SAIC-Google alliance targets AI at the tactical edge
As SAIC's chief innovation officer, Lauren Knausenberg helps manage the partnership with Google Public Sector. SAIC
By
Nick Wakeman
Their partnership reflects a shift across the market toward more mission-driven collaborations over contract-specific arrangements.
Science Applications International Corp.’s new strategic alliance with Google Public Sector highlights several trends that are shaping how companies pursue opportunities in the federal market.
Their alliance, announced in late July, is an example of how systems integrators and commercial technology companies are developing deeper and more intimate partnerships.
"When we talk about strategic partnerships, that's completely divorced from any particular deal," said Lauren Knausenberger, who leads strategic partnerships at SAIC as chief innovation officer and is a former Air Force chief information officer. "It has more to do with what part of the market, what problem, what area of technology are we going to do something amazing in."
In other words, alliances like SAIC’s and Google’s are about the long-term mission instead of a specific contract opportunity.
The focus of alliances on the mission is another trend we are tracking. In this case, SAIC and Google want to bring the power of cloud computing out to the tactical edge.
SAIC is the first integrator to sell Google’s distributed cloud capability into the federal market, particularly the defense sector.
"One of our core focuses is operationalizing AI, and there are so many military, national security, law enforcement, and homeland security use cases for operationalizing AI at the edge," Knausenberger said.
Google’s approach includes a ruggedized device that is now certified at the secret and top-secret levels for the enterprise and is built to bring a distributed cloud environment into the battlefield.
“It’s a really interesting time to partner with them because one of our key focuses is operationalizing AI,” she said.
The partnership combines SAIC’s capabilities, open-source algorithms and Google’s ruggedized device.
“You take a smattering of other partners as necessary and you start to have the ingredients to do just about any use case and do it very quickly,” Knausenberger said.
SAIC and Google are talking to customers now about pilots and demos.
“We’re going to be the first mission integrator to deploy their hardware for real mission applications,” she said.
Cloud computing at the edge is critical because traditional connectivity is either not feasible, not sure, or both. Some of the applications include autonomous drone operations in contested environments, where operational security is critical.
“Think about being a warfighter and you're running autonomous drones and sensors and you're in a place where you either don't have connectivity or you should not give away your location by generating connectivity,” Knausenberger said.
One area of focus for SAIC is intelligence operations, particularly opportunities to push more analysis and interpretation to the edge.
“You run your fleet from the cloud. That’s where you do really heavy data operations,” she said. “But you want to sense and inference at the edge. Those are things you need to make rapid decisions.”
The partnership also includes the training of 1,000 SAIC employees on the Google cloud platform. The devices will be in SAIC’s labs, where engineers from both companies will work together on practical applications.
The ruggedized devices also have NVIDIA A-100 chips in them.
“We are going to have a few extra terabytes of chip performance hanging out in our labs,” she said. “My engineers are so excited.”
The partnership is not exclusive. SAIC also has close relationships with Google’s rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
Those relationships are critical in the defense sector because “all of our DOD customers are in multiple clouds,” Knausenberger said.
She sees more of these close-knit partnerships developing across the market. For SAIC, it is a question of identifying a need and deciding on the best way to build a solution to address that.
“Are we going to build? Or buy? Or partner?” she said. That references SAIC's thinking for when it invests internally, makes an acquisition or collaborates with other companies.
That logic extends to SAIC Ventures, where the company invests in promising startup companies. See this episode of our podcast with SAIC executive Michael Hauser, who manages the venture fund for the company.
For partnerships, a mutual focus on mission is essential.
“No company has all of the capabilities needed to solve many of these large-scale problems, and so, our intent is to bring together the best capabilities that we can,” Knausenberger said.