A new Google Cloud solution portfolio built on Anthos called Distributed Cloud, a packaged industry solution called Cloud Intelligent Products Essentials and new integrations and capabilities across the Workspace suite -- which includes Gmail, Docs, Drive and some of the company’s other popular apps -- are among the biggest announcements during the company’s annual Google Cloud Next conference for partners and customers.

Like last year, Google Cloud Next is virtual due to the global pandemic. It runs from Tuesday to Thursday.

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Google also announced new customer wins, including multinational manufacturer General Mills selecting Google Cloud as its “executive transformation partner” with Accenture, agreeing to migrate its SAP workloads, custom application workloads, hosted third-party applications, Windows licensing and Oracle Bare Metal Solution (BMS) to Google Cloud.

Fast food chain Wendy’s will use Google Cloud to build artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for new digital experiences. Siemens Energy inked a new, multi-year collaboration to use Google Cloud for its business infrastructure. And Deutsche Post DHL Group will use Google Cloud for new shipment tracking solutions, according to Google.

Miles Ward, chief technology officer at Los Angeles-based Google partner SADA Systems -- a member of CRN’s 2021 Managed Service Provider 500 -- told CRN in an interview that a key investment from Google is in making migrations easier for users.

“Customers are expecting all of this to get seamless,” Ward said. “In the earliest parts of the Google Cloud motion, we’d be like, ’Yeah, yeah, we’ll do anything you want as long as it’s not SAP and Oracle and VMware. Now we’re like, ’We will do everything, including SAP and Oracle and VMware.’”

He said that Google’s investment in Omni products to make multi-cloud environments easier for customers to implement, investment in more third-party applications across its product suite and continued investment in Anthos for production use cases at higher scale deployments have also been good for business.

The investment in independent software vendors (ISVs) and third-party integrations hasn’t come at the cost of channel partners, Ward said. “They’ve been really really aggressive about pulling us into more and more deals making it so that we’re a clear part of their delivery,” he said.

Here’s what you need to know.