. Google Distributed Cloud Edge is ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernizing on-premises environments, and deploying private 5G/LTE solutions across a variety of industries. With Google Distributed Cloud Edge, retailers can provision applications at a Google network location, which allows in-store teams to focus on customers rather than sorting out IT. Manufacturers can save time and money by using video for visual inspections on factory floors, and CSPs can offer high-speed bandwidth with private 5G and localized compute to their customers. Google Distributed Cloud Edge builds on our telecommunication solutions and empowers CSPs to run workloads on Intel and NVIDIA technologies to deliver new 5G and edge use cases. Google Distributed Cloud Edge also allows ISV and network functions partners, application developers, and data scientists to deliver innovation and scale quickly and efficiently.“CSPs are looking for faster ways to deploy cloud-native network architecture that can bring flexibility and agility to their edge solutions” said Dan Rodriguez, VP & GM Network Platforms Group at Intel, “Google Distributed Cloud Edge will help accelerate the delivery of 5G Telco Cloud and services at the edge leveraging Intel® Smart Edge Open, Intel’s FlexRAN® reference software, and Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.”“We are excited to partner with Google Cloud on Google Distributed Cloud Edge,” said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom at NVIDIA. “This builds on our continued partnership to deliver GPU-accelerated computing and networking solutions that help the telecommunications industry and enterprises harness data and AI-on-5G or AI at the edge to unlock new business opportunities.”We are also committed to delivering cloud capabilities to our partners’ 5G networks and beyond. Google Distributed Cloud Edge furthers our previously announced global, strategic partnerships with both Ericssonand Nokia to bring new solutions built on a cloud-native 5G core and develop the network edge as a business services platform for enterprises.“This announcement builds on our on-going partnership with Google Cloud to develop Nokia cloud-native 5G core and Nokia radio solutions for Google’s edge computing platform. By extending this relationship into Google Distributed Cloud Edge, we will increase customer choice and flexibility, ultimately helping our global customer base with multiple cloud-based solutions to deliver 5G services on the network edge,” said Nishant Batra, Nokia Chief Strategy and Technology Officer.In addition to network modernization, we are focused on building an edge ecosystem to help CSPs move beyond connectivity services and monetize the edge. Together, 5G and edge provide a powerful combination to help enterprises continue to digitize their business while leveraging third-party services from our trusted partner ecosystem in their dedicated environment. “The announcement of Google Distributed Cloud supports Ericsson’s vision of the network becoming a platform of innovation, enabling companies across the ecosystem to deliver the applications of the future the way they need to, unlocking the full potential of 5G and edge,” said Rishi Bhaskar, Vice President and Head of Hyperscale Cloud Providers for Ericsson North America.Google Distributed Cloud HostedDesigned to run sensitive workloads, Google Distributed Cloud Hosted builds on the digital sovereignty vision we outlined last year, and supports public-sector customers and commercial entities that have strict data residency, security or privacy requirements. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted provides you with a safe and secure way to modernize an on-premises deployment, regardless of whether you do it yourself or choose to host through a designated, trusted partner. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted does not require connectivity to Google Cloud at any time to manage infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling, and uses a local control plane provided by Anthos for operations. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted will be available in preview in the first half of 2022. To address the needs of customers and governments across Europe, we are also developing trusted partner offerings as part of our ‘Cloud. On Europe’s Terms’ initiative. These partners will provide governments and enterprises the highest levels of digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or pace of innovation. Each of these partnerships leverage different technologies. Last week, we announced a “Trusted Cloud” partnership with Thales. On Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, two of our initial partnerships are with T-Systems in Germany and OVHcloud in France. T-Systems is building a sovereign cloud offering in partnership with Google Cloud for private and public-sector organizations based in Germany, which will become available in mid-2022. “T-Systems and Google Cloud share a common goal of developing cloud-based solutions for European governments and enterprises that meet their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives,” said Frank Strecker, Senior Vice President Global Cloud Computing & Big Data and Edge, T-Systems. “Together we will offer a sovereign cloud solution for customers in Germany that gives them peace of mind to meet their rapidly evolving data, operational, and software sovereignty requirements.”We’ve also announced a strategic partnership with OVHcloud to accelerate French and European organizations’ ability to digitally transform and reimagine their businesses.“We have seen how Google Cloud listens to their customers, partners and policymakers in Europe and heard the need for even greater control and autonomy,” said Sylvain Rouri, CSO at OVHcloud. “Together, we are building a sovereign cloud services portfolio that provides clients with full control over their data, software and operations whilst leveraging the full power of Google Cloud and meeting the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation.”A cloud infrastructure built for your evolving needsIn addition to building a true distributed cloud, our work on core Google Cloud infrastructure (compute, network, and storage capabilities) continues unabated. This year, Google Cloud expanded its global infrastructure by opening four new regions in Warsaw, Delhi, Melbourne, and Toronto. We now have 28 regions around the world, making us the largest and lowest latency network among hyperscale cloud providers. We also announced future availability in Berlin-Brandenburg; Columbus, OH; Israel; Madrid; Milan; Paris; Santiago; Saudi Arabia; and Turin. Combined with over 140 network-edge locations worldwide, these Google Cloud regions deliver the services, capacity, and performance you need to ensure a terrific experience for your users.We also continued to advance our network by investing in subsea cables that improve access to Google services. With the addition of Firmina, which will connect the East Coast of the United States to three locations in South America, we now have investments in 19 subsea cables. All of this allows us to provide transformative infrastructure to businesses that build on Google Cloud.Service-centric networking As our global network increases in reach, we’re building out service-centric networking capabilities to simplify everything from connectivity to observability. For organizations with interconnects, VPNs, and SD-WANs, Networking Connectivity Center provides a centralized management model, with monitoring and visualization through our Network Intelligence Center. And, with Private Service Connect, partners and customers such as Bloomberg, MongoDB, and Elastic are now able to easily connect services without having to configure the underlying network. Enterprises with workloads both on-premises and in the cloud can leverage hybrid load balancing to securely optimize application delivery. To help you detect and prevent malicious bot attacks, we recently integrated reCAPTCHA Enterprise with Cloud Amor. Together with Cloud IDS, the Google network edge is fortified with best-in-class security. Industry-leading computeOne of the reasons people choose Google Cloud is for access to the latest high-performance compute services. For example, Compute Engine can be configured with Tau VMs, which are optimized for scale-out workloads. Tau VMs offer 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose virtual machines from any of the leading public cloud vendors. Today, we are also excited to announce our new Compute Engine Spot VMs in Preview. Spot VMs offer customers better guaranteed minimum savings and more pricing predictability than spot instances from any other leading cloud provider. With fewer restrictions on excess compute capacity, Spot VMs are the future of preemptible instances for Google Cloud. Both Tau VMs and Spot VMs are supported with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Reliable and secure storage Over the last year, we’ve been focused on making our storage easier to use, more performant, and the best choice for enterprises. We recently announced extensions to our popular Cloud Storage offering, and introduced two new services: Filestore Enterprise and Backup for GKE. Together, these new capabilities make it easier for you to protect your data out-of-the box across a wide variety of applications and use cases. For a deeper dive into these storage announcements, watch our on-demand webinar, listen to our developer podcast, and be sure to attend our storage-focused sessions at NEXT ’21. Delivering a flexible cloud strategyOur goal is to make your journey to the cloud easy. With transformative capabilities to help you innovate faster and save money, we follow an open approach to give you the greatest flexibility and choice as your organization evolves. Join us at the “Driving Transformation with Google Distributed Cloud” spotlight session and watch the interactive live demo of Google’s latest investments in application modernization and infrastructure in a distributed cloud environment.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform