Google Cloud and founding members form initiative to eliminate data lock-in and ensure access to data across leading storage, analytics, and database providers

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 5, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Google Cloud and many of the fastest-growing data, analytics, storage, and database providers in the tech industry today announced they are forming a new initiative to ensure that global businesses have more seamless access and insights into the data required for digital transformation. As founding members of the Data Cloud Alliance, Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst are committing to make data more portable and accessible across disparate business systems, platforms, and environments—with a goal of ensuring that access to data is never a barrier to digital transformation.

Businesses face growing pressures to digitally transform—to reach consumers in new ways, launch entirely new digital businesses, and to meet increasingly complex governance and compliance requirements. Data is essential to digital transformation. Every consumer interaction – searches, e-commerce transactions, online comments, clicks, upvotes, and much more – creates more data every minute. The proliferation of data, along with the many software and cloud-based applications used to analyze and manage it, means businesses increasingly need common digital data standards, and a commitment to open data, in order to effectively utilize data to digitally transform.

The Data Cloud Alliance is committed to accelerating adoption of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning best practices across industries through common industry data models, open standards, and integrated processes. Members of the alliance will work together to help reduce customer challenges and complexity with data governance, data privacy, data loss prevention, and global compliance. For the betterment of customers’ data clouds, the alliance will commit to solving skills gaps through skill development for practitioners in modern data and analytics technologies.

Data Cloud Alliance members will provide infrastructure, APIs, and integration support to ensure data portability and accessibility between multiple platforms and products across multiple environments—on-premises, in public or private cloud, or in a hybrid model; and each Alliance member will collaborate on new, common industry data models, processes, and platform integrations to increase data portability and reduce complexity associated with data governance and global compliance.

“Data is the common foundation for all digital transformations,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of Databases, Data Analytics and Business Intelligence at Google Cloud. “By committing to open data standards, access, and integration between the most popular data platforms and applications today, we believe we can significantly accelerate business transformations and close the data to value gap.”

Supporting Quotes:

• “Our clients win when we are the catalyst to enable smoother technology pathways for stronger collaboration and more industry growth. With the Data Cloud Alliance, we are teaming with our ecosystem partners to be maniacally focused on open standards for data exchange across the cloud continuum.  It’s about creating an open gateway for all partners to join us in unleashing more value for our clients and accelerating their digital transformation post pandemic,” said Lan Guan, Accenture Cloud First Data & AI lead.
• “As enterprises accelerate their journeys to cloud and modernize their data stacks, they need to be equipped with the necessary skills, freedom of technology choice, and data portability to ensure their data analytics strategies are future proofed,” said Chad Verbowski, SVP of Engineering at Confluent. “We’re excited to join the Data Cloud Alliance to contribute our data streaming expertise and help make sure access to data is never the barrier to innovation.”
• “Databricks is excited to partner with Google Cloud to foster data sharing based on open standards like Delta Lake. The Data Cloud Alliance reinforces our commitment to open data sharing and the open data lakehouse paradigm, which empower data teams to collaborate more effectively,” said David Meyer, SVP of Products, Databricks.
• “We are proud to be a member of the new Data Cloud Alliance, furthering our mission to make AI part of an organization’s everyday activities. This initiative will empower more companies to seamlessly scale their AI projects and deliver exceptional results,” said David Tharp, SVP of Ecosystems and Alliances at Dataiku.
• “We are excited to collaborate with Google Cloud and the members of this Data Cloud Alliance on industry standard data models, processes, and platform integrations to help increase data portability for our clients that choose Google Cloud products for their digital transformation journey,” said Francisco Barroso, principal, US Analytics & Cognitive offering leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP.
• “Successful digital transformation requires data to be accessible across systems, platforms, and environments,” said Shay Banon, Founder and CTO, Elastic. “We are proud to partner with Google Cloud and the Data Cloud Alliance members to help customers build a strong data foundation through open data access, sharing, and integration.”
• “Fivetran is proud to pledge support for the Data Cloud Alliance. As the data-to-value gap increases, no one technology or service can tackle this challenge alone. We recognize our obligation as a data cloud leader to expedite and automate the first leg of analytics—data integration, particularly from SaaS and database sources—so that rich insights are made available to organizations much faster in order to make data-driven decisions,” said Mark Van de Wiel, Field CTO at Fivetran.
• “We are excited to partner with Google Cloud and the members of this Data Cloud Alliance to unify access to data across clouds and application environments to remove barriers to digital transformation efforts,” said Mark Porter, Chief Technology Officer, MongoDB. “Legacy frameworks have made working with data hard for too many organizations. There couldn’t be a more timely, and important data initiative to build faster and smarter data-driven applications for customers.”
• “Neo4j is committed to open standards, best practices, and skills development, as a means of breaking down barriers to productivity and interoperability. We’re proud to partner with Google Cloud and other founding members of the Data Cloud Alliance in evolving best practices and standards for the modern data stack,” said Philip Rathle, SVP Products at Neo4j.
• “Redis is excited to partner with Google Cloud and the members of this Data Cloud Alliance to collaborate on the ways data and AI can help solve customers’ evolving modern application challenges and unlock the next wave of innovation and customer success,” said Yiftach Shoolman, CTO and Co-Founder at Redis.
• “We believe every company should have the right to quickly access their data without barriers and expensive penalties. Starburst is proud to be a founding member of the Data Cloud Alliance, and remains committed to quickly unlocking access to data so companies can be truly data-driven and accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO of Starburst.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology – all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.

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SOURCE Google Cloud