Google's parent company Alphabet launched Chronicle, a cybersecurity company, in January. Since then, the company has largely been silent about its work, until CNBC spoke with Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett.
Here are five things CNBC learned during the interview:
1. Chronicle will apply Google's existing artificial intelligence and infrastructure capabilities to develop "planet-scale" security analytics, which will help large corporations "make sense of the information that is flowing across their environments," according to Mr. Gillett.
2. The new company will benefit from existing projects under Alphabet's portfolio. Earlier this year, Alphabet moved VirusTotal — a cybersecurity product Google bought in 2012 — to Chronicle. VirusTotal is a web-based application that analyzes website URLs and file attachments for viruses, worms and malware.
3. Chronicle has been alpha testing its services at various companies this year, including at Fortune 50 corporations and smaller firms in the healthcare, government and retail industries.
4. Prior to Chronicle's launch, Mr. Gillett said he spoke with executives from top cybersecurity companies to reassure them the Alphabet firm would not be a competitor to their businesses. Instead, he argued Chronicle would augment their existing security offerings, building on monitoring systems with more large-scale analytic capabilities, for example.
"In order to disarm their concern, I offered them and their [chief technology officers] access to our platform," he told CNBC. "We have such incredible scale, what we are doing … it's nothing that they would even attempt to do."
5. Chronicle hasn't set a date to go live with its cybersecurity platform.