Article Written by Sally Perkins

Following a sustained decrease in home ownership, the market is looking up, with property ownership up 1.3% since June 2016, now standing at 64.2%. The rise is small, but not insignificant. With the economy performing well, millennials who were heavily affected by the 2008 global recession are now starting to believe that they can be homeowners again. Part of this could be down to the way technology is affecting the house buying process. Cloud technology is playing its part in improving the efficiency of property management, while creating a secure and convenient service to house hunters.

Five9, Inc., a leading provider of cloud contact center software for the digital enterprise, today announced an integration with Google Cloud’s new Contact Center AI, a solution that combines multiple AI products to improve the customer service experience, as well as the productivity of contact centers.

Google Contact Center AI is a simple, secure, and flexible solution that allows enterprises with limited machine learning expertise to deploy AI in their contact centers. The solution integrates with Five9 making customer integration of AI into their systems easy.

Key features of Five9’s integration with Google Contact Center AI include:

VMware and Google have announced a preview of a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) plugin for VMware vRealize Orchestrator, and support for GCP resources in VMware vRealize Automation.

The vRealize Orchestrator is used to automate other VMware products like the vSphere virtualization platform and the vCloud suite.  This new GCP plugin for vRealize Orchestrator is said to provide customers with a consistent management and governance experience across on-premises and GCP-based IT environments.  As an example, Google and VMware said a user would be able to use Google-provided blueprints (or build their own blueprints for Google Compute Engine resources) and publish them to the vRealize service catalog.  This means a user could select and launch resources in a predictable manner that would be similar to how they would launch VMs in their on-premises VMware environment, using a tool with which they are already familiar.  

Weigh up the pros and cons of cloud computing

As a business owner, you should have total confidence in every move you make. Otherwise, it will be impossible for you to secure the backing of your clients, your employees, and your important investors. Even if you are fairly confident about a new initiative, it is still worth your while to weigh up the pros and cons. This is especially true when it comes to cloud computing. Moving your business onto the cloud is a huge step to take. It will completely transform your operation. That is why you should undertake an extensive research project before you get started.

Cohesity, a leader of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced that Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition is now available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a new, cutting-edge enterprise-grade solution for backup and recovery of applications that use Google Compute Engine. As a result, Cohesity now offers data backup and protection for a wide array of public clouds, empowering enterprise customers with an incredibly efficient and easy-to-manage solution for secondary data workloads across multi-cloud architectures.

Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition on the Google Cloud Platform delivers web-scale platform attributes such as unlimited scalability and resiliency for backing up applications running on Google Cloud Platform. The integrated solution provides enterprise-grade backup of applications that use Google Compute Engine (GCE), the infrastructure-as-a-service component of GCP, addressing a growing market demand.

Arista Networks today announced its Any Cloud hybrid cloud networking platform, which reduces operational costs and complexity for enterprises migrating workloads to the public cloud from their on-premises datacenters, is now available on Google Cloud Platform. The new virtualized offering, Arista vEOS Router combined with CloudVision with Cloud Tracer functionality, provides consistent operations, orchestration, security, and telemetry across multi-cloud environments. 

"We are proud to be participating in the Google Cloud Partner Program and the ecosystem of Google technology partners that are helping to expand the cloud platform globally," said Manuel Rivelo, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer. "The combined solution of Arista Any Cloud and the Google Cloud Platform will deliver new capabilities and value to our hybrid and public cloud customers."

Cloudability announced it is now supporting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) on the company’s True Cost cloud management platform. Businesses and enterprises using Cloudability now have full visibility into their GCP spend, giving them even more power to fully visualize their costs, manage budgets and drive cost savings. This offering is a result of customers asking Cloudability to deliver a single, integrated and normalized view for spend and utilization on the three major public clouds – GCP, AWS and Azure, providing actionable cost insights to organizations with multi-cloud environments.

"As an enterprise team focused on building reliable, effective products on top of public clouds, it was imperative for the USA TODAY NETWORK to have a technology partner that could help us manage costs and optimize resources," said Franklin Hanson, Director of Platform Engineering at USA TODAY NETWORK. "By leveraging Cloudability’s public cloud expertise and support for our Google Cloud environment, our team is able to focus on the platform itself, while still maximizing the value of our public cloud provider."

CloudBees, the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, today announced it is introducing a commercial Kubernetes-native application available immediately in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. The new offering will provide users with end-to-end coverage of all software delivery pipelines. With the launch of the GCP Marketplace, for the first time ever, commercial Kubernetes applications are available to deploy with one click to Google Kubernetes Engine. CloudBees, a Google Technical Partner, is also a sponsor of Google Next, July 24-26, Booth 3017, Moscone West.

GCP Marketplace is based on a multi-cloud and hybrid-first philosophy, focused on giving Google Cloud partners and enterprise customers flexibility without lock-in. It also helps customers innovate by easily adopting new technologies from ISV partners, such as commercial Kubernetes-native applications, and allows companies to oversee the full lifecycle of a solution from discovery through management.

ClearDATA, a leading security and compliance expert in the healthcare cloud, has joined forces with Google Cloud to accelerate healthcare innovation. The new partnership hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) combines Google Cloud’s innovation with ClearDATA’s healthcare compliance expertise to speed advancements and scale healthcare IT infrastructure. 

The new offering comes at a time when digital transformation is impacting healthcare. As pharmaceutical, life sciences and healthcare providers and payers keep pace with advanced analytics from large data sets, machine learning and other breakthrough technologies, they face numerous constraints to innovate including scalability and fear of data breaches, even with complex regulations in place to protect patient data. With the new partnership, healthcare organizations can ensure that security and protective measures are managed proactively while fully capitalizing on Google Cloud Platform’s advanced capabilities.

BindPlane addresses the common challenge most data center operations teams experience – gaining a comprehensive view of what’s going on across their IT ecosystem. BindPlane dramatically expands observability for large enterprises monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and is now available across AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google and Alibaba cloud environments.

The Multi-Cloud Challenge