Talking to the CEO of Crux About Google Cloud, Sustainability, and Getting Your Data Into the Cloud

This past week, I had another opportunity to do some public speaking (virtually) with my friends at Crux Informatics. This time we did a 1:1 video chat between me and Philip Brittan, Crux’s CEO, about the partnership between his company and Google Cloud. Check out their blog post or watch the short video here!

https://player.vimeo.com/video/513473964

As I noted in my LinkedIn post, the short conversations covered a lot of ground, so I wanted to expand a bit on these here.

First, as you may have seen elsewhere, Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Here that is again, but with fun Googley colors:

You probably haven’t seen Google Cloud’s Mission. Our CEO Thomas Kurian described this in a well-received presentation at a recent Goldman Sach’s technology investors conference. Google Cloud’s mission is to accelerate organizations’ ability to digitally transform their business with the best infrastructure, platform, industry solutions and expertise. So, that sounds pretty good. And here, with some color, although really just one color. Because we’re about enterprises, we can’t be quite as fun.

Second, I noted Google’s open approach, including both open source software and something our marketing folks have branded “open cloud“. Not that there’s anything wrong with marketing folks, but I think of this as primarily the ability for an organization to run technology workloads on multiple cloud platforms. This is sometimes also called multi-cloud. Options are good.

Third, I noted how impressed I am with Google’s Sustainability achievements and commitments. One of the most important, from the Cloud perspective, is our goal to operate on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030. This is a significant challenge! Instead of just compensating for “dirty energy” consumption with carbon offsets – which we’ve done since 2007 – the goal is to run every minute of every day on carbon-free energy. This is a tremendous ambition, and a real moonshot!

Finally, I described how Crux can speed cloud migrations by delivering the external datasets that many organizations depend on, especially in financial services, directly into their cloud environment. They provide a managed service to do this, and they’re good at it. This can turn a foundational process – say, getting your market data loaded up into BigQuery and ready for analytics – that would otherwise takes weeks or months of data engineering time into something that can be done in days. If you’re a head of data engineering or a data manager at a bank or similar financial services institution, and you’re thinking about how to get your external datasets into the cloud, Crux is a no-brainer.