Today on Reddit a really great video overview of Palantir was shared with the community.
And I would agree with pretty much everything that was said by the author. If I had to nitpick, or rather just dig a bit deeper into one bullet point, it would be: “the onsite deployment strategy”. On the one hand it’s a necessity, on the other it pegs you to a specific customer and dealing with support and account management becomes significantly more difficult (and more expensive to deal with). Professional services is definitely a model, which many enterprises employ, but it does require additional resources, structure and talent. While it’s definitely true that many companies cannot use cloud based tools due to privacy concerns, there are many that can. Thus supporting both SaaS and on-prem customers is quite important. It is certainly better for the business if the customer can launch a tool using their in-house team, rather than relying on outside consultants. Generally speaking SaaS ARR grows faster due to self service nature and time to market benefits. However, it is usually the slow moving, on-prem customers who bring in the most revenue. It’s a delicate balance to satisfy both. I’d say that tools like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, SugarCRM Discover also offer platforms for data driven decisions. And “data driven decisions” is our thesis. Predictive analytics is a hot topic and in many cases having a platform, which is more simple than Palantir could also deliver adequate business value. I.e. the system may do enough to offer excellent data driven decisions, without the need for governance or modeling integrations. Granted, these would be smaller customers, but if a large enterprise is heavily in the Salesforce world they would likely leverage SFDC predictive analytics solution.
Likewise, the companies in the beginning of the video, which are examples of those who make data driven decisions today, must have some systems in place. I do think that whatever they use is simply inferior in the overall feature set of Palantir, but vendor lock in and cost of implementation could be pretty scary for some.
I do hope that Palantir is modular in nature to where a business could benefit from integration of Salesforce and Palantir, rather than competition.