Google Cloud Platform Developer Roadshow will Tour Through Helsinki & Stockholm Next April

Cloudtech startups take note: Google has initiated a world tour for cloud platform developers on this side of the Atlantic ocean. The Google Could Platform Developer Roadshow invites cloudtech startups to participate in a set of conferences where they will be given a glimpse behind the curtains of the worlds biggest cloud company and how Google computing is here to make developers’ lives easier.

The conferences will include both Google’s insight into new approaches to computing that will enable apps to move beyond the traditional divisions of PaaS and LaaS as well as topic discussions on how trends like Big Data, containers and managed VMs will change app construction and maintenance in the future.

The tour will travel across mainland Europe during the upcoming month, including two Nordic destinations – Helsinki, April 9th & Stockholm, April 11th.  Interested startups from Finland should head over here for registration while Swedes can register themselves here.

ArcticStartup got in touch for an interview with Barak Regev, Google’s head of EMEA Cloud Platform, who gave us a little overview on Google’s yesterdays announcement which focused on the trend of cloud services price cuts as well as the roadshow program.

First Regev emphasized the potential progress to be expected in cloud platforms during the coming year alone (since the roadshow and the launch announcements are taking place during Q1) while he also pointed out the importance on gaining perception on why clouds still remain a little bit too complicated and why this is preventing clouds from becoming more mainstream across all boards.

In nutshell he explained how Google’s new computing methods are going to simplify cloud platforming from its current complexity into a more cross platform implementable and simpler package. Price reductions also hold an important position in what platforms will perhaps turn out to be.

Here are a few of the main questions and answers Regev shared with us concerning the roadshow.

Arcticstartup: Why is google sharing its cloud knowledge with the entire cloud developing community?

Barak Regev: Google has been, for 15 years, developing its own infrastructure in order to support the massive amount of assets we have in the company, be it google.com or youtube, which are the most highly used web properties out there in the world which need a huge infrastructure behind them.

It’s not a secret Google in probably the number one spender of data center capacity and building up data centers. When we launched app center back in 2007 we felt that, and this is the Google philosophy, we love to share with the community [and] with our customers, technology and processes that add tremendous value to them. We do a lot of stuff that are not always monetized or commercialized.

Clouds represents an opportunity as big any other market and for us externalizing our own infrastructure is one that what motivate us to make our infrastructure even better and take us to another level of dimension. Its not a secret that cloud as a market is a huge business opportunity and we cannot ignore it in any way given the edge in the differentiation we have in the infrastructure level.

ArcticStartup: So far you’re touring through stockholm and helsinki. Is there any particular reason you chose these nordic destinations? What are your impressions about the nordics from a tech startup perspective?

Regev: Stockholm inspires us because its an increasing startup community with amazing success coming out from Sweden. Speak about Spotify being probably one of the most famous companies in the world of music streaming which is a proud Swedish story but then you [also] look at a lot of gaming companies with a lot of innovation. The Nordics have always been at the high tech level from my end and I’ve been engaging with the markets for a long time even before Google. The Nordics tend to be innovative and better adopters of new technology, while Sweden has been in among the most adoptive if you think about it so that’s why it was quite easy for us to choose Stockholm.

Helsinki for us is a no brainer. Some of our best customers are from Helsinki or out of Finland — A big applaud and respect to Rovio, one of our best customers…We love places that thrive on innovation and that’s again why we go to Helsinki. It was also quite easy to choose Stockholm and Helsinki because [that’s where] we have a very good backbone of Google presence to leverage upon.