Enterprise

C3 AI places a big bet on Google Cloud

All of C3 AI's machine-learning tools will now be available on Google Cloud, and the two companies will develop new products together and resell each other's existing products.

C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian stand on a lawn.

C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel (left) and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian just signed an expansive partnership deal.

Photo: Google

C3 AI has signed a sweeping partnership deal with Google Cloud, the two companies plan to announce Wednesday, in what C3 AI CEO Tom Siebel called a "precedent-setting" deal.

Under the terms of the agreement, all of C3 AI's software tools for building and deploying applications around artificial intelligence models will now run on Google Cloud. The two companies will also work together to make some of Google's core cloud tools — BigQuery, Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine — work more closely with C3 AI's services.

"This is a very large-scale initiative that I think will be precedent setting in the enterprise AI application space and in the hyperscaler space," Siebel told Protocol. "I believe there is no hyperscaler and no enterprise AI application company that has formed a partnership this deep, this broad and this meaningful at global scale."

Partnerships are quite common in enterprise tech; C3 AI's flagship AI Suite runs on all three major clouds, and it signed a similar partnership deal with Microsoft in 2018 that included co-development and cross-selling agreements. But according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, these two companies have a lot in common.

"We recognize customers have multiple hyperscalers they work with and [there are] also multiple software companies running on us, and Tom's organization needs to continue to support multiple cloud providers," Kurian told Protocol. However, "I think we were one of the first companies to share that vision that Tom's been working on for 10-plus years and so the alignment in our understanding from a go-to-market perspective and how we talk to customers together [is] materially different."

Kurian and Siebel are two sales veterans who have been both fierce competitors and colleagues in the small world of enterprise tech. Siebel founded customer-relationship management company Siebel Systems in 1993 and sold it to Oracle in 2006. Kurian started at Oracle in 1996 and eventually worked his way up to president before leaving in 2018 to become CEO of Google Cloud the following year.

That familiarity extends lower in the executive ranks; Sam Alkharrat, president and chief revenue officer at C3 AI, worked closely with Rob Enslin, president of cloud sales at Google, at longtime Oracle rival SAP.

"We have been and we are being very careful to align the incentives of both sales organizations, so they are highly incentivized to work together," Siebel said. "We understand the way the compensation structures work and what motivates sales people."

Cloud companies are highly motivated to sell AI services because of the computational requirements involved.

Building AI models requires a lot of storage for the massive data sets needed to really unlock insights, and processing them taxes cloud servers more and more every year. Higher-level AI tools that help companies that can't afford top-tier data scientists — that is, most companies — use AI in their applications also tend to carry better margins than lower-level services like compute and storage.

Specific terms of the agreement were not released, but the companies said they had struck a "multiyear" partnership.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

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.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins