In a blog post, Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud (pictured), said that the widespread adoption of Google’s technology solutions by retail, gaming, financial services and manufacturing organisations had influenced the decision.
Kurian added that leading Japanese brands such as the drinks company Asahi Group Holdings and IT service management firm Kyocera Communication Systems had chosen Google Cloud to “help them push the boundaries of digital transformation in their industries”.
“We’ve invested more than $47 billion in our global infrastructure in the last three years, and we continue to invest to fuel the digital transformation journey of our customers across more than 150 countries,” he added.
“These key elements, combined with our global partner ecosystem and expanded go-to-market organization, enable Google Cloud to be a strategic partner to the world’s leading enterprises.”
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in Osaka is Google’s twentieth region overall, second in Japan and seventh in Asia Pacific.
Its first region launch in Japan was in 2016 in Tokyo.
Tatsuhito Chiku, corporate officer, GM, Information Technology Section at Asahi Group Holdings, commented: “Using Google Cloud Platform services like BigQuery have enabled us to build a system with low latency and high resiliency, and the Osaka cloud region will further improve our system availability and achieve business continuity.”
Japan’s Osaka GCP region will feature three zones and a standard set of products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. Combined with the recent launch of Anthos.
Japanese customers will benefit from having greater choice and flexibility to manage workloads on-premises and on any public cloud.
Two cloud regions in-country will also provide improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery.
Osaka’s GCP services and support will be provided its ecosystem partners NTT SmartConnect Corporation, which provides cloud, data centre and streaming services, and Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank.
“Our housing and cloud services are provided mainly from Osaka City,” commented Akira Shirahase, president of NTT SmartConnect Corporation. “Now we can operate these using Cloud Cross Connect in a closed network and secure hybrid cloud environment with lower latency.”
