Forbes contributing author Dan Woods captures key insights from his recent conversation with C3.ai CEO Thomas Siebel‚ “a veteran at creating companies that make and sell enterprise software‚” in a three-part article series.
In the second article‚ “Everything Will Be Sensored: Tom Siebel on the Future of the IoT‚” Siebel provides his perspective on the Internet of Things – including IoT’s impact on business and society as well as C3.ai’s role in building the next generation of AI and IoT applications.
Highlights from the second Q&A interview with Siebel include:
- I believe that what’s going on now with big data‚ predictive analytics‚ and IoT looks like a complete replacement market for everything in enterprise application software.
- There is no device in ten years that is not sensored. Everything that touches everybody’s life in the civilized world will have a sensor…impacting the way that we work‚ entertain ourselves‚ transport ourselves‚ and communicate.
- C3.ai combines IoT data and data from the enterprise with data from the extranet into a unified federated image to be able to process these very‚ very large datasets. They grow at breathtakingly rapid rates.
- We operate on top of cloud infrastructure—this is basically compute and storage in the cloud. We refer to that as infrastructure as a service. On top of that‚ we provide a platform as a service that serves two purposes. It provides a set of application development tools that allows people‚ whether they be in the aerospace industry or the healthcare industry or the telecommunications industry‚ to rapidly design‚ develop‚ deploy‚ provision‚ and operate big data‚ predictive analytics‚ and IoT applications. The second aspect of that platform is – not only is it a development environment – it’s an operating environment for the execution of those applications. That’s platform as a service – we use the platform as a service to both develop software-as-a-service applications that might be predictive analytics for aerospace‚ customer churn for telecommunications‚ the next generation of CRM‚ whatever it may be‚ but the platform also is the operating system for that application.
- We meet with companies where the vision is there‚ it’s all about IoT‚ big data‚ and predictive analytics. They have a hundred or a thousand use cases. And the idea is let’s pick one that is sufficiently complex and representative of the use cases that they have‚ and at the same time sufficiently tractable that we can knock it out in a short period of time and demonstrate that it works. They’re demonstrating that by solving the first use case‚ they can be satisfied that they can solve a large class of use cases. We tend to go from the pilot to the enterprise transaction.
The full article‚ Everything Will Be Sensored: Tom Siebel on the Future of the IoT‚ follows the first‚ How Tom Siebel Applies A Lifetime Of Learning At C3.ai‚ which summarizes Siebel’s perspective on the history and present state of enterprise software.
