I presume you're talking about the DCGS-A system. Palantir has done an expert level job confusing the public on this.
That system definitely has problems (it's terrible and sucks in many places), but it's a system of much larger capability and complexity than Palantir.
Comparing Palantir to it is like comparing a wheel to a an entire transport system. Palantir could comfortably fit in as a single capabilty in DCGS-A (and probably do a better job than the stuff currently filling in that role), but it could never replace it.
It's basically just a federated search, mediocre map and halfway decent link-analysis tool. But ask it to do anything even remotely outside of those three things and you're basically dead in the water as it doesn't offer anything relevant to all the other millions of things DCGS-A provides. DCGS-A is more than just some analytic tools.
The reason it's not part of DCGS-A is very political and complex and as much Palantir's doing as the Army's, but the answer is that the components that are on DCGS-A that basically do what Palantir does were selected because they're cheaper over the long run, even if a bit clunky. For example, on the client side, there's presently a forward looking mandate from big Army to drop flash and java clients (because they're an IT administrative menace). Palantir's front end is Java.
> there's presently a forward looking mandate from big Army to drop flash and java clients
I would feel way safer if the IC & military disabled Flash & Java in their browsers, along with the rest of the web. Those two plugins have shaped up to be quite the vehicles for zero-days.
The ZoomUI looked terrible to me. After years of huge iPads with only 4 icons across on it, because that supposedly makes them easier to use, the tiny tight grocery fruit pack of the icons looks like a usability nightmare. Fiddling with the knob (it's not a crown, crowns have specific functions in watches) also looks like a terrible time with every interaction. There's so many other ways they could have gone with it, and it's like they chose the wrong way just to be different.
> in the traditional Gruber understanding of what makes Apple great
The thing is, Gruber's mutant power is the ability to turntwist just about anything Apple does into a core Apple value and what defines them and makes them great.
In other words, what Gruber thinks and writes about basically doesn't matter, because Apple could do just about anything and he'd clap for it and stand in line.
there's a fair amount of vendor lock-in in this space as well and Palantir is pretty good at it. They talk quite a bit about open standards and what not. But moving off of their platform and onto one of the competing ones is basically impossible.
They've done a fantastic job at disrupting the link-chart market (which is surprisingly robust) and making it seem like customers are buying something else, but at 2-3x the price of the competition. They hide their sales guys as "forward deployed engineers" and obfuscate their sales process to the point where it doesn't seem like you've ever dealt with the kind of sketchy enterprise sales goon you'd deal with from any of their competitors.
I'm not comfortable going one way or another on Palantir, but...
> They hide their sales guys as "forward deployed engineers" and obfuscate their sales process to the point where it doesn't seem like you've ever dealt with the kind of sketchy enterprise sales goon you'd deal with from any of their competitors.
Really? I've known a couple of forward deployed engineers there, and I assure you, they're not salespeople.
Here's a long thread on just this topic here on Hacker News. One of their senior engineers jumped in to "clarify". It's worth reading the entire exchange.
I think these days they've deobfuscated the roles a bit. But back during this discussion, they were definitely hiring and mixing in sales people with their "deployed" engineers. Most of these guys would probably be sales engineers somewhere else, relegated to a life of doing canned demos for commission scraps.
It's actually kind of smart from a sales POV, embed your sales guy in the government site, call them engineers and let them have unlimited upsell opportunities.
You've basically tricked your customer to put one of your sales guys on staff.
From a customer POV, when you figure out the guy your paying $300k/yr to have on-site is just triaging issues and calling in real engineers to spot shoot issues, then spending their downtime trying to sell more software inside your organization it's kind of irritating.
I worked at Palantir for a number of years, and was heavily involved the hiring of Forward Deployed Engineers. The vast majority of FDEs did serious software development. There are only a few people I can think of who were not engineers, and their presence on deployments had to do with the alignment between their analytical background and the customer's focus.
The FDE's shouldn't have been doing any core software development unless it was some kind of bespoke one-off code, some kind of helper app for a specific SAP program or something, and that software, code and all, now belongs to the government.
They should have been doing implementation and FSR duties. If they were doing core product development while on Federal Contract, the government owns that software now. If it hasn't been turned over, source and all, it could be grounds for an IG investigation.
That is very serious stuff, so I hope you can qualify what you mean by "serious software development".
As for FDE's doing sales, just look at the current job openings. The BD team is full of FDE openings. What exactly do you think those FDEs do on the sales team?
Since everybody who touches the customer has the same title (except for Mission Specialists), it's easy for Palantir to start a deployment with non-sales FDE's, then swap them out for sales FDE's and start working the organization.
It's sketchy, but it's super smart if they're careful about it.
The thread is interesting. I do wonder if these reports are outdated, though. The people I know with that job title don't do sales. And I've met a few of them by now.
No, it's still current. If you take a peek at their careers page and look on the Business Development Team (that's the sales and partnership team) openings, it's chock full of Forward Deployed Engineer positions.
> raised almost a billion dollars and is valued at something like $9 billion dollars.
And now particular plans to sell or go public. This keeps all their financials private and the fact that they have to keep doing new fundraising rounds every few months does not make me think they're making money. At $9bil valuation, finding a buyer is going to be really tough.
They're a really weird company to deal with too. A bit cultish, the CEO is kind of flake the few times I've met him at their conferences. I get the impression that he's not really running the show, he's impossibly unqualified with zero history in any of the spaces they sell into and no business background of any useful type.
Their offices are nice, loads of free great food, but when people emerge from their offices for lunch it looks like they're on a death march. If you ask any of them if they like it there you'll always get a blank stare and a "I love it at Palantir, Palantir is great" answer.
Combined with the track jackets and sketchy legal history (well worth a read), it's kind of off-putting.
They essentially defrauded their chief competitor, i2, so that they could copy their features and reverse engineer their software so Palantir's system could integrate with it.
eldemar is providing some of the information. I'd add some color the i2 suit.
The fraud perpetrated by Palantir was actually so organized and so bad (they set up an entirely fake front company in another state), that the suing company asked the judge for the case to be tried under RICO rules...which are basically rules put in place to fight the mafia. The judge agreed that it qualified under the law (immediately tripling any damages that would have been awarded) and Palantir settled with i2 immediately after that and the case was dropped.
Word on the street is the settlement was for an almost 9 figure sum and Palantir immediately went into another fundraising round to cover the loss and sustain operations.
The employees (all senior execs) at the center of the fraud kept their jobs but didn't show their faces in public for a couple years (they had been acting as a de facto spokespeople during trade events). They're back in the public eye now.
Yes, that's correct, Palantir is currently run by people who's activities were qualified by a judge as falling under legal guidelines setup to fight the Mob.
You can say what you want about the big defense contractors, incompetence and lobbying and all that (which Palantir does in spades and has even gotten in trouble for not disclosing some lobbying deals) but mafioso they ain't.
This isn't even touching the HBGary union busting scheme and the Bank of America anti-Wikileaks proposal. And other very anti-democratic activities.
I don't know what happened to the employee with the anti-Wikileaks deal, but the one with HBGary was the stuff of dystopian nightmares. The employee responsible was publicly terminated but actually it turns out was just sent away for a bit and then quietly either rehired or just turned back up to a job he never lost. Nobody would have ever known about this if Anonymous hadn't had a very public fight with the CEO of HBGary Federal and hacked their network to pull down some documents, revealing an ongoing 3-way partnership with Palantir).
"such as former head of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael E Leiter who had said to himself “There’s Karp with his hair and his outfit—he doesn’t look like me or the other people that work for me,” before becoming a supporter and then consultant for Palantir"
and heavy lobbying (which explains some of the bizarre support they get in congress while the generals go blue in the face arguing against them)
"It has also been active in formal political lobbying, recruiting former senators John Braux and Trent Lott, (5) with its lobbying expenditures increasing steadily from 2010 to 2013 when its total annual investment exceeded $1.1 million"
I'm always surprised how cheap it is to buy politicians. I would expect a company like Palantir to spend much more than 1.1 million on lobbying. Does anybody know how much the 'consultancy fees' to former government officials are in total?
If you think Palantir spends a lot on lobbying, check out how much Boeing, Lockheed, and other multi-billion dollar contracting companies spend on lobbying. $1.1mm is probably what they spend on food in a month.
I would assume they wouldn't need to lobby since there's probably no competition or no required item appropriations for what it is they do. Any advocacy would probably be directly to agency consumers and there's no explicit lobbying involved (although there may be something to be said about the revolving door quid pro quo between government/private sector).
Their implementation periods are horrendous. Their marketing speak and sales drones make it sound like a turnkey appliance...like you just drop it in, point it to your database URLS and you're now playing with knowledge management. But in practice there's months of custom backend Java development (the entire tech stack is Java 1.6 or something horrible) to build the connectors and map the data into their backend, then months of ontology management meetings to build up the one-true-model (TM) for all your enterprise needs.
Then months and months of post deployment tweaking and continuous work to keep the system alive and fix issues when some of the data sources change schemas or something.
I've heard things like average time from purchase to full deployment is something like 9 months. But from my time dealing with them I think it's much longer.
That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
Well, feel free to buy a core and let me know how long it takes before you're up and running. Having been on the inside during 3 of their deployments, and on the outside of 2 more, I can definitely say 90 days is wildly optimistic.
edit never mind, after reviewing your comment history, it looks like you probably work for Palantir. You should probably disclose that. I stand by my comments about deployment times.
It really is an ugly square brick, regardless of how nice the bands are.
For a company that wanted you to think difference, which I interpret to mean "don't be a square", all this squareness and market conformity is really disappointing.
Funny you should mention that. Palantir's main competition in the governmeent, i2, is now IBM.
i2 was selling their software at some fraction of Palantir's and in the DoD space it's basically as ubiquitous as Microsoft Office. Palantir is everywhere, but it doesn't end up being used nearly as much.
Pretty much all the smartwatches have sufficient internal storage for some music. They're probably all just an app away from supporting this kind of use-case.
In other words Gruber's case on this is irrelevant.
The AppleTV, which is not marketed as having any internal storage at all, has the same (meager) 8GB of storage as the now free-with-contract iPhone 5C.
That system definitely has problems (it's terrible and sucks in many places), but it's a system of much larger capability and complexity than Palantir.
Comparing Palantir to it is like comparing a wheel to a an entire transport system. Palantir could comfortably fit in as a single capabilty in DCGS-A (and probably do a better job than the stuff currently filling in that role), but it could never replace it.
It's basically just a federated search, mediocre map and halfway decent link-analysis tool. But ask it to do anything even remotely outside of those three things and you're basically dead in the water as it doesn't offer anything relevant to all the other millions of things DCGS-A provides. DCGS-A is more than just some analytic tools.
The reason it's not part of DCGS-A is very political and complex and as much Palantir's doing as the Army's, but the answer is that the components that are on DCGS-A that basically do what Palantir does were selected because they're cheaper over the long run, even if a bit clunky. For example, on the client side, there's presently a forward looking mandate from big Army to drop flash and java clients (because they're an IT administrative menace). Palantir's front end is Java.