His top-to-bottom overhaul included a ramp-up of Google’s salesforce and focused on core infrastructure, data analytics, cybersecurity and industry-tailored products and services.

Google Cloud is gaining influence in the enterprise space.

The Home Depot started working with Google Cloud in 2016, when it decided to migrate its on-premises ecommerce site to the cloud. It moved its legacy data warehouse into the cloud provider’s BigQuery two years later. During those years, it saw firsthand the “growing pains” of being an early Google Cloud adopter.

“Most notably, I remember their approach to terms and conditions, customer engagement practices,” said Daniel Grider, the chain’s vice president of Technology and head of Infrastructure and Operations. “They were just not adaptable to the enterprise customer like The Home Depot.”

Fast forward to 2022, and Grider cited a “drastic” change for the better after Thomas Kurian’s three and a half years as CEO of Google Cloud, which today remains the company’s preferred cloud provider as it continues migrating workloads from its “legacy debt” accumulated over decades to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

When asked himself if Google Cloud is enterprise-ready today, Kurian told Protocol that customers such as The Home Depot — which extended its run with the cloud provider last July — are validating its arrival as an enterprise-worthy cloud contender.

“Given the number of very large customers — from stock exchanges to large telecommunications companies, to big banks, to hospital systems, manufacturing companies — that are running large systems and using our cloud to run the core parts of their business, I would say yes, the answer is yes,” Kurian said. “We've really, really transformed, and most of our largest customers have been super successful in adopting and using cloud through the work they've done with us.”

Count KeyBank among the Google Cloud customers that are convinced.

“We certainly view GCP as an enterprise-ready marketplace in cloud, or we would never be in the process of moving our workloads,” said Keith Silvestri, chief technology officer at KeyBank, which this year started a three-year migration from its on-premises data center to GCP. “From a maturity perspective, from production support, from the investments they make in security, through how they're organized, absolutely.”

Google Cloud’s annual revenue has jumped approximately 230% under CEO Thomas Kurian's tenure. Photo: Google

A former Oracle product development president, Kurian had an enterprise-oriented mandate from his start in January 2019, and took a three-pillar approach to reshaping Google Cloud as an open-source, hybrid and multicloud provider. That included sharpening its strategy by focusing on infrastructure, data analytics, cybersecurity, collaboration and communication, as well as industry-specific products and services; installing the people, systems and processes needed to execute the vision and support growth, including a tripling of its salesforce; and transforming its culture.

“All three had to come together in order to make us successful,” Kurian said. “There's always more to be done at all times, but clearly we've had a lot of success these last three years, and credit to our teams that did all the work.”

With new customers including Deutsche Bank, Ford Motor Company, Mayo Clinic, Univision and the U.S. Air Force, that success is showing up in the top line. Google Cloud’s annual revenue — which includes GCP and Google Workspace, its cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools — has jumped approximately 230% under Kurian to $19.2 billion in 2021, with GCP outpacing Google Cloud’s overall growth. In April, it reported first-quarter revenue of $5.8 billion, which was just about $17 million shy of what Google Cloud generated for the entirety of 2018 and puts it on track for a $23.3 billion annualized revenue run rate this year.

While Google Cloud continues to operate at a hefty loss — $931 million as of the end of the first quarter — parent company Alphabet has signaled it’s taking a longer-term view when it comes to the division's profitability, with plans to continue investing aggressively given the sizable cloud market that it sees. Though Google Cloud remains a distant third to AWS and Microsoft Azure in the cloud computing race, with a 10% share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market, according to Synergy Research, that’s up from 7% in 2019, and there’s plenty of room for further growth.

Wedbush Securities estimates that only approximately 44% of all enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud. Google Cloud also has a sizable revenue backlog: In April, Alphabet reported $50.5 billion in future customer contract commitments primarily related to the cloud business.

Kurian has put Google Cloud “truly on the map,” said Tom Galizia, global chief commercial officer of the Alphabet/Google practice at Deloitte Consulting, a global systems integrator and Google Cloud’s largest go-to-market partner.

“You don't go from $5 billion [in annual revenue] to $20 [billion] in three years and not get to claim that,” Galizia said. “He brought a rigor around enterprise and industry-based selling. He continued to shore up and build on the technical footprint that was already there. I also think he has taken a North American cloud company to the world. It is an enterprise global alternative that is formidable, and for the right clients in the right industries, it is absolutely the right answer.”

Prior to Kurian’s arrival, Google Cloud had been trailing or was on par with now fifth-place IBM when it came to cloud market share. It wasn’t competing aggressively enough to win the lift-and-shift core infrastructure business that was going to AWS and Microsoft Azure, and had a reputation as an organization that was more interested in convincing customers to do things Google’s way than learning what they really needed.

Embarking on its new strategy, Google Cloud’s first step was on the product side, allowing its engineers to build, mature and differentiate core services, Kurian said. He also took on Google Cloud’s previously freewheeling internal culture.

“Google had a very strong engineering culture,” he said. “We needed to add to it this focus on the customer and make a lot of our innovation be customer-driven. We spent a lot of time talking through and helping each part of our organization understand how the technology that they're building, how the role they have — whether it's in data center operations or sales — eventually meets at the customer, and how [we are] making the customer successful.”

On the business side, Google Cloud had to pick countries where it would scale its sales and distribution organization and settle on how it would approach enterprises differently than younger, cloud-native technology companies.

“You need not just sales and technical engineers, but also professional services, customer support,” Kurian said. “And along with that was being very clear with our partners: how do we work with partners, because they're a big part of the ecosystem when you're working in enterprise.”

Kurian is referring to the company’s channel partners — the systems integrators such as Deloitte, resellers and managed service providers that sell Google Cloud and wrap their own products and services around it — along with independent software vendor partners. In early 2019, Google Cloud committed to having a partner involved in every one of its deals.

To help execute its new game plan, Google Cloud hired senior leaders such as nearly 27-year SAP veteran Robert Enslin, who joined in April 2019 as global sales president. Enslin, who left Google Cloud this year, helped build out its sales organization by geographic regions and industries with recruits from enterprise players including AWS, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.

We had to build many functions that did not really exist before.

“We had to build many functions that did not really exist before,” Kurian said, “whether that's a commercial legal team to negotiate contracts … customer service, etc. To support them, we had to put in place many systems: contracting, ordering, forecasting, customer service systems, revenue recognition — all of the underpinnings that make these people productive.”

Core business processes had to be transformed, according to Kurian, from how customer support requests and premium support would be handled, to forecasting and how salespeople entered orders, to the system for helping partners drive deals with Google Cloud.

One of Kurian’s most impactful moves was establishing the Google Cloud Customer Advisory Board in early 2020 for 50 of its top customer CIOs and CTOs to provide feedback across its business and technology strategy, said Grider, who now sits on the board, which Kurian chairs.

“This has proven to be a successful mechanism to hear directly from strategic customers about their needs, their friction points and what's most important to them,” Grider said. “I appreciate the fact that Thomas personally attends every one and engages. Feedback is a gift, and providing that type of forum to solicit it is one that Google has shown a heavy interest in, and it's making a difference.”

Grider also appreciates Google Cloud’s willingness to develop products in conjunction with customers.

“It's not a typical situation where we say, 'Here's our pain point,' and then [they] come back with a solution,” he said. “We work directly with them. Thomas has impacted that ability from a product offering — that the customers have a front seat at what that looks like. And being in retail, we can appreciate that.”

Since Kurian came on board, the biggest change for Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO has been “making sure that we were involved not just with enterprises directly, but also fostering connectivity, architecture and approaches that were inclusive of the ecosystems and partners that those organizations already maintained,” Chief Technology Officer Will Grannis said.

The Office of the CTO also plays a larger role today in “emerging themes,” ensuring Google Cloud’s road map and investments are well-tuned over time so the cloud provider can meet customers where they want to be in the future.

“In the past, I would say about 60[%] to 70% of our function focused on deep technical advice to the world's top brands,” Grannis said. “That advice is still critical, but we kind of flipped to where now about 60% of our time is spent synthesizing the signals we get and making sure those signals are really strong for our internal engineering and product teams and for the cloud leadership team so that we might embark on more forward-looking endeavors that are multiyear and very strategic versus doing things just for one customer.”

Cloud computing today is about transforming almost every aspect of an enterprise organization and how it operates, Grannis said.

“The shift that you've seen from us in terms of [a] product road map that goes from core compute and storage to a more fully fledged analytics platform, to open architecture and multicloud platforms, to even just refinements in our Workspace products and rounding out our security portfolio — all of that is matching this wave,” Grannis said. “A full partnership requires a full set of capabilities.”

Infrastructure, data and analytics, and cybersecurity are typically the top three reasons why organizations choose Google Cloud, according to Kurian.

At the Google Cloud Next conference in April 2019, in his first major address to partners and customers, Kurian heralded Google Cloud’s embrace of multicloud with the launch of Anthos into general availability.

“You can build applications that can co-exist across clouds, you can do analytics that span data that sits across clouds, you can use our machine-learning tools to access information and get better insights from data and inference across clouds,” Kurian told Protocol. “That was not possible before then. It's become almost a norm now in large companies, where they want to use the best of the best from different cloud providers.”

Based on Google Kubernetes Engine, Anthos is a managed hybrid and multicloud platform that allows customers to build and manage applications across Google Cloud, in their own data centers and in third-party clouds, including those of rivals AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Major League Baseball uses the open architecture enabled by Anthos to run applications on bare metal in ballparks as well as on clusters in the cloud. HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, is using Anthos across an infrastructure that includes thousands of applications and global regions in a highly regulated industry.

Infrastructure, data and analytics, and cybersecurity are typically the top three reasons why organizations choose Google Cloud, according to CEO Thomas Kurian.Photo: Google/Weinberg-Clark Photography

“Those pathfinding activities have been critical to the growth of Anthos and, in my opinion, the growth of multicloud as an architectural pattern that more and more people are embracing,” Grannis said.

BigQuery Omni is an example of how far Google Cloud is taking its multicloud approach, according to Grannis. The analytics tool, which allows users to access and securely analyze data across clouds, is built around BigQuery, the 11-year-old serverless data warehouse that’s the centerpiece of Google Cloud’s data and analytics suite. BigQuery Omni, which runs on Anthos clusters, became available for AWS and Microsoft Azure last October.

“We're the only cloud that I'm aware of that purposefully enables computation and analytics over other public clouds,” Grannis said. “That's a pretty big indicator of how committed we are to multicloud. We embed our values and principles in our engineering, and one of our values and principles is that people should be able to run any shape of compute the way that they want it.”

Google Cloud also strengthened its analytics and data warehouse capabilities with its $2.6 billion acquisition of Looker, a multicloud business intelligence software and big data analytics company, in early 2020. Looker has since introduced new integrations with the Google Cloud portfolio, including Connected Sheets and Data Studio in April, as well as with Salesforce’s Tableau, whose business analytics software helps users visualize and understand data.

Other acquisitions have helped fill holes in Google Cloud’s security portfolio amid more rampant cybersecurity attacks.

In January, Google Cloud disclosed its purchase of Israeli startup Siemplify, a security orchestration, automation and response provider, for a reported $500 million, and said it would integrate its capabilities into Chronicle, its security analytics platform.

Using Chronicle and GCP, payments company NCR — a point-of-sale digital banking customer — can look over two years’ worth of security-related data in a matter of minutes, according to Grannis.

“Being able to crunch that much data in just a few minutes was really a game-changer,” he said. “That's enabled not only by an intelligent security approach from Chronicle, but also the scale-out infrastructure nature and the integration of those two things.”

And then in March, Google Cloud announced a $5.4 billion deal to acquire Mandiant and its extended detection and response SaaS platform to help round out a “full-service” approach to security that, in addition to Chronicle, also includes Google Cloud Armor, its network security service that provides defenses against DDoS and application attacks, and BeyondCorp Enterprise, its zero-trust identity and security platform.

“Today, the challenge most organizations have is they don't have the capability to understand what occurred to cause a cyber breach, analyze which of your systems have been compromised, remediate that through workflow and then test whether you, in fact, are secure,” Kurian said. “We realized in the front, we needed really great threat detection and response capability. Mandiant brought us that.”

Developing industry-specific products and services tailored to customers in 10 areas — consumer packaged goods, financial services, gaming, health care and life sciences, manufacturing, media and entertainment, public sector, supply chain and logistics, retail and telecommunications — has been a big part of Google Cloud’s enterprise push under Kurian. They range from Lending DocAI, which is designed to reduce the time and cost of closing loans for the mortgage industry by automating mortgage document processing, to Supply Chain Twin, which allows companies to build a digital twin or virtual representation of their supply chain for better visibility.

Kurian has been pretty focused on repeatability: how Google Cloud can drive systemic change through an entire company or industry rather than one-off, bespoke, uniform-like programs, Galizia said.

When Carrie Tharp joined Google Cloud as vice president of Retail and Consumer in August 2019 from Neiman Marcus Group, “it was a little bit of what I call, from my industry experience, kind of the bright, shiny object syndrome of, ‘Hey, can Google do something cool for me in this space?’ and TBD if that was scalable or sustainable to do from a partnership perspective,” said Tharp, a former chief digital and marketing officer for the retailer. “We really evolved … to driving true large-scale, across-the-value chain transformation.”

Retail is one of Google Cloud’s largest and fastest-growing industries drawing in customers, many of whom eschew AWS because they view its parent company, Amazon, as a competitor.

Retail Search, which became generally available in March, gives retailers the ability to provide Google-quality search capabilities to customers using their websites and applications. It uses Google technologies that understand user intent and context to improve the shopping experience. When a customer searches for a red dress with lace, for example, red dresses with lace appear at the top of the search results.

These targeted, industry-specific products comprise one area where that work with customers pays dividends: The Home Depot helped Google Cloud build Retail Search.

“A reduction in our secondary queries has been drastic as a result of the retail search problem that we put in front of them to help us solve,” Grider said. “And we continue to refine that based off their team and our team of data scientists.”

Retail Search also is an example of Google Cloud’s progress in bringing the power of Alphabet to enterprise customers, capitalizing on assets such as Google’s search and digital advertising capabilities or Waymo’s autonomous vehicle work.

KeyBank worked with Google Cloud on Anthos, and eliminating all paper from banks and reducing fraud are two other challenges they’re considering working on together, according to Silvestri. A key part of why the relationship works, he said, is that as Google Cloud created its industry-specific services, it hired people who had worked in those industries — in this case, people with financial institution experience.

“You're talking to someone who actually understands banking, which is a heck of a big importance to me,” Silvestri said. “We've already got a basis and the foundation to work on.”

When Enslin left Google Cloud in May to become co-CEO of UiPath, Google Cloud decided to streamline its sales and customer success organizations to consolidate points of contact for customers. It unified sales, technical account management, professional services and customer success personnel under two teams: Kirsten Kliphouse leads the Americas team, and Adaire Fox-Martin heads the team covering Google Cloud’s other international territories. The move was prompted by feedback from customers and partners, according to Kurian.

“When we started in 2019, we were largely focused on acquiring customers,” he said. “As we have ramped [up] our business, increasingly the sales organization that's working with the customer to identify new opportunities in the account, and the customer success team that ensures the projects are going well and the team that works with partners like Accenture, Deloitte, etc. all need to come together. They all need to work in one coherent fashion, right at the point of client engagement.”

Google Cloud’s biggest challenge right now is expanding globally, according to Kurian. The cloud provider has announced 19 new cloud regions since he joined. It currently has 34 regions with 103 zones and 147 network edge locations, with availability in more than 200 countries and territories. Additional cloud regions are forthcoming in Berlin; Tel Aviv; Dammam, Saudi Arabia; Doha, Qatar; and Turin, Italy.

“Obviously, we have a certain size and scale,” Kurian said. “There's a lot of work going on to expand both our data center footprint around the world as well as our sales, distribution and service organizations. There's a lot more geographies that we want to go to, in addition to expanding in our core geos, whether that's the U.K., France, Germany, United States, Canada, etc.”

Deloitte’s Galizia believes that Google Cloud needs to make it easier for customers to buy and adopt its technology.

“A lot of Google technology is in modules, and you have to kind of assemble the modules together to get the business value out of it,” he said. “But enterprise clients want an ‘easy’ button to buy a solution, and so I think there's still room to work on that.”

There’s also the matter of Google Cloud’s operating loss, which stood at $4.3 billion when Kurian became CEO and ballooned to $5.6 billion two years later, primarily due to compensation expenses for newly hired engineers and product managers. That loss was cut to $3.1 billion by the end of 2021 thanks to 47% year-over-year Google Cloud revenue growth and Alphabet’s decision to extend the operational life of its servers and certain network equipment by a year.

Like many tech executives, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat have said it’s early innings for the cloud, and the company remains committed to a longer-term path to profitability, with increased scale expected to erode the losses over time.

“It's a massive growth expansion opportunity for them,” Galizia said. “The key right now is how do you drive the $51 billion backlog to consumption in a thoughtful way that drives enterprise value for clients. And when they do that, I think you're going to see the profitability engine kick in pretty directly.”

“When I look at the innovation and the product pipeline and the overall demand we are seeing and how early our journey is, there's definitely a lot to look forward to,” Pichai told analysts during the first-quarter earnings call in April. “Overall, the execution has been great. We are scaling up, particularly in our go-to-market … and I think that will play out well.”

Galizia was more concerned about Alphabet giving up on Google Cloud five years ago than today, he said. He believes Alphabet now is committed because of the sheer amount of capital it’s invested.

“They're so deep at this point in the investment, I don't see them coming out of this one,” he said. “I think they're very excited about the success of the business that they've had … Think about this: Google Cloud is starting to rival even the size of YouTube. It's pretty amazing in a very short period of time.”

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Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

A first-in-the-nation bill would support wave and tidal energy as a way to meet the Garden State's climate goals.

Technological challenges mean wave and tidal power remain generally more expensive than their other renewable counterparts. But government support could help spur more innovation that brings down cost.

Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).

Move over, solar and wind. There’s a new kid on the renewable energy block: waves and tides.

Harnessing the ocean’s power is still in its early stages, but the industry is poised for a big legislative boost, with the potential for real investment down the line.

A New Jersey bill introduced this week would make the state the first in the U.S. to throw government support behind ocean energy. It would direct the state’s utility board to both initiate a study of generating power from waves and tides (they’re different, but more on that in a second), and simultaneously support ocean energy pilot projects. The bill isn’t just focused on studies and pilots, though; it calls for the board to produce a plan for deploying these technologies and potentially offering financial incentives as well.

The bill doesn’t provide funds for the fledgling technology at this point, but the state’s 2023 budget — signed into law Thursday — includes $500,000 dedicated to a feasibility study and pilot program for ocean-based energy, opening the door for New Jersey to continue to ride the wave energy … wave.

With the legislation, “New Jersey serves as a model to all states seeking to bring new forms of renewable energy into the future,” said Democrat Assemblyman Robert Karabinchak, who introduced the bill. The state has set a 2050 net zero goal, and Karabinchak said that wave and tidal energy could help make progress toward that North Star.

There’s a subtle difference between tidal and wave energy. In broad strokes, the former uses the push and pull of the tides themselves to push a paddle or spin a turbine and convert its flow into electricity, while wave energy relies upon the thrust of often-unpredictable surface waves to do so.

According to the Energy Information Administration, waves off the coast of the country are churning out 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours of untapped energy. That’s equivalent to 66% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020.

Wave energy has been around as a concept since 1799, when Pierre-Simon Girard filed a patent in his native France for using the waves “like motors” for simple machines like pumps. Modern wave energy converter technology, however, didn’t see its debut until the 1940s, when Japanese navy commander Yoshio Masuda created a wave-fueled navigation buoy that was ultimately sold commercially in the 1960s. Yet despite early work and the promise of abundant energy, the ocean presents challenges and surprises that have made it hard to tap.

“The problem is that these converters have to operate in very harsh environments,” said Muhammad Hajj, chair of the civil, environmental and ocean engineering department at the Stevens Institute. “You could design something to harness the energy of a 3-meter wave … but if the wave height becomes 8 meters, how will it respond?”

These technological challenges mean wave and tidal power remain generally more expensive than their other renewable counterparts. But government support could help spur more innovation that brings down costs.

The New Jersey legislation would provide a path to include the nascent ocean-based energy technologies in the state’s energy master plan, released once per decade. The 2019 installment pushed for the state to develop renewable technologies such as offshore wind, solar and storage, but made no mention of ocean power.

While the bill’s fate is anything but certain, the mere fact of its existence is encouraging to Inna Braverman, founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power. Her company has developed technology that converts wave power to electricity directly at breakwaters.

“I really believe that not only [will it] enable us to implement projects in New Jersey, which has amazing wave conditions, but also other states will follow,” she told Protocol.

Both Braverman and Hajj testified at a New Jersey Assembly committee hearing on the topic back in March, where Braverman characterized the response from both sides of the aisle as enthusiastic.

Various companies have tried to harvest energy from waves in recent years, but most have yet to succeed. That includes the high-profile failure of Ocean Power in 2014, which dealt with cost overruns and other challenges.That’s meant that waves have lagged behind both wind and the sun for generating electricity. Braverman attributes some of these to the fact that early efforts were far offshore.

“Not only is it expensive to install offshore, but … you get waves with a height of 20 meters. And no man-made stationary equipment can really withstand the load of a 20-meter wave height,” Braverman said. It became difficult to fund and insure these earlier projects, not to mention build the transmission lines to connect them to the grid.

In contrast, Eco Wave Power connects its technology to existing man-made structures — piers, breakwaters, jetties and other marine structures — in order to keep overall construction costs low and avoid the practical pitfalls of the open ocean. The company has two operational projects, one at the Port of Gibraltar and one in Israel, and several more in the pipeline.

Today, Eco Wave Power is focused primarily on the U.S. and European markets, Braverman said, which differ in large part because Europe already has regulations and legislation in place that enable the easy entrance of new wave projects while the U.S. does not — yet.

“We really need to introduce new renewable energy sources in order to really be able to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” she said. “And I truly believe that wave energy can be the solution for that. New Jersey is just the start.”

Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).

Every day, millions of us press the “order” button on our favorite coffee store's mobile application: Our chosen brew will be on the counter when we arrive. It’s a personalized, seamless experience that we have all come to expect. What we don’t know is what’s happening behind the scenes. The mobile application is sourcing data from a database that stores information about each customer and what their favorite coffee drinks are. It is also leveraging event-streaming data in real time to ensure the ingredients for your personal coffee are in supply at your local store.

Applications like this power our daily lives, and if they can’t access massive amounts of data stored in a database as well as stream data “in motion” instantaneously, you — and millions of customers — won’t have these in-the-moment experiences.

“Customers demand these real-time experiences, and companies that fail to meet those expectations risk falling behind,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO at DataStax, a technology company that helps businesses deliver real-time data at scale. “We live in a time where real-time applications are the engines of innovation and economic growth.”

In my conversation with Kapoor, he shared his perspective on why every business must embrace real-time data today.

Companies that don’t harness real-time data risk becoming irrelevant

While the concept of utilizing real-time data is not new, the urgency to do so is. Digital leaders — those at the forefront of building a data-driven business — are effectively capturing and processing data in real time, and then using it to deliver instantaneous experiences. Customers not only expect these digital experiences; they are increasingly demanding them from every business.

McKinsey & Company supports this view. According to a recent McKinsey report, “The Data-Driven Enterprise of 2025,” real-time data is key to success. It listed the following characteristics of top data-driven enterprises:

However, McKinsey & Company also reported that only a fraction of the amount of data from connected devices is processed in real time. The report found common roadblocks include legacy software, the challenges of adopting modern architecture and high computational demands.

“The great news is that technology has advanced to the point where real-time applications are now possible — not only for the largest organizations, but every organization,” said Kapoor. “And those who can’t deliver these experiences risk becoming irrelevant.”

Real-time technology is finally here — and it just works

Constant innovation is what solves today’s business problems. Leading enterprises prioritize giving their developers the tools and data that inspire them to innovate and do what they do best: Build the applications that improve our lives.

“Software developers are on the front lines, and their mission is to bring modern applications to life,” said Kapoor. “The good news is, the technology to build real-time applications is here; it’s easy and affordable. We’re enabling developers to do what they do best: build.”

Kapoor said that spurring developer creativity is one of the many reasons he’s excited about DataStax’s open data stack for real-time applications. Available on any cloud, DataStax delivers both a massively scalable database — Astra DB — and advanced streaming technology, Astra Streaming. Together, Astra DB and Astra Streaming provide developers with a stack that mobilizes all enterprise data to build powerful real-time applications.

“Astra DB brings the power and scale of Apache Cassandra to every developer. It uses simple developer APIs and works with developers’ favorite tools and languages, so developers can focus on what they do best — building real-time, high-growth applications that drive change,” said Kapoor.

Kapoor is also enthusiastic about the company’s event streaming and messaging technology Astra Streaming, built on the advanced Apache Pulsar open-source software. As the only streaming service that can easily turn existing messaging data into real-time data, Astra Streaming can give many types of data real-time value.

“An open stack with Astra Streaming and Astra DB enables enterprises to activate all real-time data — it just works,” he said.

Real-time data drives real change

Many of the challenges facing our world today are increasingly complex and critical, such as climate change, talent shortages and supply chain disruptions. Solving these problems requires analyzing large data sets, quickly. Additionally, organizations must use data to predict future issues and then determine the most effective solution. According to Kapoor, activating data in real time can be a powerful way to help organizations create the innovations needed to overcome both big and small challenges. In fact, new business models are being forged on the back of real-time data all the time.

As an example, a DataStax customer and AI-based irrigation company that made the Time Best Inventions list uses real-time data to conserve water while improving farmers’ outcomes. By using IoT devices sitting on or near the crops, the system sends data to the cloud, which then triggers alerts based on the data analytics. If fruit on the vine is at risk for spoiling, the system notifies the farmer to harvest the crops to reduce loss. The technology also helps farmers manage water resources, prevent plant stress, improve production and maximize crop potential — all in real time.

The Gartner report "Innovation Insight for Streaming Data in Motion: The Collision of Messaging, Analytics and DBMS”, explored opportunities for organizations to use event streaming for diverse business purposes. For example, “traffic, weather and vehicle telemetry streams enable trucking companies, railroads, airlines, shipping companies, car ride services and other transportation operators to monitor and manage fleet movements.” According to Gartner, "Large organizations already have copious amounts of streaming data in motion, but many fail to use it effectively. Data and analytics leaders must adopt recent advances in stream analytics, event broker messaging and data management technology to implement real-time systems with more business value.”

Kapoor observed that when we use data in real time, customers and companies get smarter together.

“Everyone succeeds by delivering more value, faster. We are all on a journey toward doing this. The only question is whether companies will be ahead of the curve — or playing catch-up,” he said. “Today, you’re either real time or you’re out of time.”

Learn more about DataStax’s open data stack for real-time applications here.

Don’t know what to do this weekend? We’ve got you covered.

Here are our picks for your long weekend.

Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.

Kick off your long weekend with an extra-long two-part “Stranger Things” finale; a deep dive into the deckbuilding games like Magic: The Gathering; and Neon White, which mashes up several genres, including a dating sim.

The finale of Stranger Things’ fourth season debuts today, bringing an end to the show’s most horror-filled and grave storyline to date. Though this volume is billed as a second part to the show’s fourth installment, it is in fact two extra-long additions tacked onto a season already filled with hour-plus episodes. The first will be 85 minutes, and the second is roughly 2.5 hours long. That’s a lot of “Stranger Things” to tide you over this holiday weekend. I’m hoping for a happy ending, though given the tone so far, it sure seems like “Stranger Things Vol. 2” might have its fair share of tragedy, too.

Neon White is best described by its inexplicable mashup of genres. It is one part speedrun-friendly parkour game, one part first-person shooter disguised as a deckbuilder and one part … dating sim. The resulting combination somehow works wonderfully, creating a high-octane action platformer that dares you to try to beat your high scores by striving for near-perfect runs. Between the action, you chat with NPCs and can even romance other characters, sending this bizarre gaming concoction to a totally unnecessary but hilarious new height.

The surprising combination of two of the most influential video game genres into the so-called roguelike deckbuilder has, against all odds, inspired a massive and enduring movement in the indie game community. In a great new report for The Verge, writer Lewis Gordon spoke to early pioneers like Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield, Slay the Spire designer Anthony Giovannetti and Signs of the Sojourner maker Dyala Kattan-Wright about the evolution of card games and procedural design, and why so many breakout Steam hits these days are incorporating elements of the genre.

A Coen Brothers take on Macbeth ends up being a lot more interesting than it sounds, thanks in part to the noted absence of Ethan Coen. Directed by Joel Coen, in his solo directorial debut, this monochrome and rather faithful adaptation of the classic Shakespeare tale is a big departure from the duo’s typical dark humor-infused Americana, featuring a legendary performance by Denzel Washington as the title character. The A24 film was released last year in a limited theatrical run; it picked up three Oscar nominations, and landed on Apple TV+ back in January.

A version of this story also appeared in today’s Entertainment newsletter; subscribe here.

Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.

Leverage helped mining operations expand as they borrowed against their hardware or the crypto it generated.

Dropping crypto prices have upended the economics of mining.

Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.

As bitcoin boomed, crypto mining seemed almost like printing money. But in reality, miners have always had to juggle the cost of hardware, electricity and operations against the tokens their work yielded. Often miners held onto their crypto, betting it would appreciate, or borrowed against it to buy more mining rigs. Now all those bills are coming due: The industry has accumulated as much as $4 billion in debt, according to some estimates.

The crypto boom encouraged excess. “The approach was get rich quick, build it big, build it fast, use leverage. Do it now,” said Andrew Webber, founder and CEO at crypto mining service provider Digital Power Optimization.

Bitcoin miners are HODLers by nature. Many preferred to hold most of the bitcoin they generated, selling just what they needed to pay employees or other suppliers, because they believed it would go up in value.

Everything in this crypto market comes back to leverage. While miners are typically borrowing to operate, not speculate, debt is still a key part of the business.

Are defaults coming? As the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has fallen, so has the value of mining hardware. This could be forcing some to decide whether it’s worth making payments, Webber said. “I expect there's gonna be some meaningful distress and likely some liquidation or consolidation across the space.” It wouldn’t be the first time a rush for money turned to bust.

Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.

Prescription drug ads are all over TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. As the potential harms become clear, why haven’t the companies updated their advertising policies?

Even as providers like Cerebral draw federal attention, Meta’s and TikTok’s advertising policies still allow telehealth providers to turbocharge their marketing efforts.

Hirsh Chitkara ( @HirshChitkara) is a reporter at Protocol focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Before joining Protocol, he helped write a daily newsletter at Insider that covered all things Big Tech. He's based in New York and can be reached at hchitkara@protocol.com.

In the United States, prescription drug advertisements are as commonplace as drive-thru lanes and Pete Davidson relationship updates. We’re told every day — often multiple times a day — to ask our doctor if some new medication is right for us. Saturday Night Live has for decades parodied the breathless parade of side effect warnings tacked onto drug commercials. Here in New York, even our subway swipes are subsidized by advertisements that deliver the good news: We can last longer in bed and keep our hair, if only we turn to the latest VC-backed telehealth service.

The U.S. is almost alone in embracing direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements. Nations as disparate as Saudi Arabia, France and China all find common ground in banning such ads. In fact, of all developed nations, only New Zealand joins the U.S. in giving pharmaceutical companies a direct line to consumers.

As it so happens, Americans are also highly medicated. A Mayo Clinic study from 2013 found that nearly 70% of Americans regularly took at least one prescription drug. Nearly half the population took at least two, and more than 20% of Americans took five or more. The researchers identified prescription drug abuse as the “fastest-growing drug problem” in the U.S. They also found prescription rates had increased significantly over that preceding decade.

Given the continuity of these trends, it would be easy to overlook a new factor in the equation: social media. Telehealth services have spent millions of dollars promoting prescription drugs on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. They play on users' insecurities, describing symptoms as vague as “stress” and “losing track of time.” Mood-altering medications such as SSRIs are sold as having straightforward benefits, with companies promising those suffering from depression and loneliness that 80% of customers feel better with treatment.

One major telehealth provider, Cerebral, is now under investigation by the Department of Justice over possible violations of the Controlled Substances Act. Nurse practitioners working for Cerebral said they felt pressure to see dozens of patients a day and push prescriptions, according to reports from Insider, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. (A Cerebral spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal they encourage clinicians not to rush diagnoses and provide time beyond 30 minutes if needed.)

Even as providers like Cerebral draw federal attention, Meta’s and TikTok’s advertising policies still allow telehealth providers to turbocharge their marketing efforts, enticing many patients to start treatments they may regret. As one Cerebral patient told Protocol, “On principle, I want to shout from the mountaintops so no one else falls into their nonsense.”

Both Meta and TikTok allow telehealth providers to promote prescription drugs to users ages 18 and up in the U.S. and New Zealand. Both companies make a distinction between promoting prescription medication, which is allowed, and direct drug sales, which are not. Meta and TikTok work with third-party compliance companies such as LegitScript to approve telehealth providers. Advertisements must also comply with any other relevant platform rules — for example, both platforms prohibit ads for weight loss treatments.

When asked for comment, spokespeople from Meta and TikTok referred Protocol to their respective advertising and community guidelines. (Meta’s policies are available here and here, and TikTok’s are here, here and here.) After being contacted by Protocol, Meta also removed three advertisements from its sites for violating its policies.

Meta and TikTok also say ads cannot contain misleading or inaccurate claims. However, medical experts said advertisements on their platforms do exactly that. On several prior occasions, the companies pulled certain pharmaceutical ads only after the media brought policy violations to their attention. And despite the high stakes involved in promoting medication, both companies rely in large part on automated ad verification systems, which can be prone to error.

Telehealth provider Done, for example, promoted a TikTok ad that describes how being “spacey, forgetful, or chatty” can be a symptom of ADHD. Another Done ad warned symptoms of ADHD in women “are often viewed as character traits rather than symptoms.” In an active ad campaign on Meta, Done promises gaining access to “worry-free refills” is “as easy as” taking a one-minute assessment, followed by a 30-minute appointment available as soon as the next day. (Many of the ad campaigns referenced in this article come from Meta rather than from TikTok because, to Meta’s credit, it has a transparency tool for archiving ad campaigns.)

Ads that generalize ADHD symptoms could violate Meta’s and TikTok’s own policies on misleading consumers, as nonprofit research organization Media Matters points out.

“I think this is really playing on people’s insecurities,” Dr. Kevin Martin Antshel, a psychology professor at Syracuse University who specializes in ADHD, told Protocol. Dr. Antshel noted that ADHD in adults often co-occurs with other psychological disorders such as anxiety and depression. He expressed concern that ads from telehealth providers were leading people to believe ADHD could be treated with stimulants alone, which he said is almost never the case.

Telehealth providers also seem to play on users’ insecurities when promoting erectile dysfunction medication. On Instagram, a recently removed ad campaign from Hims depicted a man asking himself, “What if it happens again today? What if I can’t get it up?” Another of its ads, which was active as of June 26 but has since been removed, shows a couple in bed with text overlaid: “POV: There’s a gorgeous woman in your bed. But you have ED & can’t get it up.” Some of the videos instruct users to “take the quiz” — a rather casual euphemism for kicking off a process that could lead to a medical diagnosis — next to a picture of someone holding a pill.

Meta has touted Roman, one of the telehealth providers that sells ED medication, as a “success story” that could serve as a case study for marketers. Meta’s case study details how Roman was able to double its sales and click-through rate on an ad campaign that promoted testosterone supplements between mid-September and mid-November 2019. Roman was among the top 10 mobile advertising spenders on Facebook that year, as were Pfizer, Allergan and Merck.

Active ad campaigns from Hims entice customers with simple solutions for treating anxiety and depression. One advertisement — which directs users to a page offering generic versions of SSRIs Prozac and Zoloft — tells viewers that “80% of customers feel better with treatment.”

Such straightforward promises don’t always align with patient experiences. One Cerebral patient described suffering severe withdrawal symptoms after being unable to schedule a refill appointment through the company. “I would fret for days over collecting my meds. I would become sick and incapable when they’d miss the refill,” the person told Protocol.

“I find myself constantly pushing [Cerebral] on people because if they use my reference code I can get a $200-off credit,” another Cerebral patient told Protocol.

A campaign from Cerebral that was active as recently as June 26 told viewers they can “overcome opioid use 100% online.” That ad, which featured a large icon of a prescription container, linked to a landing page that said “reduce cravings with medications like Suboxone.”

“It's not ideal,” Jeffrey Scherrer, an associate professor at Saint Louis University who researches opioid use, told Protocol. “But it's certainly a second option for people who otherwise wouldn't even consider seeking care — because I think it offers a little bit more privacy and reduces, for those in rural areas, the need to drive long distances to reach a provider.”

It’s hard to imagine we’d ever think of the “good old days” for drug advertising as when gray-haired men were suggestively throwing footballs through tire swings between news segments on the Iraq War — yet here we are.

In the television era, regulators faced a simpler task. To start, there were only so many ad slots to fill, which limited the pool of companies that could reasonably afford to buy air time. (Devoted NFL fans can list the blue-chip advertisers by heart.) Broadcast and cable channels could review what went in their slots, and the FCC could feasibly monitor ads on the hundred-or-so cable channels beamed into American living rooms.

Social media advertisements operate at a scale that would have been unfathomable in the television era. Meta hosted over 10 million advertisers on its platform last year. In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, TikTok removed 3.2 million ads from its platform due to policy infringements.

Social media platforms also allow for more precise targeting. A 2021 investigation from The Markup found that Meta allowed drug manufacturers to target potential patients granularly based on proxy categories. For example, an advertisement promoting a drug used for inflammatory lung disease was aimed at users interested in cigarettes. Similarly, advertisements promoting antipsychotic medication targeted users interested in therapy. Those categories allowed for targeting even though Meta says ad rankings can’t be informed by medical conditions or psychological states.

Age verification poses another significant problem. Meta and TikTok both only allow prescription drug advertisements to be shown to users above the age of 18. But their age verification systems have loopholes that could still let ads slip through to children.

Some prescription drug campaigns seem tailored for younger audiences. A Done ad that ran on Instagram as recently as June 26, but has since been taken down, depicts a young woman telling her mom and dad, “I think I may have ADHD.” The mom in the skit responds, “You’re probably fine — you’ll always be my baby.” The dad advises, “Why don’t you go to the gym and sweat it out.” But the skit concludes with the young woman deciding to ignore her parents and instead take a one-minute assessment from Done.

The other open and troubling question is whether social media worsens users’ mental health, which could make these advertisements more appealing. In leaked internal documents from Facebook, researchers wrote that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression.” Mark Zuckerberg told Congress those research findings were inconclusive.

“If [social media users] are displaying symptoms of pain, despair, depression, hardship [and] loneliness, then what sort of adverts would you expect to be targeted in those situations?” Professor Victoria Nash, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, asked Protocol. “I wouldn’t be surprised that in a more unregulated context — which I think the U.S. probably is — that this is where you would see prescription drugs being targeted.”

High-frequency digital activities — like scrolling through social media — are so out of sync with the pace of ordinary life that people come to feel more distractible when they aren’t online, according to Antshel. He said social media is “in a sense conditioning people to want this kind of rapid operational speed, constant mental stimulation.” When that stimulation isn’t available in a domain such as the classroom, people are more likely to notice their distractibility, he explained.

Still, Antshel wasn’t ready to call for a ban on prescription drug advertising. He pointed to benefits from drug ads, including reaching people who lack information and access to treatments. “So knowing what to talk about with the primary care physician, I think, could potentially be a good thing. But I can also tell you that I routinely see patients coming in [and] telling me what type of medication they want [and] what type of dose they want.” The issue, he said, is that “we're taking the direct-to-consumer advertising to an extent where it really is creating the potential for harm.”

Hirsh Chitkara ( @HirshChitkara) is a reporter at Protocol focused on the intersection of politics, technology and society. Before joining Protocol, he helped write a daily newsletter at Insider that covered all things Big Tech. He's based in New York and can be reached at hchitkara@protocol.com.

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