Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Read any overview of how the finance and accounting function is changing, and you will notice several common themes. Three of the most important of these are: cloud migration, data standardization, and interoperability. The aim of technology in finance is to remove friction. With cloud migration that means making upgrades, licensing, procurement and maintenance simpler with software-as-a-service (SaaS) models.

Google Cloud has a genuine passion for solving technology problems that make a difference for our customers. With the release of our BigQuery Connector for SAP, we're taking a another big step towards solving a major challenge for SAP customers with a quick, easy, and inexpensive way to integrate SAP data with BigQuery, our serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi cloud data warehouse designed for business agility.

Recently there has been a lot of excitement around the idea of a stand-alone metrics layer in the modern data stack. Traditionally, metrics have been defined in the BI or analytics layer where various dashboards are used to look at business metrics like Revenue, Sales Pipeline, numbers of Claims, or User Activity. Given that most organizations end up with multiple BI/Analytics tools, the idea has a lot of merits.

As I meet with our customers, there are always a range of discussions regarding the use of the cloud for financial services data and analytics. Customers vary widely on the topic of public cloud – what data sources, what use cases are right for public cloud deployments – beyond sandbox, experimentation efforts. Private cloud continues to gain traction with firms realizing the benefits of greater flexibility and dynamic scalability.