Palantir Finance sells to hedge funds and financial institutions, but the whisper referrals work in that insular industry just the same.
These guys need salespeople and marketing folks like I need a hole in the head.
EDIT: turns out I was wrong about the GSA schedule: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:ffLq8fxcGdAJ:h...
EDIT 2: Ha! The last page has their pricing. And it comes with a 90 day warranty!
EDIT 3: Double ha! "Implementation Ninja Services" is the official name for their lowest-level customer support.
The government is not a monolith, where everyone shares the same hallway (although the Pentagon might come close...).
There is a well-established game around enterprise sales. It involves golf, steak, strip clubs, and (as tptacek memorably put it) gnawing off your own toes. If these guys are succeeding at selling big-box enterprise software while refusing to play it, then they are rewriting the rules and others will follow. I don't want to be over-optimistic about this, but it sure would be a good thing, and I find it more interesting than either their analytics platform or their bubble machine.
"We don't have one"
"Who cleans the floors?"
"I do."
"You're the janitor"
FWIW I'm the cleaner, kiln technician, website team, chief scrubber and bottle washer, etc., for a company too.
I realise they're doing things differently. If people come to them all ready set to buy they still have to go through some process even if that process is only payment - someone manages that in some way. Maybe they take online payment and do delivery with no human interactions from the company side but someone still set that up, they still have a sales person.
When the press call to ask for an interview, or just for info about the product, who do they speak to? That person/those people are your publicist(s).
Who writes copy for the website? That's your marketing team.
Who do I speak to when I want to buy? That's your sales team.
Not labelling some thing doesn't stop it from being that thing.