So Palantir is hiring if you have a clearance :-). Time to get your tax dollars back. Looks like SAIC all over again.
You don't need a clearance. We have large commercial deployments.
Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
31–40 of 101 posts
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#32How do they get such precise prices? If I was selling something for 140k, I would sell it for 140k. But they sell it for $141,015.42.
It's GSA price. My guess is the retail price is somewhat rounder, and after tax and other specific discounts it comes down to that.
Yes: GSA prices are IIRC the result of a pro-forma (and totally BS) discounting process.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#33If you read between the lines, notice how the "Palantir Gotham Appliance" for 151,042.82 includes "Palantir recommended...database software licenses."
I would bet Oracle (or MS/IBM) is getting a hefty chunk of that.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#34All right in line with just about any sort of "Enterprise" software. Training and implementation services are downright cheap. Maintenance is the standard 20%. The last big vendor PO I had to look at put every professional services line item at $300-360/hr with $320 being about average.
Also Palantir's software actually does something more challenging than a lot of enterprise software. People should go and see what small packages from Oracle, HP, Tibco & IBM cost. It's incredible.
Yep, absolutely. This is a perfectly reasonable price for good enterprise software that actually adds value to an organization. (God, I feel like a middle manager just by typing that...).
My company spends tens of millions per year on some really awful enterprise software unfortunately.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#35Favourite part: "Palantir is in no way affiliated with, or endorsed or sponsored by, The Saul Zaentz Company d.b.a. Tolkien Enterprises or the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien."
Funny, but necessary. The Zaentz company is notoriously litigious. From Zaentz' Wikipedia article: "In 2011, Zaentz's company began several legal actions against small businesses in the UK to enforce their "Hobbit" trade mark, including the Hungry Hobbit cafe in Sarehole, near Birmingham[13][14] and a pub in Southampton, England, which had traded as The Hobbit for twenty years.[15] This raised the ire of many British correspondents such as Stephen Fry, who described it as "pointless, self-defeating bullying."
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#36For folks who've never seen one of these. 132-33 - Price for a Palantir server, priced per core. $141k per core. Includes 1 year of "maintenance" (support and software upgrades). 132-34 - This is the maintenance for second year on. $28k per core. How many users can a core support? I dunno. But let's say you can serve 50 people off of a 4-core system (you can redo the math for the number of users). You initial purchas…
I've done a bit of work with Palantir. This is basically spot on. They're really cagey about the core/user requirement in real life so I'd be comfortable in saying most customer over purchase cores. They usually staff 2-3 full time guys for every 30-50 people and the implementation takes forever. I know of more than one place that didn't have a working system a full year after purchase. Meaning the maintenance had already expired on that first year.
Your later comment about the crack model is also spot on. There's a fairly long list of disgruntled places that bought on discount and are now being hit with huge O&M maintenance fees and are looking for a way out. I think they're government customers are slowly going away.
They're starting to show up more overseas here. Palantir recently opened up a Seoul office. But how much of whatever business they get out of it is government and how much of it is commercial is anybody's guess.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#37How do they get such precise prices? If I was selling something for 140k, I would sell it for 140k. But they sell it for $141,015.42.
It's GSA price. My guess is the retail price is somewhat rounder, and after tax and other specific discounts it comes down to that.
Strictly speaking, being on the GSA schedule and being able to offer products/services for sale to the federal government requires that you not sell that product/service anywhere else for less than that GSA price.
This is actually one of the reasons that doing business with the government is less lucrative than the commercial industry (for products and services which are comparable, many are things only sold to the government, so there is no hesitation about pricing them through the roof).
As you can imagine, one of the ways that duplicitous federal contractors get around the idea of having to sell to the government for less than their normal prices is to structure their products/services as different (and therefore not apples to apples comparable).
I still would bet that the price that they charge Goldman Sachs (just as an example, I don't actually know which investment banks are using their product) is higher than what they charge for any individual government client.
Also, I think it's probably worth noting that the maximum addressable customer base for their products for federal agencies is way smaller than the equivalent number of financial customers. There's really only a handful of agencies that have this capability (I'd guess more than a handful, but probably less than a dozen).
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#38All right in line with just about any sort of "Enterprise" software. Training and implementation services are downright cheap. Maintenance is the standard 20%. The last big vendor PO I had to look at put every professional services line item at $300-360/hr with $320 being about average.
Also Palantir's software actually does something more challenging than a lot of enterprise software. People should go and see what small packages from Oracle, HP, Tibco & IBM cost. It's incredible.
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.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#39For folks who've never seen one of these. 132-33 - Price for a Palantir server, priced per core. $141k per core. Includes 1 year of "maintenance" (support and software upgrades). 132-34 - This is the maintenance for second year on. $28k per core. How many users can a core support? I dunno. But let's say you can serve 50 people off of a 4-core system (you can redo the math for the number of users). You initial purchas…
They sure have chosen their preferred client industries of Government and Financial Services wisely then. Those industries (a) are accustomed to paying that much for their technology, and (b) are very unlikely to leave your platform once you start using your wares, since the difficulty of getting them as a customer in the first place (and how slow they move and how much paperwork / due diligence is required) directly translates to difficulty for them to move off of your system.
Brilliant.
Re: Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]
#40So what exactly do you get for those prices? Some data munging and analytics? Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster. But this is the government so that might be more expensive than forking over the cash to Palantir.
It's less automated data analytics and more chart drawing and semantic knowledge base management tied to a federated search system. Their principle competitor is http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/analysts-notebook They used to have a free trial you could run via java webstart on their website, but they've taken it down. Here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f86VKjFSMJE It's big data in the sense tha…
Interesting, it looks a lot like Maltego.