This Director of IT for a large retail & consumer enterprise is streamlining global initiatives and focusing on high-value projects like supply chain optimization and migration to the cloud. Our guest describes a permanent shift from physical stores to e-commerce and highlights an increasing focus on data security across all consumer data. Read on to learn the benefits of a dedicated Google Cloud Platform instance, how to best leverage consumption-based versus subscription models, and how generative AI is likely to be deployed across large organizations.
Vendors Mentioned: Akamai / Alteryx / Cisco / Cloudflare / Google / MariaDB / Microsoft (Azure, Power BI, Teams) / MongoDB / OpenAI / Salesforce (Tableau)/ Snowflake / Splunk / Teradata / Zoom
Vendor-Specific Commentary – Google Shop Also Employs Cloudflare, Azure, MongoDB
Data Migrations. Our guest confirms a general industry shift away from legacy providers such as IBM, Teradata, and Oracle towards more cloud-native players like Snowflake and MongoDB, though their transition to the cloud has been hampered by the sheer size of their data warehouses and the billions of records they manage. “We use cloud platforms for e-commerce, customer data, BI, and for certain applications. But the financials, the HR, and the sales transactional data, we have not been able to move them out yet. I will say we are still in the process.” This organization increasingly uses MongoDB and MariaDB for small-scale applications. Their major cloud providers are Microsoft Azure and Google; they do not use AWS. “We used to have a huge on-premise Teradata installation, and we moved out to Google Cloud Platform, but it took us almost three years. I think we still have small portions running on Teradata.”
The company is also moving towards modernizing its data prep tools, a corporate mandate driven by consolidation and licensing cost concerns, with most of that spending also going to Google. “They were very supportive. Nothing is free, but they put a huge team to help us transition from our previous provider to Google.” Despite the move to Google, the organization continues to use Tableau and Power BI for data analytics and visualizations.
GCP Cybersecurity. This company employs multiple vendors, as our guest emphasizes the need for constant innovation and adoption of new technologies in the cybersecurity sector. “This is such a dynamic area, if you don't move fast, you fall behind fast.” The company benefits from a private instance and direct, high-speed connection to Google Cloud Platform natively, which is more secure than Google’s default public cloud. “Google has data centers dedicated to us directly.”
ETR Data: According to the preliminary January 2024 Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS) data, Google is maintaining strength across several of the highlighted sectors and product areas that this interview guest discussed. The ML/AI, Database / Data Warehousing, and Analytics sectors are all in line with or higher than the spending intention levels captured last year. The Information Security sector is showing strong growth, and the Contact Center products and services have seen a meteoric rise over the last twelve months. However, as our guest alluded to, despite the transition to Google's data and analytics architecture, its B.I. and Reporting feature is not growing at the same rate, as seen above in Looker's year-over-year decline. Please note that ETR tracks Google in several other areas of technology not shown in this chart.
Additional Vendor Commentary – See Interview Replay or Transcript for Full Details
Cloudflare > Akamai. Our guest points to the rapid growth and expansion of Cloudflare's services, including its global network, cloud offerings, and DNS services. “With Akamai, the more you use, your spend goes up too fast…we moved out of Akamai for our e-commerce platform.”
Cisco Hardware is Here to Stay. Like many large enterprises, this company relies on Cisco for its hardware infrastructure, including switches, routers, and VPNs. However, this guest is transitioning away from Cisco's communications and collaboration platform in favor of Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Upcoming Trends. Our guests think technologies like OpenAI and ChatGPT are interesting but suspect their short-term impact might be limited for very large companies. Labor challenges, real automation, robotics, and IoT are presently a higher priority. Customer service may be the first beneficiary of generative AI, making chatbots more efficient and friendly. “When you cannot identify if it's a real person behind that chatbot, that's when you are being successful.”
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