TechTalk Driving Innovation and Transformation with Data and Analytics
When it comes to IT evolution, collaboration is king.
By Insight Editor / 18 May 2021 / Topics: Analytics Cloud
By Insight Editor / 18 May 2021 / Topics: Analytics Cloud
Modern data platforms enable organizations to adapt processes, enhance the customer experience and boost efficiency. Watch or listen as Stan Lequin of Insight and Kevin Collins of Google discuss how their teams partner with Databricks to create flexible, future-ready solutions for clients.
To experience this week’s episode, listen on the player above, watch the conversation below, or scroll down to read a complete transcript. You can also subscribe to Insight TechTalk on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Audio transcript:
[Music]
Stan
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I am excited to discuss two of my favorite partners, Google and Databricks. We have an incredible success driving transformation innovation on the GCP platform around data and analytics. And so, we could not be happier to have one of our other partners where we're a partner of the year winner on Databricks engage, and so when I think about what we've done together with GCP and with Google and with Databricks it kind of feels like a Reese's Pieces moment or a Reese's peanut butter cups, like two great tastes that come together and are even better, and so I could not be more excited. I'm joined today by Kevin Collins. Who's the Senior Director of North America Solutions Technology and Partners at Google. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kevin.
Kevin
Thanks Stan. I couldn't be more excited. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.
Stan
Awesome, well let's dive into it, a little bit of Q and a if that's okay?
Kevin
Absolutely, Let's do it. Let’s have some fun.
Stan
All right. So, Google and Databricks share a common vision on data and AI, and that's a vision that's open, unified, and simple for customers. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why it's so important?
Kevin
Yeah, I'd love to, and first really quickly I like to thank you Stan, and as well as the entire Insight team for having me here. This is as you said, a great, great partnership and a great sandwich, and hopefully we can put some good meat and potatoes in between it.
So, thank you, and yeah, to your question. Now, I'm really excited about the partnership with Databricks, you know, we provide organizations with an open approach that allows greater flexibility for customers to create their data and AI strategies and it builds on top of the Google commitment to open cloud, right? This approach gives our customers and insurers interoperability portability for enterprises including those that want to use multi-cloud strategies and open-source technologies, like Kubernetes, MLflow, Apache Spark, you know, Delta Lake. We're actually trying to meet customers where they are and their cloud journey, right, by protecting them from vendor lock-in and supporting the clouds to the degree that they want to support them in the applications that they want to support, right?
Our distributed cloud provides solutions and consistency across all the public clouds as well as the private clouds, right? And we provide a solid foundation for modernization and ability to drive for future success. So, we've even gone as far as making our data analytics and our machine learning tools available on other platforms to help customers out as well. So, we talked about the partner with Databricks it just further extends our strategy of openness and another great partner and vendor to work with. So, pretty excited.
Stan
Incredible commitment to open an open clouStand the amount of just incredible technology that’s coming out of Google. You mentioned Kubernetes, of course and how we look at that as various arrows that are in the quiver of things that we can use as relates to creating transformation innovation has been incredible, and so, to see Google continued on this path with this relationship is really exciting to us. Perfect, thanks, Kevin.
Kevin
Awesome.
Stan
Well, I know what's exciting to me, right? But can you talk a little bit about what makes us so exciting for our mutual customers?
Kevin
Yeah, happy to do that. It’s the pandemic has put a lot of customers and a lot of businesses forced them to kind of rechange the way they're going to market and digitization in the cloud has been a primary lever for success for a lot of the folks that have made it and had to change their business. It's a huge, huge lever. As we think forward enterprises want to improve their customer experiences, now that they're in the cloud, now that they've gone through the change, how can they provide a better customer experience, right? Increase the efficiency and productivity with data-driven processes as they're looking back at their supply chain, how can they get data and information quicker and faster to help them with their supply chains, and how do they create new revenue opportunities, right?
These are all things that customers are asking and drive them for, and in order to provide that in today's world either reliable and secure data platform and it's absolutely essential to make that happen, and that's what we're trying to do with the relationship with Databricks, so at the end of the day with this customers both get the value and benefit of Databricks with value and benefit of GCP in our platform, right? So, a couple of the things I'd call out their advantages for customers that use GCP is first, to global scalability, elasticity, and security we provide by our global network, which is one of the best in the world, right? The ability to deploy Databricks and containers with our Kubernetes GKE, right? It's the first Kubernetes based deployment of Databricks on any cloud, right? So that's pretty amazing stuff.
The ability to integrate capabilities that we provide in Google cloud, such as AI, Machine learning, BigQuery, and Looker with our regular data platforms that’s going to decrease latency and provide a better experience for our customer's users as well as their customers as well. So, a huge benefit there and then lastly, customers that I want to deploy Databricks vie our marketplace are going to have the added benefit of integrated security billing and rapid deployment. So, it's the combination I think, is world-class and something that I think both Insight and our customers can take advantage of.
Stan
Yeah, and just some tremendous information in there, Right? So, I dig into what you said about experience, right? And so, we put a big focus on best experience wins. We do just a tremendous amount of transformation around modern application and we do a lot around product enhancement, product and service enhancement and there really aren't any projects we're doing today that don't include artificial intelligence as a core component to the systems and solutions and applications that we're releasing, and so AI enabled an incredible experience that have become sort of table stakes today. So, I love that you had that and the security aspect of it. I don't know if everyone realizes just how incredible and expansive the network is. It's only a couple of hops before you get on Google's network in, and so from a security perspective just tremendous capabilities there, resiliency and everything else through the network that you built as part of obviously a search capability. So just incredible capabilities there.
Kevin
Yeah, thanks for calling that out. It is special and unique in every customer that we talk to that actually looks into it and sees how expansive it really is, is impressed. So, it's a big differentiator and something from, to your point as security as well as a scalability perspective, big benefits for our customers.
Stan
Awesome. Well, let's talk a little bit about trends. What trends are you seeing in enterprises as relates to their transition and move to cloud for analytics and AI?
Kevin
Yeah, good question, Stan. It's goes back a little bit to the pandemic conversation we had a few seconds ago, right? Now, businesses that are going to thrive in the next decade are the ones that are going to build a strong foundation in data and analytics, right? If we take a look at the conversations, we're having with customers today, and what the biggest trends are, it’s data analytic and processing segment of our market, right? There's not a customer we talked to today that doesn't want to have that conversation, and how are we innovating there? How are we improving our business? And how can we make it better for them, right? So, companies that are embracing data analytics solutions are the ones going to be successful and they're really doing it. We're fine in for three major reasons, right?
First, there's a lot of companies that are struggling to handle the volume, right? Massive volumes of data coming in peaks and valleys, so it's not consistent all the time, depending on how your business or your deployment, and then how do you glean actionable insights from that, and in its expedient way, right? That's a challenge a lot of our customers are facing, right? The second challenge is, organization, architectures tools, and infrastructure have been built over the last 15, 20, 25 years and they're complex and complicated in a lot of ways, not by design, but it's just happened like that over the course of the year. So, customers need analytics and tools that have a common open platform, right? Where they can easily access data and have it available for all their analytics services. So that's the second.
And then the third, companies are looking for industry based AIML to provide them specific information and data to their industry to help provide specific insights, and you want to have an analytics platform that’s going to support that. Right, and then as we go back to the kind of some of the opening comments I made, you have to meet customers where they, right? So that requires in a lot of cases us to work across multiple clouds, right? You may have your data in one area. You may want to run your applications in another, and that's exactly what we're trying to bring to customers with Databricks and our partnership. So that's really kind of the vision there on that piece of it. And Stan, if you don't mind me flipping the table on you a little bit, you know, as we talk through this. I think there's a ton of value that Insight brings to the table, as well as we talked through, we talk a little bit about what Google and what Databricks is bringing but how can Insight really help our customers move to a stronger data platform faster?
Stan
Yeah, I know. Thanks, Kevin, I appreciate that. Yeah, so we have a fast start that we do. As I mentioned, we do a tremendous amount of stuff on Google from an analytics perspective from the cloud perspective. We were Databricks partner of the year. So, we do quite a bit around Databricks, and so we know what the sort of, what the value is, what this means from an end state perspective, and we know it's about proving that value for our clients. And so we built a fast start that really allows you to accelerate that value through rapid prototyping, building out the business value very quickly showing, I think when especially with data projects, and that's what I love about both platforms, you can get to value so quick, and so building that roadmap quickly to show with modern tools, what your data and analytic platform can be with GCP and Databricks, building out that prototype, and then showing to the business leaders and stakeholders around here's kind of what we can do, and then identifying that long-term roadmap for the platforms. And so, it's really our fast start, I think is the best way to engage us. If you go to insight.com/gcp-databricks that will actually give you an overview of our fast start and let you know how we can quickly engage and help show the power of the platforms.
Kevin
Awesome.
Stan
Awesome.
Kevin
What great way to get started man.
Stan
No doubt. Well, Hey Kevin, I can't thank you enough for your time today. This was great, really excited for our clients to hear about this tremendous partnership. Just loved everything you talked about today. I get a chance, best thing about my job is I get to meet with just a lot of different clients and talk about the business outcomes they’re trying to drive, and I just know how powerful this platform is going to be for them and your trends that you're going to spoke about resonates exactly what I hear about as we engage with enterprise organizations, and so, just so on message. So, thank you so much for your time today.
Kevin
Very welcome and thank you to you and Insight. Let's make it better for our customers.
Stan
Sounds great. All right, thanks again, everyone for joining us and have a great rest of the day.
Kevin
Have a good day.
[Music]
President, Insight Solutions
Stan leads Insight’s team of 5,000 deep technical experts — engineers, architects and software developers — who create and deliver integrated solutions dedicated to helping organizations accelerate their digital journey. His team solves clients' greatest pain points spanning the modern workplace, modern infrastructure, modern applications, data and artificial intelligence, the intelligent edge and cybersecurity. Insight Solutions cover consulting and managed services designed to help clients first visualize and strategize how they will innovate — including the organizational change management side of digital transformation — then fully execute and manage a fully digital business over time.
Senior Director of North America’s Solutions, Technology, and Partner Teams, Google Cloud
Kevin joined Google Cloud in January 2020 as the senior director of North America’s solutions, technology, and partner sales organizations. He leads a technical multi-product team responsible for ensuring Google’s horizontal solutions meet customer needs and building a best-in-class partner ecosystem.
Kevin has been serving customers and team members in the technology industry for over 30 years, including in previous roles at Red Hat and Microsoft. He has a strong track record of developing strong teams that are passionate about driving customer value through technology.
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