Google Cloud has been gaining some noticeable traction in recent months: 43% growth in Q2 is nothing to sniff about, especially during a global recession. Masaf Dawood is director of Google Cloud services with SpringML, a premier Google Cloud partner with specialties in application development, data analytics, machine learning and marketing analytics. SpringML works exclusively with Google Cloud and has worked on 200 engagements with Google since the consultancy was founded in 2015.

The world became a different place post Covid-19, and how we work, communicate and collaborate has been redefined—possibly forever. When “shelter in place” hit the entire world, we were not sure how we’d be able to execute our projects, customer commitments, and day-to-day operations. OpsRamp, an ITOM provider, has a distributed team across the U.S. and India for development and operations, and most of our engineers rarely worked from home.

In some industries, Covid-19 has served as a war cry to push the lever on progressive digital initiatives. Urgency amid dire uncertainty created a reason to move forward and faster. Surveys have also indicated a much stronger focus on public cloud infrastructure, as IT leaders gravitate toward cost-effective, on-demand scalability.

For decades, compute or server infrastructure has been the backbone of the IT world. Compute has gradually evolved from on-premise hardware to programmable compute in the form of software containers. Technology operators need to constantly monitor the performance of their Windows, Linux, and container infrastructure so that they can optimize their compute environments to match workload demands.

Markley Group is a Boston-based data center leader that provides co-location and private cloud services through a three-million square foot data center portfolio. The company was founded in 1991, when there was no such thing as the cloud. Today, many of its customers are experimenting in public cloud but often have workload requirements which are better suited or more affordable running on private infrastructure, according to Patrick Houston, Director of Engineering at Markley Group.

Google Cloud is growing marketplace traction with enterprise customers as an innovative, service-rich option for multi-cloud environments. The public cloud platform, known to be a developer’s favorite, has solutions by industry and comprehensive offerings in artificial intelligence, analytics, DevOps and high-performance computing among others. Today, OpsRamp announced a partnership with Google to bring hybrid discovery, monitoring, and automation to Google Cloud customers and partners.

Bobby McCullough is a Sales Engineer with Flycast, an IT service provider specializing in service management, asset management, security and IT operations management. Flycast uses OpsRamp internally and also resells the platform to its customers. He spoke with us about trends in ESM, ITSM and IT operations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has to date killed more than 700,000 people while unleashing the deepest economic recession since the Second World War. The World Bank forecasts the global economy will register a negative growth of 5.2% in 2020, disrupting the livelihoods of millions of global citizens.

Covid-19 has forced IT leaders across the world to rethink and strategize their plans and investments. Despite the economic downturn, surveys have indicated that digital transformation initiatives are still moving forward. Meanwhile ensuring infrastructure resilience and workforce productivity are primary challenges which IT leaders face to survive.

Epsilon, an OpsRamp customer and leader in outcome-based marketing, delivers marketing technology, solutions and services to name-brand clients such as Coach, Walgreens, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Dell/EMC. Acquired in 2019 by Publicis Groupe, Epsilon was recently ranked as a leader in its sector by Forrester. Success though, is a game with no end, and the company has been modernizing its legacy IT infrastructure in the last several years to remain competitive.