More Info on Google Cloud’s Data Cloud Alliance

The biggest cloud news so far this week has come out of Google Cloud. The world’s third-largest public cloud provider held its Data Cloud Summit this week and, as part of that event, announced its new Data Cloud Alliance.

As we wrote previously, founding members include Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis and Starburst. Together they aim 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.”

Google Cloud says that will happen as member companies provide APIs and integration support for data portability and accessibility, regardless of where that information resides. Look, too, for the Alliance to develop “new, common industry data models, processes and platform integrations to increase data portability and reduce complexity associated with data governance and global compliance,” Google Cloud said this week.

Note that Alliance members are not so much rivals as companies that offer complementary services. Many are vendors that sell through the indirect channel, while others (i.e., Accenture, Deloitte) are channel partners themselves (albeit sort of also vendors). How the Alliance’s efforts will filter down to smaller MSPs, resellers and the like remains to be seen.