Google Intelligent Products Essentials is a new integrated solution designed to help enterprise clients quickly get hardware products online with a distributed Internet of Things. Intelligent Products Essentials aggregates critical components to launch distributed IoT and edge computing solutions. Essentially turn-key, Essentials does require a third-party system integrator to implement the system. As with other new offerings unveiled this week at the Google Cloud Next virtual event, Essentials is underpinned by analytics tools and designed to help organizations mine value from data for new and existing products.

“It is less of a product and more of a template or workbench, tying a number of connectivity and integration components together to give companies a head start on a complete IoT and edge deployed solution,” VentureBeat. Essentials is characterized as a solution for companies that lack the wherewithal for a completely customized solution — primarily smaller to mid-size enterprise firms.

Google is not charging a fee for this product, instead looking for profits on the essential Google Cloud products components that are necessary to effectuate the solution, VentureBeat notes.

While Google’s announcement emphasized consumer products like smart ovens and smart bicycles, VentureBeat expects interest in using Essentials to help create “modern environments for machine monitoring, maintenance, and failure analysis,” including automated security updates, as well as “complex IoT solutions for smart-cities infrastructure, healthcare monitoring, remote inspections, etc.”

Essentials is built on a Kubernetes microservices architecture using DataFlow to connect to the cloud environment and various databases of the customer’s choosing. “Interestingly, Google does not require that the IoT devices run its Android OS, as it realizes many IoT devices run an RTOS or some other simple OS,” VB informs.

As detailed in VB, other product announcements at Google Cloud Next include:

• Vertex Workbench, an enhancement to Vertex AI (which helps speed the build and deployment of AI models) that incorporates Dataproc, BigQuery, Dataplex, and Looker, among other Google Cloud services, for convenient ingestion and analysis of data via one interface.
• BigQuery Omni, enabling analysis of data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. A complement to Google’s Dataplex, Omni makes data accessible to more analytics tools.
• Spark on Google Cloud was previewed, with Google proclaiming it “the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for Google Cloud.” Spark permits data engineers, scientists and analysts to use Spark from a preferred interface, “writing apps and pipelines that autoscale without manual infrastructure provisioning or tuning.”
• Google Earth Engine, which makes Google’s more than 50 petabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets available through integration with BigQuery, Google Maps and Google Cloud’s AI technologies, giving customers “a way to better understand how the world is changing and what actions they can take” in matters ranging from understanding energy costs to population density.