Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Company
A cache of internal documents shows that despite growing revenue, Palantir has lost top-tier clients, is struggling to stem staff departures, and isn’t collecting most of the money it touts in high-value deals.
SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/Palantir-Gone
ROBERT STEELE: Stephen E. Arnold and I only tell the truth — about Google, about IBM, about Palantir. Below is my top post, and a portal to all the posts about Palantir here at Phi Beta Iota. I offered to help Palantir as I have offered to help Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. All of them are collapsing for various reasons. At some point it becomes impossible to substitute lies (“marketing”) for the truth (“innovative engineering”).
Palantir is both arrogant and ignorant at the CEO and developer levels; it lacks the revenue model or unicorn cult following that has sustained Google; its offerings are shallow, partial, and in my view, rotten to the core — this is not a company that knows anything about normalizing, analyzing, or making sense of multi-disciplinary data that comes in many mediums. They are also a named defendant in a racketeering case that includes the US Chamber of Commerce, for their role in supporting covert operations including defamation and harrassment of US activists on US soil seeking to expose electoral fraud and direct bribery of elected US officials.
See Especially:
Stephen E. Arnold: Palantir Raises More Money — Comment by Robert Steele on Palantir’s Short-Falls
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NEAL RAUHAUSER: I became acquainted with Palantir while reading HBGary's email, which Anonymous made public after a ruinous raid in early 2011. The white paper I wrote and circulated on Capitol Hill led to eighteen House offices calling for hearings on Team Themis, a 21st century take on the Nixon administration's plumbers.
Since then I've built and field tested much of what Team Themis planned. Palantir made their software available at http://analyzethe.us otherwise I'd have never seen it, but I wouldn't use it even if it were free. What they offer is an enormous vertical silo that is both capital and labor intensive.
FMS Advanced Systems Group, another In-Q-Tel funded venture, offers Sentinel Visualizer, an LE/intel grade link analysis package, and you can get the full system with geospatial and temporal analysis for a tenth of what Palantir wants for a basic install. I've been very pleased with my single seat purchase and there is a path to multiple analysts sharing data using a Microsoft SQL server if one needs that capacity. Sentinel Visualizer is most often compared to IBM's Analyst's Notebook and it has the advantage of not locking you into a proprietary data storage system.
Those who deal more with internet and social media might be better served by Paterva's Maltego, which began life as a penetration tester's toolkit. Integration of external data sources is easy and about a year ago the software's launch page began showing links to a marketplace of API access which has grown to two dozen solid offerings including Crowd Strike and Flashpoint Intel. Analysts with the paid version of this system can collaborate in real time, but it's more a one man horse that evolved to permit teaming, with each user responsible for his own files.
Anyone who thinks Palantir is the answer started with a poorly worded question and they've wasted orders of magnitude more than they would have paid for a workable solution. You can start exploring Maltego with their community edition and Sentinel Visualizer gladly supplies fully functional short term evaluation licenses for their software.
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