Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprise

Ten years ago, business technology was at the forefront of innovation and productivity. But there’s a fundamental shift underway: in the last few years, consumer technology has begun to outpace business technology. People have fallen in love with the simplicity and freedom of living in the cloud with the help of modern browsers and smartphones—and they want to bring that experience to the workplace.

This is where Google comes in. For the better part of the past decade, we’ve worked to extend our popular consumer products—everything from Gmail and Google Drive to Maps, Google+ and Search—to meet your business needs. It should be easy for you to work better together, from anywhere, with secure (and simple!) tools. Here’s a look back at some key highlights from 2012.

Work securely...
Keeping your information secure is one of our top priorities. To that end, domain administrators can now require their employees to use 2-step verification, an additional layer of security that reduces the chance of unauthorized account access. Your company can also use Google Apps Vault, a solution for managing and archiving critical information for legal and regulatory reasons. If your business operates outside the U.S., we now offer Model Contract Clauses as an additional way to comply with the European Commission’s Data Protection Directive. Finally, Google Apps received ISO 27001 certification, ensuring our systems meet one of the most widely, internationally accepted independent security standards.

… anytime, anywhere...
It should be easy to get work done – anytime, on any device, with anyone. With offline editing in Chrome, you can now create and edit Google documents and leave comments even when you don’t have an Internet connection. Any changes you make will be automatically synced when you get back online. When you’re travelling, you can also edit Google documents and spreadsheets using the Drive app on your iPhone, iPad or Android device. Just like on your computer, you’ll be able to see other people’s edits instantly as they’re made.

If your business has workers on the go, Google Maps Coordinate combines the power of Google’s mapping technologies with modern smartphones to help you improve communication with employees in the field. In addition, the Google Play Private Channel lets you distribute internal apps to your employees who use Android devices. The new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes we launched with our partners are secure and easy to manage, which makes them especially great devices for 1-to-1 programs in schools, additional laptops for office workers, or desktop units for multiple users in a call center. (And we’re honored that Inc. Magazine named the Chromebox one of the best business gadgets of 2012.)


...with simple tools...
We’ve also focused on making our products simpler and easier for you to use – both at home and at work. We introduced Google Drive as a single place for you to create, share, collaborate and keep all your work. You can now insert files (up to 10GB) from Drive directly into an email without leaving your Gmail inbox, and you can share work from Drive on Google+. You and up to 14 colleagues can join a Google+ hangout directly from a calendar entry or your email inbox. Once inside a hangout, you can open a Google Doc for everyone to see and work on simultaneously. And if your company uses Chrome along with Google Apps, you can now call or email us for help with Chrome.

With the Google Search Appliance 7.0, you can search for a document on your company’s intranet just as easily as you’d search for a holiday recipe on Google.com. And if your business relies on geographic data—say, to map gas pipelines or help customers locate your store—you can use Google Maps and Earth Enterprise to visualize your data on the Google Maps interface you’re already familiar with.



...supported by partners and Google infrastructure
Whether it’s Apps for Business, Maps Coordinate, or just a Google search, most Google services you use are possible only because of the powerful and energy-efficient infrastructure we’ve built over the years. This year, we worked to bring you more direct access to this infrastructure to help run your businesses and applications in the cloud. Compute Engine lets your business run virtual machines in Google’s data centers and BigQuery helps you quickly analyze big sets of data to gain business insights. Google Cloud Platform also offers more European datacenter support and lower prices for Cloud Storage.

The new Google Cloud Platform Partner Program ensures that partners have the tools and training to help your business meet its IT needs. And the Google Enterprise Partner Search makes it easy for you to find one of our 6,000 Google Apps Resellers with the services you’re looking for – from setup and user training to email migration, management services and support.

Work doesn’t always need to feel like work. Leaders in every industry—from retail, media and manufacturing to transportation, education and government—are adopting this notion, which we call “going Google.” Going Google means something different for everyone: starting a wine business with your two best friends, trying to build a bear-proof cooler, or keeping citizens safe. But we all have the common goal of bringing our organization into the future so we can work the way we live.

Posted by Zafir Khan, Google App Engine Team

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train.

In rural areas, it’s common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it’s often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud.

Nomanini, a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means “easy” in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales terminal that is used on-the-go by people ranging from taxi drivers to street vendors. It generates and prints codes which people purchase to add minutes to their mobile phones.

Today, Vuyile sells vouchers on the train for cash payment, and earns a commission weekly. Since he started using the Lula, he’s seen his monthly income increase by 20 percent.


Nomanini founders Vahid and Ali Monadjem wanted to make mobile services widely available in areas where they had been inaccessible, or where—in a region where the average person makes less than $200/month—people simply couldn’t afford them. By creating a low-cost and easy-to-use product, Nomanini could enable entrepreneurs in Africa to go to deep rural areas and create businesses for themselves.

In order to build a scalable and reliable backend system to keep the Lula running, Nomanini chose to run on Google App Engine. Their development team doesn’t have to spend time setting up their own servers and can instead run on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s own applications. They can focus on building their backend systems and easily deploy code to Google’s data centers. When Vuyile makes a sale, he presses a few buttons, App Engine processes the request, and the voucher prints in seconds.

Last month, 40,000 people bought airtime through the Lula, and Nomanini hopes to grow this number to 1 million per month next year. While platforms like App Engine are typically used to build web or smartphone apps, entrepreneurs like Vahid and Ali are finding innovative ways to leverage this technology by building their own devices and connecting them to App Engine. Vahid tells us: “We’re a uniquely born and bred African solution, and we have great potential to take this to the rest of Africa and wider emerging markets. We could not easily scale this fast without running on Google App Engine.”

To learn more about the technical implementation used by Nomanini, read their guest post on the Google App Engine blog.

Posted by Jessie Jiang, Product Management Director

(Cross-posted on the Google Developers Blog.)

We're constantly making updates to our Google Cloud Platform products—Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Big Query, Compute Engine and others—based on user feedback and to improve the overall experience. For example, two weeks ago we introduced a major update to Google Cloud SQL providing faster performance, larger databases (100GB), an EU zone, and a no-cost trial. But, we know there is more to do. Today, we’re continuing to improve the platform with new storage and compute capabilities, significantly lower prices, and more European Datacenter support.

Lower storage prices and new Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) Storage
To give you more flexibility in your storage options and prices, we’re reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20% and introducing a limited preview of Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage. DRA storage lowers prices by trading off some data availability while maintaining the same latency performance and durability as standard Google Cloud Storage. DRA can be used for things like batch compute jobs that can easily be rescheduled or for data back-up where quick access to your data is important. DRA achieves cost savings by keeping fewer redundant replicas of data. Unlike other reduced redundancy cloud storage offerings, DRA is implemented in a manner that maintains data durability so you don't have to worry about losing your data in the cloud.

And, to automatically keep a history of old versions of your data, we’re introducing Object Versioning. You can also use it to help protect against deleting or overwriting your data by mistake or due to an application error.

More European Datacenter support
We are continuing to roll out our European Datacenter support. Now, customers using Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and (soon) Google Compute Engine can deploy their applications, data and virtual machines to European Datacenters. This helps bring your solutions even closer to your customers for faster performance and enables international redundancy.

36 New Compute Engine instance types and overall reduced prices
Earlier this year we introduced a Limited Preview of Google Compute Engine with four standard instance types. Today, we are announcing 36 additional instance types and are reducing the price of our original 4 standard instances by about 5% for those currently in our preview. In the coming weeks, the following will be available:

• High Memory Instance - High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.
• High CPU Instance - Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.
• Diskless Configurations - Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.

We are also introducing Persistent Disk Snapshotting which makes it simple to instantly create a backup of your disk, move it around Google datacenters, and use the snapshot to start up a new VM.

We want to thank you, the community of developers and businesses who are pushing the platform into new areas and building innovative applications. We look forward to seeing where you take it next. Find out more about the new Cloud Storage pricing and Compute Engine instances. Sign up now and get started today.

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager, Google BigQuery

Big Data can be a challenge for businesses and developers. There is so much information available today that it can be difficult to gain insights and make business decisions based on that data. Last month, Google BigQuery integrated several partner solutions, making it easier to import data from other cloud and on-premise solutions and visualize your data with rich interactive dashboards. Today, we’re giving you new ways to work with your data by adding two new features to BigQuery.

Batch Queries

While BigQuery specializes in getting insights quickly, we understand that there are important, non-interactive queries, such as nightly reports, that businesses also need to run. Now, you can designate a query as a batch query and it will complete within a few hours.If you’re using BigQuery via our standard self-service model, you pay 2 cents per GB processed for batch queries and 3.5 cents per GB processed for interactive queries.

BigQuery Connector for Excel

Analysts and executives use spreadsheets to explore large data sets. Last year, we launched the ability for BigQuery users to execute queries inside Google spreadsheets using the Google Apps Script integration. With the new BigQuery Connector for Excel, we’re now making it simpler to execute BigQuery queries using Microsoft^® Excel. This connector takes advantage of Excel’s standard web query feature to eliminate the extra work of manually importing data and running queries directly within Excel. For instructions on how to download and use the connector, see the BigQuery Connector for Excel page.

If you haven’t gotten started with Google BigQuery yet, you can sign up here.

[Microsoft and Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.]

Posted by Brittany Wenger, Winner of Google Science Fair 2012

(Cross-posted from Google App Engine Blog)

Editors note: Today’s guest blog post comes from 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, the winner of this year’s Google Science Fair. Brittany built an application on Google App Engine called the Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer. This artificial neural network can detect complex patterns in data, learning how to classify malignant or cancerous cells it hasn’t seen before. Learn more about her project.



When a patient has a palpable breast lump, the first step a doctor takes is to determine whether the mass is malignant or benign. One relatively simple diagnostic procedure is a form of biopsy called fine needle aspiration (FNA). Though these tests are less invasive than others, they are historically less accurate as well. My goal was to create a tool for doctors to use when interpreting test results from these procedures.

For this project, I decided to create a neural network built on Google App Engine, using data published to the Machine Learning Repository by the University of Wisconsin. A neural network attempts to replicate the brain as a form of artificial intelligence through networks of computers and can be used to detect extremely complex patterns. It learns from its mistakes, so it can classify a case it hasn’t seen before as malignant or cancerous based on specific criteria like clump thickness or bland chromatin. Because the diagnostic power of the network improves the more data it has, building on App Engine is a way to ensure the app can continue to scale easily, no matter how much information goes into the system.

I got started integrating my neural network application code, written in Java, with App Engine in a few hours using the SDK’s Greeting Service sample code as a starting point. The application has two main parts, a training module, that implements the neural network itself and runs the training process over the input data stored in static files, and a web interface that takes input data and returns the network’s analysis.

Google App Engine provides the scalable infrastructure I need to collect information from every hospital in the world and run when there are many concurrent requests, as usage of my application increases. Because my network is built as a cloud service, not only is my app working on the web, but mobile tablets, smartphones, old PC systems, or new technologies can also easily access the service from any hospital with an internet connection.

The neural network I developed is 99.11% sensitive to malignancy when using leave-one-out testing with original data. Thus far, I have run 7.6 million trials. Moving forward my goal is to make the application accessible to the global medical community so more data can be deposited and used to improve the diagnostic power of the network.

Posted by Eric Morse, Head of Sales and Business Development, Google Cloud Platform

Cloud is core to everything we do here at Google. In the last decade, we’ve invested in building an infrastructure that can serve 4 billion hours of video every month, support 425 million Gmail users and store 100 petabytes of web index, and it’s growing every day. We’ve taken this technology and extended it via Google Cloud Platform so that you can benefit from the same infrastructure that powers Google's applications.

As a business, we know you spend a lot of valuable time thinking about IT solutions. We think it’s important to provide you with the best options for your business, which is why we are thrilled to introduce the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program. This program provides our partners with the tools, training and resources they need to successfully address your business’ IT needs. For example, Orangescape Technologies, one of our partners, integrated Google App Engine as part of their platform to help United Biscuits, a leading manufacturer of biscuits and snacks in Europe, migrate their legacy Lotus Notes applications to the cloud.

The Google Cloud Platform partner program has two types of partners.

Service Partners
Service Partners provide consulting and implementation services on various Google Cloud Platform products. You can use their knowledge and expertise to develop applications like:

• Business apps: Ci&T, a global systems integrator, built a new quotation app on Google App Engine to help SulAmerica, one of the largest insurance providers in Brazil, provide better policy quotations to millions of their customers.
• Mobile apps: Agosto built a smartphone app running on Google App Engine to help the Minneapolis Loppet Foundation register thousands of participants in a Nordic ski event.
• Social apps: PA Consulting built a crowd-sourced app on Google App Engine and Google Maps for MetOffice to provide richer, up-to-date local weather forecasts around the world.

Technology Partners
Technology Partners provide tools that integrate with Google’s platform or use one of our services as a foundation for their products.

• Google Compute Engine: Compute Engine technology partners offer a rich set of management services that help you configure and manage applications running on Google’s infrastructure.
• Google BigQuery: BigQuery technology partners enable you to import data from a wide range of existing on-premise and cloud data sources into BigQuery, as well as build rich, visually interactive dashboards on top of BigQuery.
• Google Cloud Storage: Cloud Storage technology partners have integrated Google Cloud Storage directly into their offerings to provide you with active archiving, backup and recovery, and primary storage solutions.

Contact a Google Cloud Platform partner directly to learn how they can help you make the most of your IT investments by taking advantage of Google Cloud Platform.

Posted by Craig McLuckie, Product Manager, Google Compute Engine

(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.)

Over the years, Google has built some of the most high performing, scalable and efficient data centers in the world by constantly refining our hardware and software. Since 2008, we've been working to open up our infrastructure to outside developers and businesses so they can take advantage of our cloud as they build applications and websites and store and analyze data. So far this includes products like Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google BigQuery.

Today, in response to many requests from developers and businesses, we're going a step further. We're introducing Google Compute Engine, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that lets you run Linux Virtual Machines (VMs) on the same infrastructure that powers Google. This goes beyond just giving you greater flexibility and control; access to computing resources at this scale can fundamentally change the way you think about tackling a problem.


Google Compute Engine offers:

• Scale. At Google we tackle huge computing tasks all the time, like indexing the web, or handling billions of search queries a day. Using Google's data centers, Google Compute Engine reduces the time to scale up for tasks that require large amounts of computing power. You can launch enormous compute clusters - tens of thousands of cores or more.
• Performance. Many of you have learned to live with erratic performance in the cloud. We have built our systems to offer strong and consistent performance even at massive scale. For example, we have sophisticated network connections that ensure consistency. Even in a shared cloud you don’t see interruptions; you can tune your app and rely on it not degrading.
• Value. Computing in the cloud is getting even more appealing from a cost perspective. The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers. You can see pricing details here.

The capabilities of Google Compute Engine include:

• Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.
• Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.
• Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the Internet with configurable firewalls.
• Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.

At launch, we have worked with a number of partners - such as RightScale, Puppet Labs, OpsCode, Numerate, Cliqr and MapR - to integrate their products with Google Compute Engine. These partners offer management services that make it easy for you to move your applications to the cloud and between different cloud environments.

You can learn more about Google Compute Engine here. We’re going to pace ourselves and start with Google Compute Engine in limited preview (sign up here), but our goal is to give you all the pieces you need to build anything you want in the cloud. Whether you need a platform like Google App Engine, or virtual machines like Google Compute Engine, these days, you define your limits. We’re just at the start of what the cloud can do.

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek and Momchil Filev, Google BigQuery Team

(Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.)

Last month we announced the public launch of Google BigQuery, which enables developers and businesses to gain real-time business insights from massive amounts of data without any hardware or software investments.

Since then, we’ve added new features to Google BigQuery every week. For example, our most recent release includes support for running up to 20 concurrent queries, depending on the volume of data. This enables developers to build visually interactive dashboards on Google BigQuery.

Today, we’re highlighting two data visualization providers, QlikView and Bime, who are using Google BigQuery’s latest features to build dashboards with snappier and richer experiences.

QlikView

QlikView, one of the leaders in the Business Intelligence market, has developed a dashboard that visualizes the birth-record data for all babies born to mothers of different ages and races. With the help of BigQuery, QlikView can crunch millions of rows of data in seconds to answer questions like, “What's the average age of a mother in New York vs. in Texas?"

Bime

Bime, a cloud-based Business Intelligence provider based in France, is another early adopter of Google BigQuery. They’ve built a slick UI on top of the Google BigQuery platform that allows users to slice and dice 432 million rows of business data. For example, you can adjust a few simple parameters to see the sales distribution across products or regions on a map.

This is just a snapshot of how developers can use Google BigQuery to build interactive visual dashboards using a browser and without the hassle of managing SQL. Sign up and share your BigQuery use cases via our developer feedback form or on the Google Enterprise Google+ page.

Posted by Ju-kay Kwek, Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google App Engine Blog and the Google Code Blog.)

Rapidly crunching terabytes of big data can lead to better business decisions, but this has traditionally required tremendous IT investments. Imagine a large online retailer that wants to provide better product recommendations by analyzing website usage and purchase patterns from millions of website visits. Or consider a car manufacturer that wants to maximize its advertising impact by learning how its last global campaign performed across billions of multimedia impressions. Fortune 500 companies struggle to unlock the potential of data, so it’s no surprise that it’s been even harder for smaller businesses.

We developed Google BigQuery Service for large-scale internal data analytics. At Google I/O last year, we opened a preview of the service to a limited number of enterprises and developers. Today we're releasing some big improvements, and putting one of Google's most powerful data analysis systems into the hands of more companies of all sizes.

• We’ve added a graphical user interface for analysts and developers to rapidly explore massive data through a web application.
• We’ve made big improvements for customers accessing the service programmatically through the API. The new REST API lets you run multiple jobs in the background and manage tables and permissions with more granularity.
• Whether you use the BigQuery web application or API, you can now write even more powerful queries with JOIN statements. This lets you run queries across multiple data tables, linked by data that tables have in common.
• It’s also now easy to manage, secure, and share access to your data tables in BigQuery, and export query results to the desktop or to Google Cloud Storage.

Michael J. Franklin, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, remarked that BigQuery (internally known as Dremel) leverages “thousands of machines to process data at a scale that is simply jaw-dropping given the current state of the art.” We’re looking forward to helping businesses innovate faster by harnessing their own large data sets. BigQuery is available free of charge for now, and we’ll let customers know at least 30 days before the free period ends. We’re bringing on a new batch of pilot customers, so let us know if your business wants to test-drive BigQuery Service.