It helps to have friends in high places: Accenture and Google Cloud have formally cemented their alliance with the creation of the Accenture Google Cloud Business Group (AGBG).
The group, which was announced Wednesday, was designed to help companies use Google Cloud's technologies in order to improve their customers' experiences and fuel their digital transformations.
Accenture brings a deep level of professional services, machine learning and artificial intelligence experience to the AGBG. One of the goals of the AGBG is building business processes with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Earlier this month, Accenture broadened its artificial intelligence and big data capabilities with its purchase of Kogentix.
RELATED: Accenture beefs up AI, big data with purchase of Kogentix
The new group is comprised of a team of specialists from both companies and will initially focus on developing cross-industry, data-driven solutions for customers in North America, Europe and Japan. Accenture said it has approximately 1,000 employees trained on Google Cloud technologies and intends to more than double that number next year.
The initial focus of the group is on the retail, consumer packaged goods and health industries. Not surprisingly, AGBC will serve as an advocate of Google Cloud's capabilities by helping enterprises migrate their workloads to the cloud while also providing managed services that are tailored for the Google Cloud Platform.
AGBG can also bring global scale to customers that run SAP by delivering managed SAP solutions on Google Cloud Platform. The improved customer experience is generated by combining Google Marketing Platform data with enterprise data sources for analytical insights while also increasing customer engagement.
The AGBG group is the latest example of Google Cloud and Accenture working together. Accenture is using its analytics and Google Cloud technology to help Verizon resolve customer services issues faster while reducing costs.
Accenture also announced today that it was named as the 2017 Google Cloud Platform Partner of the Year for helping customers use the Google Cloud product suite to transform their businesses.
Google Cloud Next 2018 news
Google kicked of its Google Next Cloud 2018 conference yesterday in San Francisco. Some of the notable news included:
• A fully managed Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery platform called Cloud Build, which TechCrunch covered.
• Google updated its Cloud AutoML (machine learning) platform, which was announced earlier this year, with two new offerings in AutoML Natural Language and AutoML Translation, which was covered by IT World Canada.
• New security features for Google's G Suite and artificial intelligence tools make grammar suggestions to Google Docs, both of which were written up by CNET.