BigQuery leads the way toward modern data analytics

At Google, we think you should have the right tools and support to let you embrace data growth. Enterprises and digital-native organizations are generating incredible value from their data using Google Cloud’s smart analytics platform. At the heart of the platform is BigQuery, a cloud-native enterprise data warehouse. BigQuery helps organizations develop and operationalize massively scalable, data-driven intelligent applications for digital transformation.

Enterprises are modernizing with BigQuery to unlock blazing-fast business insights

Businesses are using BigQuery to run mission-critical applications at scale in order to optimize operations, improve customer experiences, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). We have customers running queries on massive datasets, as large as 100 trillion rows, and others running more than 10,000 concurrent queries across their organization. We’re seeing adoption across regions and industry verticals including retail, telecommunications, financial services, and more.

Financial services company KeyBank is migrating to BigQuery for scalability and reduced costs as compared to their on-prem data warehouse. “We are modernizing our data analytics strategy by migrating from an on-premises data warehouse to Google’s cloud-native data warehouse, BigQuery,” says Michael Onders, chief data officer at Keybank. “This transformation will help us scale our compute and storage needs seamlessly and lower our overall total cost of ownership. Google Cloud’s smart analytics platform will give us access to a broad ecosystem of data transformation tools and advanced machine learning tools so that we can easily generate predictive insights and unlock new findings from our data.”

Other customers finding success with our smart analytics tools are Lowe’s, Sabre, and Lufthansa. They’re all modernizing their data analytics strategies and transforming their businesses to remain competitive in a changing data landscape.

Product innovation is simplifying migrations and improving price predictability

We are continuing to make it easy to modernize your data warehouse with BigQuery. The new product capabilities we’re announcing are helping customers democratize advanced analytics, be assured of price predictability, and simplify migrations at scale.

• Simplifying migrations at scale: We’re helping customers fast-track data warehouse migrations to BigQuery with the general availability of RedShift and S3 migration tools. Customers can now seamlessly migrate from Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3 right into BigQuery with BigQuery Data Transfer Service. Customers such as John Lewis Partnership, Home Depot, Reddit, and Discord have all accelerated business insights with BigQuery by freeing themselves of the performance and analytics limitations of their Teradata and Redshift environments. “Migrating from Redshift to BigQuery has been game-changing for our organization,” says Spencer Aiello, tech lead and manager, machine learning at Discord. “We’ve been able to overcome performance bottlenecks and capacity constraints as well as fearlessly unlock actionable insights for our business.”

• Offering enterprise readiness and price predictability: Enterprise customers need price predictability to do accurate forecasting and planning. We recently launched Reservations for workload management, and today, we’re pre-announcing beta availability of BigQuery Flex Slots, which enable customers to instantly scale up and down their BigQuery data warehouse to meet analytics demands without sacrificing price predictability. With Flex Slots, you can now purchase BigQuery commitments for short durations–as little as seconds at a time. This lets organizations instantly respond to rapid demand for analytics and plan for major business events, such as retail holidays and game launches. Learn more about Flex Slots here. We’re also pre-announcing the beta availability of column-level access controls in BigQuery. With BigQuery column-level security, you can now have access policies applied not just at the data container level, but also to the meaning and/or content of the data in your columns across your enterprise data warehouse. Finally, we now support unlimited DML/DDL statements on a table in BigQuery–find more details here.

• Democratizing advanced analytics: We’re making advanced analytics even more accessible to users across an organization. We’re excited to announce that BigQuery BI Engine is becoming generally available. Customers can analyze large and complex datasets interactively with sub-second query response time and high concurrency for interactive dashboarding and reporting. One Fortune 500 global media outlet using BI Engine summarized it well: “To deliver timely insights to our editors, journalists and management, it’s important we answer questions quickly. Once we started using BigQuery BI Engine, we saw an immediate performance boost with our existing Data Studio dashboards–everyone’s drilling down, filtering, and exploring data at so much faster a pace.” Learn more here.

All these product innovations and more are helping customers jump-start their digital transformation journeys with ease.

Our cohesive partner ecosystem creates a strong foundation

We’re making deep investments in our partner ecosystem and working with global and regional system integrators (GSIs) and other tech partners to simplify migrations across the planning phase, offer expertise, and make go-to-market delivery easier. GSI partners such as Wipro, Infosys, Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, Cognizant, and more have dedicated centers of excellence and Google Cloud partner teams. These teams are committed to defining and executing on a joint business plan, and have built end-to-end migration programs, accelerators, and services that are streamlining the modernization path to BigQuery. The Accenture Data Studio, Infosys Migration Workbench (MWB), and Wipro’s GCP Data and Insights Migration Studio are all examples of partner solutions that can help modernize your analytics landscape by supporting migrations at scale.

Partners are essential for many cloud migration journeys. “Enterprises today are seeking to be data-driven as they navigate their digital journey,” says Satish H.C., EVP, data analytics at Infosys. “For our clients, we enable this transformation with our solutions like Digital Brain, Information Grid, Data Marketplace and Next Gen Analytics platform, powered by Google-native technologies like BigQuery, BigQuery ML, AI Platform and Cloud Functions.”

“We are excited to be partnering with Google Cloud to help streamline data warehouse migrations to BigQuery so that organizations can unlock the full potential of their data,” says – Sriram Anand, Managing Director, North America Lead for Data Engineering at Accenture. “As our clients are managing increasingly fast-changing business needs, they are looking for ways to scale up to petabytes of data on-demand without performance disruptions and run blazing-fast queries to drive business innovation.”

Tech partners are also core to our data warehouse modernization solution. With Informatica, customers can easily and securely migrate data and its schema from their on-prem applications and systems into BigQuery. Datometry and CompilerWorks both help customers migrate workloads without having to rewrite queries. Datometry eliminates the need to rewrite queries and instead converts the incoming request into target dialect on the fly, while CompilerWorks converts queries’ source dialect SQL into target dialect SQL. Along with their core offerings, these tech partners have also developed additional migration accelerators.

We’re also happy to announce that SADA, a leading global business and technology consultancy managed service provider, just announced a multi-year agreement with Google Cloud. They will be introducing new solutions to help organizations modernize data analytics and data warehousing with Google Cloud, including support for Netezza, Teradata, and Hadoop migrations to BigQuery. These solutions offer a shorter time to value on new releases, expedite decision making with data-driven insights, and allow customers to focus more on innovation. Learn more here.

Making the BigQuery move

We’re seeing this momentum across our smart analytics portfolio as industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester have recognized Google Cloud as a Leader in five new analyst reports over the past year, including the new Forrester Wave(TM): Data Management for Analytics, Q1 2020.

These launches, updates, and new migration options are all designed to help businesses digitally transform their operations. Try the BigQuery sandbox to get started with BigQuery right away. Jumpstart your modernization journey with the data warehouse migration offer, and get expert design guidance and tools, partner solutions, and funding support to expedite your cloud migration.