Glean Technologies Inc. is a rising star in conversational search, harnessing the power of Google Cloud’s infrastructure to break down data silos and amplify its marketing support.
Glean is an artificial intelligence platform that connects and understands a customer’s data across sources such as email, Google Drive, Slack, Teams, Jira, Confluence and ServiceNow so that practitioners across an organization can find the answers they need to do their work. Glean’s platform relies on Google Cloud for fast, scalable solutions, and Google Cloud Marketplace has enabled Glean to grow its business with increased visibility and reach, according to Tamar Yehoshua (pictured, right), president of product and technology at Glean.
“[Glean] was built fully on Google Cloud Platform using BigQuery and using all of the GCP components … we have taken advantage of pretty much most of the GCP stack, and it’s worked extremely well for us,” she said. “It’s been really effective to co-market together and to sell. In fact, from Q1 to Q2, our number of deals in the Marketplace doubled.”
Yehoshua spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Stephen Orban (left), vice president of migrations, ISVs and marketplace at Google Cloud, and they discussed data silo solutions and how Glean’s partnership with Google Cloud has enabled the startup to expand its AI platform. (* Disclosure below.)
Comprehensive search to create data silo solutions
Glean, which recently raised more than $200 million in a late-stage round that valued the company at $2.2 billion, indexes information from popular business applications and can customize search results based on factors such as user job descriptions and current projects. Along with its use of Vertex AI, Glean employs Google Cloud services, such as Cloud SQL and Pathways Language Models, in its search solutions.
“[Glean] builds unique solutions that customers can only find on Google Cloud Platform,” Orban said. “They’re one of the most comprehensive search solutions out there to help customers learn from their data and build generative AI applications, which everybody is doing these days, very quickly. They market it really well to our mutual customers … so everybody is educated on how it works.”
Glean’s use of Google Cloud Marketplace has enabled it to leverage go-to-market support and streamlined access to customers. Google Cloud offers a unified platform for customers to buy and use various solutions that support data sets, infrastructure and models for generative AI use cases.
“Our sellers are promoting Marketplace, and the Marketplace sellers are promoting Glean. And we’re finding that our customers have an easier experience buying on the Marketplace,” Yehoshua said. “The procurement is easier; finding us is easier.”
Mutual benefits for Google Cloud and Marketplace partners
The relationship between Google Cloud and its Marketplace partners is also a two-way street. Glean played a key role in supporting a Google Cloud customer in the finance world, according to Orban.
“We actually worked together with a very large financial services customer that Google Cloud was already talking to in Asia-Pacific,” Orban explained. “They had the need to break down their silos and be able to create more knowledge, easily accessible for their knowledge workers. Our team quickly brought in the Glean team, who was able to showcase not only how their solution is awesome, but how it can actually run. This is a regulated entity, and it can run in their own GCP project.”
An ability to support highly regulated customers, such as those in financial services, highlights the importance of security in building solutions around search and generative AI. Glean relies on retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, to validate access and permissions, according to Yehoshua.
“This is something that Glean has spent five years working on, making sure that we adhere to the permissions of all of the SaaS apps that we leverage, making sure the data is secure,” Yehoshua said. “We’re a RAG-based architecture, so we read the data, we adhere to whatever permissions that the original data was in. It’s the customer’s data, and it’s secured in the customer’s GCP project.”
Google Cloud’s partnership with Glean offers an example of how companies large and small are working together to meet the evolving needs of businesses for generative AI solutions.
“Google’s mission overall is to solve computer science’s hardest problems, and we inherit that in cloud by helping customers solve their hardest technology problems,” Orban said. “We talked about the key levers here, breaking down data silos. You can take all of the data that is spread across in silos in a customer’s organization, very quickly connect it up to Glean — so it understands a lot of that content — and then use it in a natural language interface and a generative AI interface.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series.
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels special interview series. Neither Google LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)