Google LLC’s cloud unit today detailed new partnerships with two major enterprises: BT Group plc, the largest telecommunications provider in the U.K., and financial services giant Bloomberg LP. 

The partnerships focus on two different sets of use cases. As part of its collaboration with BT, Google Cloud will support the company’s effort to create an internal “AI and data fabric.” Bloomberg, in turn, is working with Google Cloud to make it easier for customers to access market data such as stock price updates.  

BT is the U.K.’s largest telecommunications provider with revenues of about $28 billion last year. Today, BT announced that it has inked a five-year contract to use Google Cloud infrastructure and services as part of its digital transformation initiative. 

The initiative has multiple components. BT aims to create a platform, described as a company-wide data and AI fabric, that is intended to help it increase operational efficiency. The firm will also work with Google’s site reliability engineering, or SRE, team to help its technologists adopt best practices such as continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is a method of automating some of the manual tasks involved in producing software. 

BT also hopes to unlock new revenue growth opportunities through the collaboration. Using Google Cloud’s services, the company plans to introduce new digital offerings and make the user experience more personalized for customers.

Also on the agenda: making it easier to maintain BT’s network. The company envisions its engineering teams using Google Cloud’s services to analyze network issues and address them before there is an impact on user experience.

BT and Google have already started working on the initiative. BT expects to complete “the core migration of data” to Google Cloud by 2023. 

“By deploying our full cloud capabilities, and support from our SRE organization, our goal in this partnership is to set up BT with the tools it needs for future growth and innovation,” said Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian. 

Bloomberg is the other company with which Google announced a partnership today. As part of its product portfolio, Bloomberg provides a service called B-PIPE that provides access to real-time financial data such as updates on stock price movements. Bloomberg will work with Google Cloud to make financial data from B-PIPE more easily accessible for joint customers. 

The plan, the search giant said, is to give organizations the ability to access B-PIPE data through Google Cloud infrastructure using “native connectivity.” The companies will deliver the data in a way that won’t require organizations to install additional software or deploy any on-premises hardware.

B-PIPE is used by financial firms to inform their business decisions. A bank’s stock trading team, for example, can use data from B-PIPE to identify investment opportunities. The service is also useful for other tasks, such as evaluating the effectiveness of an investment strategy or building applications that make automatic trading decisions based on market changes.

The financial services sector has emerged as a major focus of Google Cloud’s effort to grow its presence in vertical industries. CME Group Inc., the operator of several major exchanges used to trade in financial instruments, last November announced plans to move its technology infrastructure to Google Cloud. In conjunction, the search giant bought $1 billion worth of CME Group stock.

Carriers such as BT are also a major focus for Google. Last year, the company introduced a platform called Distributed Cloud Edge that makes it easier for carriers to run the software they use to manage their 5G network infrastructure.

Image: Google