Throwback to Google Cloud Next 2019 and visiting Microsoft HQ

With this year’s edition of Google Cloud Next underway, I found myself looking back at 2019 when I attended Google Cloud Next at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

I was part of the team that brought the IKEA booth to the conference floor, demonstrating the retail and cloud solutions our engineering teams were building, systems that today scale across global store and digital operations. Sharing concrete architecture lessons directly with engineers from other industries was one of the highlights of our cloud transition work.

During that same trip to the US West Coast, we also visited Google’s Mountain View campus (including the classic Android release statues on the lawn) and flew up to Redmond to meet face-to-face with Microsoft leaders, including Julia White, to discuss strategic cloud and edge partnerships.

Between back-to-back architecture sessions and partner meetings, we also managed to squeeze in a trip along the San Francisco waterfront. Looking back at the photos from that week is a great reminder of how much groundwork was laid during those years, and how valuable direct, technical partnerships are when modernizing a global enterprise.