Tag Archives: Google Partnerships

A new Android smartphone and 5G partnership with Jio


Thank you to everyone at Reliance Industries for all you do for India — from investing in infrastructure and technology to creating jobs and expanding opportunity to supporting communities in need, especially in this difficult moment for the country.


It’s been devastating to see the country hit so hard by COVID-19. Yet it’s heartening to see how Reliance has stepped up to contribute to the national response and get support to the communities that need it most. On behalf of all of us at Google: We hope you are taking care and we are wishing for better days ahead.


For Google, the past year has brought renewed purpose and greater urgency to our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. At a time when so many aspects of our lives and work are moving online, it’s even more important to make technology accessible and helpful for everyone. 


This goal is at the heart of our partnership with Reliance Jio. I was proud to help launch this partnership last year. It was the first and biggest equity investment from the ₹75,000 crore ($10 billion) Google for India Digitization Fund.


Our vision was to bring affordable access to information for Indians in their own language, to build new products and services for India’s unique needs, and to empower businesses with technology.


I’m excited that today, we can announce the next steps in this vision, starting with a new, affordable Jio smartphone, created with Google. Our teams have optimized a version of our Android OS especially for this device. It will offer language and translation features, a great camera, and support for the latest Android updates.


It is built for India and it will open up new possibilities for millions of new users who will experience the internet for the very first time. And we can’t wait to show you the device later this year.


I’m also proud to announce that we are taking our collaboration further with a new 5G partnership between Google Cloud and Jio.


It will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation, and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education and more — laying a foundation for the next phase of India’s digitization.  

As part of this collaboration, Reliance will also shift its core retail businesses to Google Cloud’s infrastructure. They will be able take advantage of Google’s AI and machine learning, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offerings. Harnessing the reliability and performance of Google Cloud will enable these businesses to scale up as needed to respond to customer demand. 

Empowering businesses as they embark on their digital transformation is a key part of our mission in India, and I’m excited for the innovations this partnership will help unleash. We are proud to play a part in India’s next wave of technological innovation. 


Helping to connect 1.3 billion Indians to the opportunities the internet creates is meaningful to all of us at Google — and certainly to me personally. I know that with greater access to smartphones and improved connectivity, there’s no limit to what India’s people can do. 


We look forward to getting technology into the hands of more people and to exploring what more we can achieve together in the years ahead.


Posted by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet

Partnering with Jio to help bring the promise of internet connectivity and affordability to everyone

From the infrastructure that facilitates widespread connectivity to the availability of truly affordable smartphones, we have been committed to finding ways to help bring ubiquitous access to information to people everywhere. With the pandemic resulting in greater dependency on online services and the need for timely information, access to the internet is especially crucial today. But hundreds of millions of Indians are yet to benefit from being connected, to utilize services and access information that can have a positive and immediate impact on their daily lives. Today we are excited to give you an update on our partnership with Jio in two key areas that can help bridge this gap.


Making the internet accessible to millions of more Indians with Jio


While millions of people across India who use feature phones want access to a full-fledged smartphone, there exists gaps in usability and affordability that prevent these aspirations from becoming reality.


Our Android teams across the globe have been hard at work in finding solutions to these challenges. A big milestone in this journey was our announcement last year to invest in Jio Platforms Ltd to address this gap by jointly creating a device based on optimizations to the Android operating system and the Play Store that serves the needs of many who have never used a smartphone before, while offering premium capabilities that have until now been associated with more powerful devices.

Along with Jio we are thrilled to share a preview of our made-for-India device that is built to address the unique needs of millions of new smartphone users across India. We have worked closely with the Jio team on engineering and product development on useful voice-first features that enable these users to consume content and navigate the phone in their own language, deliver a great camera experience, and get the latest Android feature and security updates.


Image 1: Use Google Assistant to get things done in popular Jio apps; Image 2: Listen to any content on your phone screen by tapping the ‘Listen’ button; Image 3: Quickly Translate any content -- on your phone screen or in the phone’s camera


Easily access and consume content in a choice of Indian languages: For users who might not be able to read content in their language, with a tap of a button they can now translate what’s on their screen, and even have it read back to them in their own language. Read Aloud and Translate Now are seamlessly integrated in the OS allowing these features to work with any text on their phone screen, including web pages, apps, messages, and even photos. We’ve also added App Actions that enable Google Assistant to deliver a great experience with many of the Jio apps on this device. In addition to asking for the latest cricket scores or a weather update, you can also ask Google Assistant to play music on Jio Saavn or check your balance on My Jio.


Image 1: Clearer photos in low light with Night mode; Image 2: Photos have wider dynamic range with HDR mode; Image 3: Snapchat lenses bring Indian-specific effects to your selfies


A great camera experience: A fast, high-quality camera is a must-have feature for today's smartphone users, so we partnered closely to build an optimized experience within the phone’s Camera module resulting in great photos and videos: from clearer photos at night and in low-light situations to HDR mode that brings out wider color and dynamic range in photos, these are firsts for affordable phones in India. We have also partnered with Snap to integrate Indian-specific Snapchat Lenses directly into the phone’s camera, and we will continue to update this experience.


Ongoing feature drops and the latest system updates: Along with support for the latest Android releases and security updates, this experience will keep getting better with new features and customizations, all delivered over-the-air. With Google Play Protect built in, it has Google’s world-class security and malware protection. And with the Google Play Store, you will have access to millions of apps that people across the world use and enjoy.


The smartphone being developed with Jio will be called JioPhone Next. It will be coming later this year, and will enable scores of new internet users to experience these best-in-class Android smartphone features at an affordable price. This is a momentous step in our Android mission for India, and is the first of many that our Android product and engineering teams will embark on in India. We are also actively expanding our engineering teams in India, as we continue to work on finding ways to answer the unique needs of India’s smartphone users.


Powering Jio’s services with a new Google Cloud Partnership


We’re delighted to share that Jio and Google Cloud are embarking on a new long-term, strategic partnership, independent of our investment in Jio Platforms Ltd, with a goal of powering 5G in enterprise and consumer segments in India. Jio will take advantage of Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure and will also migrate many of their core businesses to Google Cloud.


Google Cloud’s deep expertise and innovation, combined with telco-specific capabilities for security, performance, and resilience, will help Jio’s 5G service to deliver high speed internet as demand for connectivity goes up. The two companies will collaborate to bring a portfolio of 5G edge computing solutions as Jio builds new services across many verticals including gaming, healthcare, education, and entertainment. These will be powered by Jio’s 5G network and Google Cloud’s innovations in AI/ML, data and analytics, and other cloud-native technologies. 


This new Cloud partnership will also see Reliance migrating its core retail businesses like Reliance Retail, JioMart, JioHealth, JioSaavn and others to Google Cloud’s infrastructure, taking advantage of Google’s AI/ML, ecommerce, and demand forecasting offerings. Leveraging the scalability of Google Cloud will increase reliability and performance, as well as enable these businesses to scale up to respond to customer demand.  


We are deeply privileged to play a role in the next phase of India’s digital transformation and we look forward to working closely with Jio to share more on these developments in the months ahead.


Posted by Ram Papatla GM & India Engineering Lead, Android, and Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India

 

Google Cloud and SAP forge partnership to develop enterprise solutions

Today, we’re announcing a new strategic partnership with SAP, focused on developing and integrating Google’s best cloud and machine learning solutions with SAP enterprise applications. This partnership, which includes certification of the in-memory database SAP HANA on Google Cloud Platform(GCP), new G Suite integrations, Google’s machine learning capabilities, and data governance collaboration, offers Google Cloud, SAP and our customers more scope, scalability, and the exciting opportunity to create new products.
SAP has a long history at the center of business and technology. More than 345,000 customers worldwide, including 87% of the Forbes Global 2000, work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively with SAP’s broad suite of products. With this partnership we’re offering SAP customers the opportunity to leverage Google Cloud to accelerate their digital transformation and convert data into actionable insights and business outcomes.
SAP applications in the cloud
The SAP HANA database is now certified on GCP. This certification enables customers to run mission-critical SAP applications and databases like SAP HANA on GCP through ongoing certifications and integrations. One example of this work is the accelerated availability of certain performance enhancements to ensure that GCP delivers optimal performance for SAP HANA.
The partnership also represents the start of a close engineering collaboration between SAP and Google. Google Cloud is the first public cloud vendor to make SAP HANA express edition available to developers in an on-demand deployment model. Developers can now use SAP HANA express edition to build custom enterprise applications on GCP with the flexibility of on-demand, near instantaneous deployment leveraging Google Cloud Launcher. In addition, we are also working closely with SAP to make SAP Cloud Platform available on GCP.
The SAP Cloud Platform’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution now supports G Suite and GCP. The integration with Google allows customers to easily and securely connect SAP with Google’s productivity suite G Suite or GCP and give access to their users to any application from any device at any time.
Machine learning for the enterprise
Machine learning is top of mind for enterprise CIOs and developers alike, and Google is leading the industry to expand access to machine learning’s benefits. Google Cloud solutions include APIs covering speech, text, image, translation and infrastructure for large-scale training and delivery of machine learning capabilities. Google and SAP intend to collaborate on building machine learning features into intelligent applications like conversational apps that guide users through complex workflows and transactions. This is just one example of how the Google Cloud and SAP partnership will enable digital business transformation using the power of machine learning, with deeper technology integrations to come.
Integrations in productivity apps
Google Cloud and SAP will drive greater integration across joint applications. These integrations will enable seamless experiences such as the combination of Gmail with SAP Cloud for Customer, a CRM solution that allow users to link email conversations, search for duplicate contacts and creating new leads, opportunities, tasks and visits directly from Gmail. Other integrations include Calendar with Concur Tripit, and Sheets with SAP BusinessObjects Cloud. Colgate-Palmolive, a long-standing SAP customer, is already seeing the benefits of the combined strength of G Suite and SAP.
Colgate-Palmolive has a focused IT strategy that relies on a small number of strategic partners, including SAP and Google Cloud. Colgate chose to partner with SAP and Google Cloud because both are innovative and approach work collaboratively. They've been working with SAP for 23 years and moved all employees to G Suite suite in 2016 (about 28,000 people globally). The implementation took only six months and, after only three months, they’re already working differently, collaborating more easily.
Colgate gets tremendous value from the work they do with Google and SAP, individually. They’re excited about the numerous opportunities ahead given a tighter Google / SAP partnership. Examples include combining Google’s machine learning with SAP’s business process expertise as well as integrating SAP’s Digital Boardroom, a co-innovation between SAP and Colgate, with Google Slides.
Greater visibility and control
Enterprise customers moving from on-premise to public cloud environments wish to retain insight and control over the access to their sensitive data, while at the same time benefiting from the agility, scale and global presence of a public cloud platform. GCP provides a rich set of capabilities around access control, auditing and encryption key management to enable customers to defend against external attacks and manage insider access risk.
We're now working with SAP to develop a governance, risk management and compliance solution that provides visibility and control over how data is handled on GCP, including how administrative access is granted by the cloud provider. For customers desiring an independent entity overseeing the handling of their data on a public cloud, SAP plans to act as a data custodian for their data on Google Cloud Platform.
We look forward to all the ways we can bring the innovation, scale and reliability of Google Cloud to the already invaluable tools SAP provides to hundreds of thousands businesses around the world
Posted by Nan Boden, Head of Global Technology Partners, Google Cloud