Looking Ahead to 2022 as a Google Cloud Practice Lead

This year has been tough. The year prior has been even tougher.

I want to take this section to acknowledge the unfortunate loss of lives caused by the pandemic.

COVID-19 has shocked the world, and put our ‘normal’ ways of working to the test, be it disrupting supply chains and businesses, large and small, to defaulting family businesses. The effect of this impact will still likely be felt for some time. Mental health is more important than ever, and do not even hesitate to ask for help here.

The Year Past

First off, our very own Sean Lee and Scott McCracken both have covered the “A Year In Review: 21 Biggest Announcements from Google Cloud in 2021” in a very thorough blog post, which I would encourage you to read-up for Google Cloud highlights.

Meanwhile at Contino, this year we have seen a great urgency from our clients to help adapt to the ‘new-normal’. This drive for digital transformation was a matter of business continuity, and not merely a cost-optimisation exercise. We were all-hands on deck this year. That is across all our practices alike.

And we are not new to change,

Since 2014, we’ve grown to a global team that all have one thing in common: we’re here to challenge the status quo.

We work with the leading enterprises to deliver measurable Digital Transformation that delivers on The People and The Processes, with our dual ‘delivery & upskilling’ squad based model, as much as the actual Technology.

With our busiest year yet, the scale of efforts resulted in a remarkable growth of Contino, where we’ve now crossed the 500 global continis mark!

Our global consultancy may have had humble beginnings with AWS and Azure cloud service providers, followed by the Google Cloud in the US and APAC regions. And this year we've had the official launch of the Google Cloud practice EMEA (UK&I) which I have had the pleasure to lead.

This is a natural evolution for Contino internal practices, as this is a recognition of a clear demand for the Google Cloud, particularly where such cloud adoption is a fast-becoming strategic focus point for our clients.

The Public Sector and the Financial Services Industry members are looking for a long term competitive advantage and positive/neutral environmental impact, with a vision beyond that initial cloud migration phase ‘lift & shift’, and can now leverage Google Cloud's unique value propositions with cloud adoption strategy thought leadership. We take our clients on the full end-to-end organisational, cultural and operating model transformational journey, while working with our Google Cloud partnership to see through such client business value mapping to delivery.

Reflecting on 2021, It’s been a #challengeAccepted type of a year, where the Google Cloud EMEA Practice;

• Achieved Premier Partner Status!
• Smashed 570% the internal revenue targets for 2021!
• Near 300% practice growth in SMEs certifications!
• Was featured at Google Next ‘21, with the Google Cloud Landing Zone deck
• And way-way more that I cannot cover on LI post about :D

I am really grateful to be working with amazing continis, and really am impressed at the #continuousLearning attitude and the speed at which our consultants are able to achieve results while #learningEveryDay. Cloud and Technology innovation is progressing at really fast paced and being a SME one year can really have you behind the proverbial curve only a year later.

This is largely the result of Contino's generous personal development package - a culture of learning. This covers leadership, consulting and technical skills alike.

This Learning and Development package consists of the £5,000 and 10 days off each year, to ensure that “The Culture, and Focus on Employees Development with Purpose” is not just some buzzword on another “benefits package” - but really is what we stand for. This is something I truly appreciate and find incredibly valuable that helped me on my own professional development journey. There will be more on this L&D topic in a separate post.

This year was incredibly eventful for Google Cloud Practice EMEA with regular for-now remote community calls, guest speakers and webinars across a spectrum of Google Cloud focused topics. On that note, only recently our VP of Engineering Federico Fregosi has thoroughly covered The Foundations of the Robust Cloud Strategy: A Guide to GCP Landing Zone in a webinar here. Such GCP Practice meet-ups and activities are set to continue with a regular cadence as B.A.U. - and hopefully in-person, in the near future.

Looking ahead to 2022

We’ve been practicing Digital Transformation programmes for nearly ten years, offering Cloud Native development accelerators, Data Analytics, AI Modelling, and best-practice DevSecOps in Financial Services, Public and Private sectors.

Given the tremendous growth of GCP Practice this year, I can see the (Forrester report) trend to continue into 2022.

My take for the next year is to grow and scale on the industry trends, and also capitalise on the emerging MLOps and AI and BI that Google Cloud is known to excel at.

The ‘101’ emphasis is to ensure we are delivering an outstanding and measurable value for our clients, that in turn helps them drive productivity, innovation, sustainable growth and scale, in the following themes;

• Help our clients Financial Services Industry leverage Google Cloud to ensure business and operational resiliency given the regulatory requirements.
• Choose Carbon-neutral Cloud Service Provider that can help accelerate the #cop26 targets and start reducing emissions today, given the breadth and depth of the FSI and Public sector. We want to bring the right solution for our clients that is world class as well as  sustainable and does not cost the earth.
• Help our clients leverage and adopt multi and hybrid cloud resilience, with best-in-class global networking and zero-trust security from Google Cloud. Help adopt the appropriate cloud-native solutions, leveraging the most advanced Google Cloud offerings like GKE, Anthos and CloudRun, with Infrastructure-as-code (IAC)  to help client teams spend more time and focus on their actual business value-add.
• DataOps and MLOps, leveraging multi-cloud Data Lakes, Machine learning and AI for real world tangible business insight extraction. Google Cloud has great DataOps Maturity with BigQuery, AutoML and AI capabilities, as well as Looker to help deliver on such timely, easily-accessible Business Intelligence. This can unlock  great value for the enterprises in the ever evolving, competitive landscape. We have also recently published a Data Maturity In Public Cloud 2021 report.

Watch this space for more GCP Practice webinars and blog posts, with more updates in 2022.

With a great relationship between Contino and Google Cloud, I am really excited about the projects in the year ahead, with multiple specialisations we will undoubtedly earn along the way. The GCP Practice is set to further grow and scale in the coming year, and I am always looking for great people to join our team.

Reach out if you want to learn more.

Wishing you all a great, thoughtful festive XMaaS and a successful, meaningful New Year!

-

Jaroslav(JP)

Xmas as a Service is not(yet) a thing :)