In an independent report about the Industrial Internet of Things called “The IoT Platform Shakedown‚” Lux Research reinforces its highest “strong positive” rating of C3.ai’s success and recommends C3.ai as a top IoT platform provider‚ among a field of 29 vendors.
Lux explains‚ “There are hundreds of Internet of Things (IoT) platform products on the market today. Platforms exhibit a wide range in technology strength and product maturity – picking the optimal platform is no easy task.”
Excerpts from Lux Research’s assessment of C3.ai’s platform strengths and feature sets include:
Technology & Differentiators
- C3.ai has developed a solution for connecting sensors‚ IoT devices‚ and enterprise systems to a platform with pre-built IoT applications‚ an app dev environment‚ and a comprehensive analytics engine. The Platform begins with inputs from a variety of data sources‚ including sensors‚ SCADA systems‚ asset management solutions‚ CRM platforms‚ and ERPs. It feeds this data to its transformation engine‚ which processes the data and pushes it to its app and analytics environment.
- Users can select from a set of pre-built applications‚ which the firm claims are broadly applicable across multiple industries. Beyond the pre-built applications‚ the C3.ai platform provides a development environment for building custom IoT applications similar to ThingWorx. C3.ai has integrated machine learning / analytics tools into its applications and development environment. The analytics tools provide reports‚ dashboards‚ visualizations‚ and actionable insights. C3.ai hosts the solution in AWS‚ but can deploy the solution in private clouds‚ as well as on-premises as an appliance.
Strategy & Markets
- C3.ai operates from offices in seven countries across North America‚ Europe‚ and Asia with most of its customers in North America and Europe. Given the firm’s genesis in the utilities space‚ most of its customers are still energy organizations (mostly electricity providers)‚ but it has won a few big deals outside of the utilities space. 80% of its customers leverage the pre-built applications for managing their internal operations; some customers are building custom applications through C3.ai‚ which they then resell as part of a bundled solution to their customers. The pricing model is tied to the specific pricing of Amazon’s storage and compute fees‚ which C3.ai says keeps billing simple and allows customers to pay as they grow.
Lux Take: Strong Positive
- With proven value and scale‚ C3.ai is a leader in IoT application and analytics platforms. The firm’s founder and CEO‚ Tom Siebel‚ is a mogul and will be able to get in front of execs and drive growth.
Read more: The IoT Platform Shakedown‚ Lux Research‚ August 5‚ 2016
