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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain that? I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets. I understand that as with any large-scale implementation, a good portion of their actual project dollars will come from billable hours to get it running and keep it running, but they're certainly not run like an actual consulting company.

Also, neither SAP nor IBM are consulting companies. SAP is an ERP provider and IBM is a cloud-based solution provider and outsourcing company. Most people would say consulting companies are those like Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey, BCG, etc.

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SAP and IBM are both absolutely consulting firms, with the caveat that tech consulting means you're actually building solutions for your customers and not just telling them what they should build.

I think the biggest confusion is that Palantir is not in the data collection industry. They make tools to analyze data and contract out consultants (Forward Deployed Engineers) to do the analysis -- but the data is not being sourced by them. There's nothing you can do with Palantir that you couldn't do with any consulting firm or an in-house data-science/data-engineering team. Palantir's value proposition is that they have better tools and smarter people, but there's nothing magical or particularly nefarious about it.

I'm going to continue to disagree on the definition of consulting companies. Consulting companies have billable hours as their primary revenue stream. SAP in Q2 made over 80% of its revenue on cloud and software licenses. It's an ERP company with some consultants, not the other way around. Accenture, in comparison, makes about 75% of its revenue on billable services. I'll give you maybe IBM since their revenue is close to a 50/50 split between billable hours services and infrastructure/application fees depending on how you define the categories in their 10Q.

If anyone has any breakdown for Palantir's revenue by category, I'd love to see it.

I'm not sure why that matters. You can knock on IBM's door with a pile of cash and they'll build your software system for you. I don't doubt that it's a smaller part of their business but it's still analogous to what Palantir does. Pick a different software services company if IBM and SAP don't suit you.

I could also knock on my neighbor's door with a pile of cash and he'd build a shed for me even though he's never swung a hammer in his life. That doesn't mean he's in the business of building sheds, it just means he likes money. Palantir markets itself as a platform and tools vendor, and everything I've seen so far indicates that their primary revenue stream is there, not in professional services.

The actual consulting equivalent of Palantir would be any of the many data science "guns for hire" consultancies floating around that will sell you a few people for $250 an hour to get a project done, then leave.

If he builds you a shed for money he's in the shed-building business. I'm not sure why you're so intent on arguing semantics here.

IBM will build you a system to analyze some data. So will Palantir. Two different firms that offer a similar service. That's the only point I was trying to make.

You're purposely ignoring intent. Palantir has been a surveillance company from it's inception.

I’ve always understood their product to be big data analytics. They pull together the government’s or their customer’s data from disparate sources to allow the data to be more easily used to draw useful conclusions. They aren’t surveilling anyone as far as I’ve seen. That being said, they do apparently assist ICE with utilizing its own data to assist with immigration/border enforcement.

Semantics here are important because calling Palantir just a consultancy and trying to categorize it with other consultancies is disingenuous. It is a company with a platform and toolset specifically built to enable surveillance states. Calling it a consultancy "like IBM" is not a fair characterization of the company.

And no, if you do a thing once for money you are not in that business. That argument is completely ridiculous. You are in the business of whatever you primarily do for money on a regular basis.

It only feels disingenuous because you're not familiar with Palantir's business or offerings. You're not alone in this, most people who have strong opinions on Palantir have them based on lazy journalism from publications who's primary goal is to spread FUD (it's funny how we laugh at the average journalist's understanding of technology until the narrative aligns with our personal beliefs). I tried my best to explain but it seems you've already come to your conclusions.

> There's nothing you can do with Palantir that you couldn't do with any consulting firm or an in-house data-science/data-engineering team. Palantir's value proposition is that they have better tools and smarter people

I agree with this account of what Palantir offers, but it seems like an example of "big enough quantitative differences become qualitative".

Palantir isn't selling data no one else has, and I know the average news scare story about them is ridiculous; they're portrayed like a private NSA even though they don't do primary data gathering at all. (Why doesn't Stratfor draw those hit pieces? Just because they seem less competent and more corporate?) But there's a reason Palantir gets no-bid intelligence agency contracts. What they offer isn't in practice possible for most government agencies or companies to replicate. Part of that is simply competence, but not all of it; Palantir is a data analysis contractor noticeably focused on analyzing humans and finances.

I've seen Palantir do a couple of tech demos aimed at engineers, and they consistently focus on two big things. The first is experience and scale: Palantir has probably dealt with a problem a lot like yours in the past, and has the pre-existing tooling and expertise to produce results much faster than even an equally-competent internal team could. The second is selling human-integrated products, where instead of handing over a data lake or an ML pipeline spitting out probabilities, they provide analysis environments that let human analysts manage lots of data in easily-understood ways, and highlight further data they might wish to integrate. Neither of those things is evil, and I assume the human-integrated stuff is at least partially marketing spin, but I hope its understandable why they would make people nervous.

When people wanted to restrict the National Tracing Center, they restricted it to analog data so that people can only be identified via targeted lookup. Palantir seems to sell the opposite of that; maybe you can't get somebody's phone location without a warrant, but if you can aggregate license plate scanners, automated tolling records, and credit card transactions into a unified model of where they went, maybe you don't need to.

I like your answer but what bothers me:

1. What are the tools we don't know Palantir has? We know a few and while these fit in your description, they're kinda dangerous apps, and this brings me to point 2:

2. Who they sell these to?

I think consulting in tech sometimes means custom software solution with a lot of engineers on loan, often deployed to the customer's site.

But despite Palantir's attempts to expand into the private sector, I do believe their government side has been more successful, so I think it's fair to say that Palantir is a government contractor first and foremost.

>I, and I think a lot of HN readers, are strongly of the impression that Palantir sells a platform and toolkit for mass data analysis specifically meant for human tracking across large government datasets

They do

https://southfront.org/palantirs-user-guide-mass-surveillanc...

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/palantirs_sur...

https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-W...

They do! But they don't have the data, these are tools, just like a browser access the web, Palantir solutions access gov data and link to who knows what datasets, but on paper, they ain't no NSA.

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