4 ms·

I think this is the most surprising thing, from my understanding, Palantir's user-facing tech is an ancient c.2007 era Java web start tool backed by a fairly ho

by bane 10y ago

I think this is the most surprising thing, from my understanding, Palantir's user-facing tech is an ancient c.2007 era Java web start tool backed by a fairly ho-hum enterprise ontology system, some free-text search and fairly basic geospatial map server. It sounds like a 3-6 month, 3 person project to replicate with modern tech. I think all of the pieces of a Palantir-like system exist with open/free alternatives, but nobody has just bothered to write the glue code to make it happen. This makes me wonder at the ultimate utility of the particular shape of a Palantir system if nobody else is bothering to do it in quite the same way. It's probably some combination of PostgreSQL (plus PostGIS) + Elastic Search + Neo4j for the storage tech, pick-your-web-framework for the server-side, D3.js + some mapping library for the front-end and have all the major pieces. A few months of glue code and CRUD writing and it would be done. I'd definitely welcome a quick-to-deploy open/free alternative. The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff.

bazqux2 10y ago
That matches my understanding of their tech stack as well. I also understand why people don't do an open sourced version - it doesn't pay nearly as well as having a job. What I find interesting about this is that in effect Palantir is acting as a consulting company while pretending to be a software tooling company. This allows them to claim a higher earnings multiple to inflate value and extract more money out of VCs and offer a lower percentage of equity to employees. This is a very old trick. The problem is that consulting companies are much harder to scale than software companies and the inevitable disappointment will lead to a loss of equity. There is good money in consulting (I am one) but it's hard to build a large consulting company when the 'tooling' companies can poach your talent away with cheap VC money and fairy tales about future piles of cash. It spoils the market. VC powered tooling companies masquerading as consulting companies are a real problem right now.
- bane 10y ago
  What's pretty interesting is that my understanding of their licensing scheme is that it is not cheap per seat per year. Something on the order of $10-12k. There was a pricing sheet that floated around a few months ago that was released through a FOIA request. So it sounds like they covered their initial development R&D costs through licensing, led with that tool into consulting. My understanding is that many of the tooling companies who became consulting firms mostly jettisoned the tools along the way. Palantir has just let theirs stagnate.
  - bazqux2 10y ago
    You should check out Ab Inito, an even more secretive ETL company that predates Palantir and is also milking the DoD (it's an age old racket). They're $90K per seat per year and it's basically a crappy version of Jenkins. Apparently they have staff that search the internet and sue anyone who mentions them. Not even Palantir does that. So let's see how long this posts lasts :)
    - pinewurst 10y ago
      http://www.abinitio.com/en/ http://www.abinitio.com/en/ Wikipedia: "Ab Initio maintains a high level of secrecy regarding their products. Some people working with their product, even those who work for organizations who use Ab Initio, operate under a non-disclosure agreement which prevents them from revealing Ab Initio technical information to the public."
argonaut 10y ago
> The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff. Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now. At least from a superficial perspective, the UI seemed pretty slick.
- bane 10y ago
  > Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. Well, I think that's their intention. Pretend to be a software tool maker, but really be a services group. However, that radically changes the investment/return story. Because software, once you make a tool, you can sell it a hundred billion times for pretty much no additional cost and make pure profit after the first few thousand seats pays off the initial investment. But humans (services) don't return investment like this and most services work is very one-off by nature. > As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now. This is important either way: - if they're still pushing out the JWS client they used to have available as a demo for most of a decade (Op Tradestop), then the VC money isn't funding technology, it's funding sales and marketing expansion of the core services business - if they're using web tech, there's plenty of very good, very mature web tech that's open/free for anybody to use, killing off their "secret sauce" sales lead-in and their customer stickiness. Here's their only known publicly facing web tech [1] I'll let readers decide if this is the output of a $20billion valuation company or something a couple guys over a weekend could cook up. - if their back-end is just big-data scalable whatever (and their technologies page seems to indicate it is [2]), then they aren't offering any value to their customers there either 1 - https://d3svb6mundity5.cloudfront.net/dashboard/index.html https://d3svb6mundity5.cloudfront.net/dashboard/index.html 2 - https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/
  - argonaut 10y ago

by bane 10y ago

bazqux2 10y ago

That matches my understanding of their tech stack as well. I also understand why people don't do an open sourced version - it doesn't pay nearly as well as having a job. What I find interesting about this is that in effect Palantir is acting as a consulting company while pretending to be a software tooling company. This allows them to claim a higher earnings multiple to inflate value and extract more money out of VCs and offer a lower percentage of equity to employees. This is a very old trick. The problem is that consulting companies are much harder to scale than software companies and the inevitable disappointment will lead to a loss of equity. There is good money in consulting (I am one) but it's hard to build a large consulting company when the 'tooling' companies can poach your talent away with cheap VC money and fairy tales about future piles of cash. It spoils the market. VC powered tooling companies masquerading as consulting companies are a real problem right now.

bane 10y ago
What's pretty interesting is that my understanding of their licensing scheme is that it is not cheap per seat per year. Something on the order of $10-12k. There was a pricing sheet that floated around a few months ago that was released through a FOIA request. So it sounds like they covered their initial development R&D costs through licensing, led with that tool into consulting. My understanding is that many of the tooling companies who became consulting firms mostly jettisoned the tools along the way. Palantir has just let theirs stagnate.
- bazqux2 10y ago
  You should check out Ab Inito, an even more secretive ETL company that predates Palantir and is also milking the DoD (it's an age old racket). They're $90K per seat per year and it's basically a crappy version of Jenkins. Apparently they have staff that search the internet and sue anyone who mentions them. Not even Palantir does that. So let's see how long this posts lasts :)
  - pinewurst 10y ago
    http://www.abinitio.com/en/ http://www.abinitio.com/en/ Wikipedia: "Ab Initio maintains a high level of secrecy regarding their products. Some people working with their product, even those who work for organizations who use Ab Initio, operate under a non-disclosure agreement which prevents them from revealing Ab Initio technical information to the public."

argonaut 10y ago

> The real money is in the integration, ETL, ontology consulting service bit and so anybody could really build a company around that stuff. Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now. At least from a superficial perspective, the UI seemed pretty slick.

bane 10y ago
> Yes, and that stuff takes years to build. You're missing the whole point of Palantir when you leave this as essentially a footnote. Well, I think that's their intention. Pretend to be a software tool maker, but really be a services group. However, that radically changes the investment/return story. Because software, once you make a tool, you can sell it a hundred billion times for pretty much no additional cost and make pure profit after the first few thousand seats pays off the initial investment. But humans (services) don't return investment like this and most services work is very one-off by nature. > As a sidenote, your info is outdated. At least for the user-facing portion (which I saw - I obviously didn't get to see the graph/backend internals), it's all web-app-based now. This is important either way: - if they're still pushing out the JWS client they used to have available as a demo for most of a decade (Op Tradestop), then the VC money isn't funding technology, it's funding sales and marketing expansion of the core services business - if they're using web tech, there's plenty of very good, very mature web tech that's open/free for anybody to use, killing off their "secret sauce" sales lead-in and their customer stickiness. Here's their only known publicly facing web tech [1] I'll let readers decide if this is the output of a $20billion valuation company or something a couple guys over a weekend could cook up. - if their back-end is just big-data scalable whatever (and their technologies page seems to indicate it is [2]), then they aren't offering any value to their customers there either 1 - https://d3svb6mundity5.cloudfront.net/dashboard/index.html https://d3svb6mundity5.cloudfront.net/dashboard/index.html 2 - https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/technologies/
- argonaut 10y ago