Google Cloud, a suite of cloud computing services, has announced it will be joining a new alliance of data analytics companies that aims to support governments and organizations in recovering from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Emer2gent is set to combine traditional travel, business, economic, and retail data sets with sentiment and behavior data with a predefined purpose of facilitating the global economic recovery from the downturn caused by COVID-19. It describes itself as “an alliance of partners sharing data and expertise to build economic resilience”.
Led by Rolls-Royce, it already counts The Data City, Truata, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, IBM, and ODI Leeds as its members. Google Cloud is the latest to join the group and will be offering its BigQuery and and Public Datasets cloud data warehouse that assist companies to make informed decisions quickly and also ease their transformation.
Rajh Das, Google Cloud’s manufacturing and industrial lead for the UK and Ireland, remarked the company takes great pride to be involved in such an important project as we all work together to support business globally during these extraordinary times.
IBM is providing the IBM Cloud Pak for Data, its public cloud, and high-performance computing, along with subject matter expertise from its Data Science Elite team.
Andrew Brown, general manager for IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software Europe, said IBM looks forward to joining our existing partners and valued clients in this initiative. Brown further added that it is hoped that this contribution by IBM will help accomplish the identification of proven use cases, to assist where recovery indicators emerge for countries, governments, state agencies and supporting companies to best respond to the next phase of the improvement in the pandemic.
Caroline Gorski, global director for R2 Data Labs, the Rolls-Royce data innovation catalyst behind the alliance, expressed her hopes for the quick recovery of the global economy. Gorski added people, businesses and governments around the world have changed the way they spend, move, communicate and travel because of COVID-19 and we can use that insight, along with other data, to provide the basis for identifying what new insights and trends may emerge that signify the world’s adjustment to a new normal after the pandemic.
