Newsroom

Sure, that extra hour of sleep we all got back in November when daylight savings time ended was pretty sweet, but we’ve been struggling to adapt to the time change ever since and it’s eating into our productivity. Almost there now, though! All we need is another day or two and we’ll be fully into the standard time swing. Good thing we won’t be re-setting our clocks again anytime soon.

And now, as we shake off the last of our surprisingly enduring grogginess, here’s a look at the news it caused us to miss this week.

Google means business. This, from a post on Google’s PR blog about the company’s Next ‘17 event in San Francisco this week, did not bode well for us overworked tech media types:

“We’re rolling out dozens of announcements this week, including new customers, partners, products and services like application development and machine learning.”

Dozens? We braced for the worst, but thankfully the onslaught turned out to be manageable. And just a little surprising. Google made enterprise adoption of its cloud solutions the key theme of this year’s Next, and then did the kinds of things a vendor getting serious about the enterprise needs to do, like:

• Simplify its partner programs, add specializations, and invest in growth, sales, and profitability incentives.
• Add a bunch of business-friendly capabilities to the G Suite productivity suite, including shared Google Drives for workgroups and new data migration tools.
• Turn Hangouts (pictured) from a tool for connecting consumers to a tool for conducting meetings.
• Introduce security features of the kind consumers can live without but enterprises demand (and inspire security vendors like Check Point and Dataguise to get in on the act too).
• Sign an alliance agreement with SAP. Really, nothing screams “enterprise” like an alliance agreement with SAP.

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