The two fastest-growing companies on the Cloud Wars Top 10 have forged a sweeping data- and AI-centric partnership to make it easier and faster for businesses to pair Google Cloud and Palantir technologies to drive superior business outcomes with a big focus on industry-specific solutions.
While each company has scores of partners, I believe this broad-ranging expansion of the existing collaboration between Google Cloud — the #1 company on the Cloud Wars Top 10 — and #5 Palantir will deliver outsized impact for customers for a variety of reasons:
Bringing together the best of both: Palantir’s Foundry platform for enterprise data management now runs on Google Cloud infrastructure, and is also available on the Google Cloud Marketplace.
Strategic focus on data: Beyond that platform-to-platform compatibility and availability, Google Cloud and Palantir are promising deep high-value integrations at the data level. “Foundry will integrate with Google Cloud products to empower people throughout an organization to better work with data,” the companies said. “Foundry users can bring together their data in Google BigQuery with a variety of other sources, and run Google analytics as well as AI/ML capabilities to help drive more effective decision-making and faster business value.”
Massive market presence and momentum: While Palantir has been widely recognized for its success in governmental agencies and particularly with the U.S. Department of War, private-sector organizations have developed an enormous appetite for Palantir’s technologies and solutions as Palantir’s Q1 commercial revenue grew by 133% to $595 million.
Google Cloud also generated superb growth in Q1 as its revenue spiked 63% to $20 billion. And every single customer for each of those hypergrowth vendors shares the same #1 priority: AI transformation powered by AI-ready data.
Top-level executive support for the partnership: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Palantir COO and CTO Shyam Sankar sat down for a two-minute virtual fireside chat that reiterated key issues for each company’s customers: open technologies, accelerated business outcomes, enhanced data capabilities, and smarter and faster decision-making. Below, I’ve shared key perspectives from Kurian and Sankar from that video.
Industry-specific focus and outcomes: I have been a huge supporter of industry-specific solutions for several years and believe they will soon become the core operating model for most companies. For Google Cloud and Palantir, their emphasis on vertical-market capabilities — starting with retail and financial services — reflects the true power of this partnership and will, I believe, accelerate the worldwide shift toward vertical agentic solutions.
Thomas Kurian: Partnership’s Impact Has Parallels to Google Search
On the video with Palantir’s Sankar, Kurian said, “In the same way that Google Search made information on the entire internet available super-easily and thereby transformed the value of all the data on the internet through search, our aspiration is to provide that same ease of use for companies with their own data, making it easier, making it faster to get value from it, and helping everybody find the data they need to solve and make a decision they want answered.”
Shayam Sankar: Driving New Levels of Competitive Advantage for Customers
On the video with Kurian, Sankar said, “Really this is about bringing together the best of AI, which Google clearly represents, and enabling our customers to turn their data into decisions, and turn those decisions into sustainable competitive advantage, whether that’s happening on the factory floors in Detroit or the retail shelves in Sydney…. Palantir’s operational decision-making suite is really about moving from a world where our software was built to help us *plan* for the future to the world that we live in today where our software needs to help us respond to reality. And that is about operating your business —and you operate your business by making better decisions. How do I help you expand the surface area you have to make a better, faster, more-informed decision today that you turn into a sustainable competitive advantage? That’s really what this partnership is about.”
Final Thought
In these remarkable early days of the AI Revolution, the big tech vendors are faced with a simple but challenging question: how much of this massive market do I pursue for myself, and how much do I go after with partners?
It’s clear that Google Cloud and Palantir have determined that customers will gain more value and more capability and more success via the expanded partnership — and that, not very far down the road, those two companies will reap handsome rewards by putting the immediate needs of customers ahead of short-term possibilities for themselves.
Community Summit North America is the largest independent innovation, education, and training event for Microsoft business applications delivered by Expert Users, Microsoft Leaders, MVPs, and Partners. Register now to attend Community Summit in Nashville, TN from October 11-15.
