I have wondered on more than one occasion if Palantir wasn't simply made up of a bunch of people who know how to "work the data/analytics machine" well, supported by people who know how to get government & big business contracts REALLY well.

By "work the data/analytics machine", I mean putting together the full spectrum of data analysis tools & people - something that anybody with enough money/time/staff can do - anything from the ETL/stream processing, integrating across different databases, big data processing systems, BI tools/analytical tools, graph processing, search tech, conventional data mining, recurrent/convolutional neural networks, etc. etc. etc.

Partially, I say this out of personal experiences, having observed how government & big business is often quite motivated to spend some money, when seeing what they perceive to be "cool" and advanced data/analytics capabilities.

That's not saying Palantir doesn't have advanced tech, I am sure they built some pretty cool proprietary stuff. But, just that maybe what they do isn't such a mystery to people who understand how it is done anyway.

They seem to push the notion that they are the proprietors of amazing software for data analysis.

Then when you buy them, a bunch of "forward deployed engineers" come in and carefully comb through all your data sources and figure out how to get it all ingested and linked in their software.

Which, of course, is actually the hard part of doing data analysis at large organizations! By default, in any large org, important data is fragmented and sitting in silos--and departments defend it that way. Being able to see all that data come together would seem like magic. But it's mostly because of the manual work upfront.

Maybe the right way to think about Palantir is a data-aggregating operation that uses marketing to convince large organizations to allow them to aggregate data.

That's not a secret. Ask anyone at the company and they will say Palantir is primarily an integration company. The reason the demand so much money in for this integration is simply because no one else will actually do it despite the constant refrain of it being "only" data integration.

I actually hear this a lot. Companies with data/analytics problems that aren't being served, or, may have internal politics or technology challenges preventing them from doing the obvious data integration tasks that would benefit them. Plus, for the longest time, government and "data" work was viewed as a nightmare, boring and not "hip or cool". I've always seen that as an opportunity, one Palantir clearly has done well with.

One key role of the "forward deployed engineers" is a political one. Once you've let them tie up all your data into their platform, you're already pouring some insane amounts of money into this. Now, whatever the results, you certainly don't want to "start again with another promising solution". That's one of the reasons Palantir makes so much money out of their business.

Leveraging sunk cost fallacy?

The really hard part is creating a company that gets all of the data sources like the camera readers and videos from police cars that go to Palantir. Having that data (+ more that I don't know about) pretty much locks out other vendors because Palantir can bring more to the table besides processing the cities data.

I don't know if you can say it locks out vendors. Earlier this year, the reports were that Palantir had problems retaining commercial contracts. With their "forward deployed engineers", the image that's emerged is that Palantir is a contractor house with a patina of spies.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/inside-palantir-silico...

They tried to push the PR angle in 2013, and no one took notice.

https://gcn.com/articles/2013/10/04/gcn-award-nyc-databridge...

And Accenture's case study of the same project:

https://www.accenture.com/t20150719T214424__w__/gb-en/_acnme...