Podcast

Ep 6 – The BFCs: Is Google Cloud Platform (GCP) right for telcos?

October 27, 2020

This week’s guest

Neil Bunn

Head of Customer Engineering, Media and Telco Google Cloud Canada

This is the second episode in my Big Effing Clouds – or BFC – series. I’m taking a look at the big-three cloud vendors – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and AWS.

They all think they deserve telcos’ business, and they’ve spent billions on their solutions. But when you’re sitting on the other side of a sales pitch, it can be super hard to know which one to choose. That’s what this series is all about – helping you figure out which is the best fit.

In this episode, I sit down with Neil Bunn, Head of Customer Engineering, Media and Telco, for Google Cloud Canada. I’m known for being a Google Girl because, frankly, you never forget your first cloud.

Neil’s going to tell us how Google’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) is helping telcos take customer care anywhere, across devices and platforms (and let’s be honest, name one telco that doesn’t need better CX!) [03:15].
He also offers an unexpected reason why Google should be at the top of telcos’ list (hint: think, Anthos) [05:00].
We’ll also dig into headlines from this year’s Google Cloud Next, including news about Big Query Omni and Spanner [05:38]
As well as Google’s super cool Confidential VMs, which should prick up the ears of anyone concerned with data privacy [7:29].
We’ll finish up our conversation with a few telco customer success stories and a look at not-to-be-missed innovations on the horizon. [10:28].

Hopefully, you’re arriving here after listening to my conversation with Rick Lievano from Microsoft Azure. If not, check it out when you finish this one.

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Download my guide, Time to go to the public cloud! The essential steps for CLOUD success
Google Cloud Next On Air 2020: Check out the Application Modernization series and search for these sessions (registration required):
- Anthos Deep Dives Part 1 and Part 2, plus a session on Accelerating Application Development with Anthos
- Analytics in a Multi-Cloud World with BigQuery Omni
- Confidential Computing: The Next Frontier in Data Protection
Listen to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Verizon SVP/CIO Shankar Arumugavelu discuss Verizon’s pilot of Google Cloud Contact Center AI
Check out my article in Fast Company about the future of remote work and how to make the most of it

Guest bio

Neil Bunn leads Enterprise Customer Engineering in Canada for Google Cloud’s intense focus on major Telco clients. He is a certified professional engineer with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Queen’s University. He is a patented inventor in the area of large scale systems management. Neil started his career designing and building large scale distributed systems at IBM, including responsibility for supercomputers focused on major health and climate issues.

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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.

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