Google bolsters Apps for Work and rebrands it ‘G Suite,’ organizes all cloud services under ‘Google Cloud’

Google has today announced Google Cloud, the new name for all of the company’s cloud offerings. This includes Google Cloud Platform, Maps and Machine Learning APIs, the newly-rebranded “G Suite,” as well as the Chrome and Android devices that give users access. But Google is also today announcing advancements across its cloud and enterprise offerings…

Really, Google Cloud is just an effort to unify all of Google’s cloud offerings under one umbrella. As Google Cloud SVP Diane Greene explains:

Google Cloud spans every layer, it includes all of Google Cloud Platform; our user facing collaboration and productivity applications — now named G Suite; all of our Machine Learning tools and APIs; the enterprise maps API’s; and also the Android phones, tablets, and Chromebooks that access the cloud. All of this, built for the cloud from the get-go.

Moving into what Google calls the “Google Cloud era,” the company also announced new products and services for the Cloud Platform:

• Eight new Google Cloud Regions: Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland and Frankfurt
• Kubernetes 1.4, which “improves Cluster Federation to support straightforward deployment across multiple clusters and multiple clouds.”
• Many updates to its data analytics and machine learning portfolio, including upgrades to Google BigQuery and Cloud Machine Learning.
• A new role on the GCP team called Customer Reliability Engineering, which is” designed to deepen our partnership with customers.”

Also mentioned today is the rebranding of Google Apps for Work. Now known as G Suite, there’s nothing really much that’s dramatically changing about the group of enterprise services, but Google has today announced a slew of advancements across the board:

• Quick Access in Google Drive for Android, “which shaves 50 percent off the average time it takes to get to the right file by eliminating the need to search for it.”
• “Find a time” in Google Calendar, which “suggests meeting times and available rooms based on your preferences.”
• Smarter spreadseets: “You can simply enter your question using natural language and Explore in Google Sheets will use Natural Language Processing to translate your question into a formula and offer an instant answer.”
• Explore in Google Docs, which uses machine intelligence to “automatically recommend related topics to learn about, images to insert and more content to discover.”
• Explore in Google Slide, which “dynamically offers layout suggestions that help your content shine.”
• Team Drives, which “helps streamline teamwork from end-to-end, from onboarding a new team member to offboarding a departing team member.”
• Team Meetings, which is a new meeting experience for Google Hangouts that makes things easier: “no downloads, no browser plugins, invite anyone, join from any device, even without an account or a data connection.”

Many of these features haven’t launched publicly yet, but Google plans to launch them with organizations that are interested by way of an Early Adopter Program.

Google also announced today an alliance with Accenture:

Google and Accenture will work together to deliver solutions to customers in a number of industry-specific verticals, including retail, healthcare, energy, finance and others. The solutions will combine technology from across Google’s products and platforms. Accenture and Google will provide dedicated resources from each company with expertise in cloud solutions architecture, mobility and app development to help bring these solutions to large enterprise clients.