Google Cloud introduced updates to its open data cloud ecosystem to erase the age of data silos and provide everyone from data engineers and data scientists to developers and business analysts easy access to vast amounts of distributed data.

Data is at the heart of digital innovation and has seen unprecedented growth in the last 10 years, Gerrit Kazmaier, GM of Google's cloud business, told a group of reporters ahead of the Next event.

"But at the same point in time, we have to recognize that working with data was never as hard as it is today," he said. Many companies are using technology that wasn't made for this digital age of distributed data, large numbers of workloads, and a lot of people trying to access them.

"That really creates a big challenge for companies because they see all of these data silos emerging around them. It's really important that we move from data silos to an open data cloud," Kazmaier said.

To work toward this idea, the cloud provider has extended its partnerships with Elastic, MongoDB, Palantir, ServiceNow, Reltio, Striim, and Collibra to support data transferability.

"We are working together to enable Elastic Search service directly on top of BigQuery, which means that customers can use the benefits of Elastic Search and the benefits of BigQuery together without replicating or moving data," Kazmaier said. The cloud giant is also extending support for its search tool Looker to the Elastic platform to embed search insights into data-driven apps.

MongoDB Atlas, which is one of the database services used for modern application development, now integrates data in real-time with Google's BigQuery. "Basically, you have a direct connection between your application stack and your system of intelligence in BigQuery and can combine them now in real-time," he explained.

These updates are significant because an open data cloud allows for a unified experience working with data across all formats and clouds for all possible workloads. "Data Cloud truly builds your end-to-end data value chain," Kazmaier explained.

He touted the open data cloud's connected ecosystem, which renders it "a platform for data vendors to put their data applications on top of and innovate together with us on behalf of our customers," Kazmaier explained. Google doesn't see other data vendors and data technology companies as competitors, he said. "We think of them as partners that we are trying to keep working with to reduce time to value for our customers."

Kazmaier also highlighted the provider's efforts to build a data cloud alliance with more than 17 growing data vendors in the cloud space. "The essence of the data cloud alliance is really to ... enable our customers to build boundary-less across data applications and data systems," he said, referencing the 800 infrastructure service providers (ISVs) contributing to the open data ecosystem with their own data products.