Transform 2021

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July 12-16

At Google’s inaugural Data Cloud Summit, the company announced three new solutions across its database and data analytics portfolio: Dataplex, Datastream, and Analytics Hub. Google says all three services, which are available in preview, are designed to help businesses break free from data silos to predict business outcomes and make informed decisions.

A recent Gartner survey found that organizations estimate the average cost of poor data quality at $12.8 million per year. With data spanning databases, data lakes, data warehouses, and even data marts — in multiple clouds and on-premises — enterprises are grappling with how to centrally manage and govern their apps. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion in 2020.

Datastream, Analytics Hub, and Dataplex

The first of Google’s new cloud products is Datastream, a serverless change data capture and replication service. Datastream enables enterprises to ingest data streams in real time, from Oracle and MySQL databases to Google Cloud services — including BigQuery, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner. Google says that for early customers like Schnuck Markets, Datastream simplified their architecture and reduced lag for Oracle data replication to BigQuery and CloudSQL.

Available in preview in Q3, Analytics Hub, a complementary product, exchanges data and analytics assets throughout organizations to address challenges in data reliability. Analytics Hub provides a way to access and share data at a lower cost, allowing data providers and organizations to control and monitor how their data is being used and create a curated library of internal and external assets.

As for Dataplex, it’s an intelligent data fabric that lets organizations manage, monitor, and govern their data across data lakes, data warehouses, and databases. Automated data quality allows data scientists to address data consistency using AI and machine learning capabilities from Google or a third party and a pay-as-you-go model. Early user Equifax is working with Google to incorporate Dataplex into its core analytics platform.

Tom Galizia, global chief commercial officer at Deloitte, says Deloitte will work with Google to deploy Dataplex, Datastream, and Analytics Hub with enterprise customers and institutions. “What is truly powerful here is that Google Cloud solves for disparate and bespoke systems housing hard-to-access siloed data with enhanced data experiences. They’ve also simplified implementation and management for better decision-making. We are truly excited to realize the market potential with Google Cloud’s innovations for building data clouds,” he said in a statement provided to VentureBeat.

New services in preview and GA

During the Data Cloud Summit, Google detailed additional updates pertaining to its cloud database and analytics suite.

BigQuery Omni for Microsoft Azure is available in preview, and Looker for Microsoft Azure is now generally available. Both can help deliver insights from Azure cloud environments. In related news, BigQuery ML Anomaly Detection is also generally available, allowing customers to detect normal versus problematic data patterns across their organization.

In Q3, Google plans to launch Dataflow Prime, an expansion of its Dataflow service that provides a solution for streaming data analytics. Dataflow Prime will embed AI and machine learning capabilities to offer streaming predictions such as time series analysis and smart diagnostics that proactively identify bottlenecks, auto-tuning for increased utilization.

Google also announced that it will soon lower the entry price for Cloud Spanner–  its fully managed relational database — 90% by offering customers granular instance sizing. Beyond this, the company previewed BigQuery federation to Spanner, which will let users query transactional data residing in Spanner from BigQuery for real-time insights. Lastly, Google launched Key Visualizerin preview to provide interactive monitoring that lets developers identify trends and usage patterns in Spanner.

“Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it. Every industry is accelerating their shift [to] being digital-first as they recognize data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation,” Google Cloud VP and GM Gerrit Kazmaier said in a blog post. “At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping our customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable real-time insights needed to future-proof their business.”

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On the last day of GamesBeat Summit last week, leaders from Roblox, Fair Play Alliance, and Accenture discussed the issue of digital civility, and what challenges need to be addressed as games lean more firmly into the mainstream.

“If there’s ever been a silver lining to COVID, it’s been gaming,” said moderator Seth Schuler, managing director with Accenture Strategy. “We estimate 35% of the world’s population now plays video games.”

Accenture’s most recent gaming research found that gamers are spending 16 hours a week playing games, and another 14 hours a week engaged with others via social media across platforms like YouTube, Baidu, Discord, and Twitch. Nearly all gamers report that they game online to hang with their friends, meet new people, and during COVID, to have much needed social experiences. As a category, gaming is increasingly becoming a super platform for engaging people across entertainment activities and growing an ever-more diverse set of players.

For Roblox, socialization and player-created content is the core of the platform, arguably more so than in traditional games, so trust has had to be central from the start, says Laura Higgins, the company’s director of community safety and digital civility.

“Safety has always been our number-one priority,” Higgins said. “We’re a platform that was built around young people, and so those values, for us, that’s table stakes. My role has been to focus on creating healthy communities, positive experiences, and educating the community to then go and be good citizens elsewhere online.”

The intent is to teach life skills around kindness and empathy and teamwork, as well as conflict resolution, she added. That requires stringent rules and a multilayered approach to safety. That means a large team of moderators backed by AI and machine learning tools and chat filtering, particularly related to personal information in order to create a safe experience at the foundation. For parents, Roblox includes a suite of parental control tools, locked down with a PIN, to ensure that parents are confident their children are safe, as well as encouraging parents to actually spend time on the platform with their child.

As their community grows up with them, from kids to older teenagers and young adults, Roblox is intent on fostering a nurturing experience. To do that, one of your most important goals should be listening, Higgens said.

“This is my advice for any developers out there,” she explained. “If you can spend time with your community, you’ll learn so much. I’ve been an online safety professional all my life. There are certain things that I can take for granted that we as a company need to do to keep our community safe. That’s the basic. We start there. But there are certain more nuanced things going on with the community. It’s important that we listen and adapt to what’s going on.”

Accenture found that with folks spending more time online now, reports of bad behavior are going up — but one person’s bullying could be seen as another person’s rough play, Shuler said.

“One of the biggest questions for us is not just how we make games great experiences and how we have fun together, but how we look at these spaces and fulfill social needs and understand the breadth of needs and opportunities in these spaces,” said Kimberly Voll, co-founder of the Fair Play Alliance.

Game communication is very different from face-to-face interaction, even voice chat, with its lack of non-verbal cues and communication, she said, which can lead to mismatched expectations in your gaming experience, and lead to unexpected friction. The other challenge comes from game audiences increasingly crossing multiple cultures. Gamers don’t necessarily have the same shared background or the infrastructure of trust to rely on for successful interactions.

“A lot of the work we’re trying to do is to move us away from one size fits all, which is always the classic one size fits none,” she said. “These are spaces where humans gather, and where humans gather there is a full spectrum of behavior. Not everyone is going to get along with everyone else. What does that mean for how we’re making games?”

With some bad actors eager to enter the ecosystem, the challenge is building spaces that reduce the vulnerability in these communities as a whole, that make them healthier and more robust, and able to push back against these bad actors. And equally,  foster resilience within individuals and help reduce their vulnerability as they create experiences.

“When we look at the root causes of why these behaviors emerge, when we know there’s a possibility of friction or mismatched expectations, we as game developers can invest in reducing the chance of that happening at the beginning, before a game gets off on the wrong foot, before it descends into frustration and folks start taking shots at each other,” said Voll. “In addition, [we must] take steps to understand how bad actors gain access to the system and operate within these systems, and do our best to reduce the chance.”

Individuals in a space can use social tools or opportunities to push back against harmful experiences, she added. Consequences are incredibly important; developers need to get better at detection and assessment of hate and harassment, and drawing strong lines in the sand — but the problem is much more complex. Developers also need to start investing in enriching spaces that foster successful interactions and successful coexistence, that speak to people’s need to connect and feel a sense of belonging in a space, wherever they come from.

The base case for technology in this space right now is AI, machine learning, and deep customer analytics for the end-to-end customer experience, said Christian Kelly, strategy managing director of internet, software and platforms at Accenture.

“Over time what you want to do is use machine learning and AI to understand the experience at an individual gamer level, so that you can reinforce the positives and you can take remediation steps on the negatives,” he said. “That’s a huge thing for all gaming companies to do from a centralized standpoint, and for the company to own.”

But there’s also decentralized technology coming out all the time, he adds, pointing to Temper, a tool developed by the Global Innovation Exchange at the University of Washington, which can be attached to a TV or monitor. It listens for things like hate speech and bad behavior, and will actually terminate gaming sessions.

“There are things, from a technology standpoint, that the industry can do, but there are also new innovations that are happening based on hardware, software, and cloud services that are going to enable parents to be more educated and do something about it in a decentralized way,” he said.

Higgins, who’s also on the executive steering committee of the Fair Play Alliance, noted that it’s the cooperation in the industry that will make great strides in addressing these issues as well.

“One thing that’s really joyful about working in the video game industry is the collaboration and the will to work together to solve some of these huge issues,” she said. “There are some wonderful conversations and sharing of best practices, of tools, big platforms making some of these tools that would have been inaccessible to small studios and startups, because they just couldn’t afford them, and so enabling people to use those for free. We know there’s a lot more of that’s coming in the pipeline as well.”

Overall, the industry must recognize, as a whole, it’s a shared community, and everyone has a duty of care to keep that community safe and healthy, no matter which platform players end up on.