8 ms·

Palantir Pricelist (page 27) [pdf]

225 points by thebyrd 12y ago

phmagic 12y ago
pretty affordable compared to most enterprise software packages
- bicknergseng 12y ago
  "per core"
  - trhway 12y ago
    with 90 days warranty :) Can it rot? Anyway, from their Gotham page https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/ "Working closely with the customer, our engineers integrate and map all of the relevant source data—regardless of type or volume—into a single, coherent model. ... Once the model has been created, data flows continuously from its sources into the Palantir Gotham platform. ... They can search across all of their data sources at once, visualize relationships, explore divergent hypotheses, discover unknown connections, " Pretty much my 2009 pitch, and in the hindsight i see that my main weakness was that i couldn't even imagine $150K/core. Man, it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :)
    - gerbal 12y ago
      > it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :) Imagination and lucrative government contracts.
      - crazypyro 12y ago
        And a billion dollars that was used to pay off a competitor after stealing their technology.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    kdb, a database engine I consider extremely simple compared to Palantir costs $50k/yr/core.
    - mmcclellan 12y ago
      simple but competent for time series. and the 32-bit version is at least available for free now.
judgardner 12y ago
132-51 | IMS | Implementation Ninja Services
fishcakes 12y ago
Pretty affordable considering many other things on the GSA don't work once you buy them!
- jonknee 12y ago
  Luckily for Palantir whether or not it works is classified. I have my doubts. I'm sure it "works", but I'm also sure it's a giant waste of money and Americans are not safer because we're funneling millions of dollars to Palantir.
  - bane 12y ago
    I messed around with the demo they used to have on their website. It seems to be very much an answer to the 9-11 failure to connect the dots problem. Unify search, build semantic links. It was a very manually intensive tool based on what I saw. Very little automation, more like those pictures and strings you see in crime shows on TV...but on a computer.
amalag 12y ago
You can't do diddly with an off the shelf install. They get you on the Implementation Ninjas and Support.
- capkutay 12y ago
  I think they get you on the off the shelf price too.. $150k/core...say you run it on a cluster of relatively puny machines ...($150k * 4 cores) on a 4 node cluster is already above $2m.
- elblanco 12y ago
  Their implementation periods are horrendous. Their marketing speak and sales drones make it sound like a turnkey appliance...like you just drop it in, point it to your database URLS and you're now playing with knowledge management. But in practice there's months of custom backend Java development (the entire tech stack is Java 1.6 or something horrible) to build the connectors and map the data into their backend, then months of ontology management meetings to build up the one-true-model (TM) for all your enterprise needs. Then months and months of post deployment tweaking and continuous work to keep the system alive and fix issues when some of the data sources change schemas or something. I've heard things like average time from purchase to full deployment is something like 9 months. But from my time dealing with them I think it's much longer.
  - fishcakes 12y ago
    That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
    - elblanco 12y ago
      Well, feel free to buy a core and let me know how long it takes before you're up and running. Having been on the inside during 3 of their deployments, and on the outside of 2 more, I can definitely say 90 days is wildly optimistic. edit never mind, after reviewing your comment history, it looks like you probably work for Palantir. You should probably disclose that. I stand by my comments about deployment times.
bane 12y ago
For 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 purchase is $564k. Or about $11k per user. Each year after that, if you want software updates, it'll cost you $113k or or about $2.2k per year per user. So let's say you use the system for 3 years. That's over $15k of software per user over that time. Plus there's training ~$2k per user. Or another $100k in training costs. And then who knows how many hours of engineering and "ninja" services. But a CONUS (within the U.S.) FSR is billed at about $300k per year for a full-time person on staff. Let's say you need two of them to support those 50 users. Added up for 3 years of Palantir: $1.5million I'll let you decide if that's good value, but that works out to around $30k per user partial TCO (not including power, security, networking, local IT staff support, etc.).
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Not that out of line for what much other enterprise software costs. A Bloomberg terminal runs about $24k/user/year: http://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-costs/ http://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-co... When I was doing enterprise financial software it wasn't uncommon for contracts to run in the millions per year.
  - bane 12y ago
    Yeah it kind of depends how you look at it. Is it specialty software that provides some critical function they can't get elsewhere? Or is it Microsoft Office, everybody gets it and it should really be like $150/seat. I should have also added to my original post, this is their GSA schedule. For these specific line-items, the government considers this the "prenegotiated lowest price". This simplifies purchasing. So if somebody in the government wants buy another core (item 132-33) they just ring up Palantir or their GSA schedule VAR (reseller) and ask for a 132-33 volume:1 and they know that it'll cost $141k and be good for 1 year of O&M. The downside of being on the GSA schedule is that it means that there are limits on your ability to change prices year to year to reflect a change in business environment. Say next year you want to drop the price by 50%. That's not allowed, since it would basically mean that you weren't selling your software at the lowest possible prenegotiated price. Similarly if you want to increase it, you're limited in that as well. I think the +- variance can't exceed 10% in a single 12 month period, but I might be wrong. The other downside is that this basically provides your prices in public so your competitors can see what you charge, which can be critical information in contract bids. There's always a loophole. For example, convince your customer to not buy off of the GSA and sell them a "package" at some discount off of GSA. That "package" counts as a different SKU and the GSA doesn't apply. So for example, you could make a Palantir "starter kit" composed of 2 core license (normally $282k) 1 extra year of O&M maintenance for both cores (normally $56k) 500 hours of Ninja Services @ $150/hr (normally $98k) 500 hours of CONUS FSR Service @ $120/hr (normally $73k) all for the grand total of $350k or some such, instead of the normal price of $510k. A $160k discount. Any government purchaser would fall over themselves to try to make this happen since it's a >30% discount off of the normal GSA schedule prices (which they can refer to and are governed by various rules). This looks fantastic on their yearly performance eval "-saved government $160k on purchase of Palantir package deal" This is the crack model. When the O&M runs out in two years and they come asking for more, well, there's no deal anymore, and the GSA schedule prices on O&M and people have gone up 20% in that time. edit keep in mind that this company has raised almost a billion dollars and is valued at something like $9 billion dollars.
incision 12y ago
All 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.
- sien 12y ago
  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.
  - meowface 12y ago
    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.
  - elblanco 12y ago
    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.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
So 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.
- mbesto 12y ago
  > Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster That's exactly what Palantir is... companies like (SAP/Oracle)+(Accenture/Deloitte/IBM) can't compete with this since the "Just hire a few data scientists" talent is near impossible to attract without the sexiness of a company like Palantir. Palantir packages the whole thing up in a nice bow. Having spent a lot of time in enterprise software (mainly SAP), Palantir's value proposition is extremely attractive to BigGov and BigCo, with largely a higher rate of success and lower cost.
- bane 12y ago
  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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f86VKjFSMJE It's big data in the sense that using google's search box is big data. But from my time using their demo a couple years ago, the actual tool is fairly small in focus. I don't even think the chart view can show more than a few hundred things.
  - AJ007 12y ago
    Interesting, it looks a lot like Maltego.
    - kevinschumacher 12y ago
      Both use yEd http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yfiles_about.html http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yfiles_about.html
xacaxulu 12y ago
So Palantir is hiring if you have a clearance :-). Time to get your tax dollars back. Looks like SAIC all over again.
- xamdam 12y ago
  You don't need a clearance. We have large commercial deployments.
  - bane 12y ago
    I did some consulting work with the NYPD and heard you guys also have some deployments with them and other large police forces. Those are nice non-clearance, but cool, jobs as well.
    - dreamweapon 12y ago
      "Cool" I guess, if you consider working for the NYPD to be cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner [2] https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/nypd-muslim-surveillance https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/nypd-muslim-surveillance [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
      - bane 12y ago
        I do. All big organizations do bad things in specific cases and have problems that need to be addressed - the NYPD is no different. For every one of these examples I can point to a hundred cases where some officer put their life on the line to do their job and help do their part to make NYC a decent place to live. To give you an idea of how big the NYPD is as an organization, it's about a third larger than the active duty Army of Australia. My couple times working with them showed most of the officers I encountered to be genuinely concerned about their city and a strong desire to do a good and fair job. And yes of course there's lots of rallying together and supporting each other, even when that support often doesn't make sense to an outsider. But they really don't have anybody else they can rely on for their safety and support. And they take enormous flak and disrespect from the public on a daily basis for pretty much exercising any aspect of their function. But as a large police force, the NYPD is basically a model for other large municiple forces and are heads and tails above deeply problematic large forces like the LAPD.
mikegreen 12y ago
Do not confuse the GSA schedule with actual implementation cost (or TCO as mentioned below). The prices are a starting point and as with any relationship, they can (and will, if the buyer is smart) be negotiated. Source: sold & implemented alot of software for the gubbmint.
dlinder 12y ago
132-51 CONS CONUS FSR Support hourly rate. CONUS rates will be billed for Services performed outside the continental U.S. unless in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as an 8-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 146.60 132-51 OCONS OCONUS FSR Support hourly rate. OCONUS rates will be billed for Services performed in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as a 12-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 195.47
- bane 12y ago
  I'm actually surprised how cheap their OCONUS warzone rates are. Many contractors will pay hazardous bonuses, time in theater bonuses and living condition bonuses on top of the CONUS base pay. Added up it can far exceed this kind of rate. But this is probably helpful for people getting into consulting to see what hourly rates are for this kind of work. In my experience these rates are actually fairly cheap. I'm used to seeing $170-200 for most things billed to the government. But I've also heard Palantir has fairly conservative pay caps, that might account for the low rates.
  - janjongboom 12y ago
    What's a "time in theater" bonus? Never heard of the term & can't find it on Google either.
    - bane 12y ago
      It's a bonus paid after spending n months in a warzone. e.g. After 4 calendar months, $5000, after 8, $10,000. Hazard pay is usually some percentage on top of base pay and if you're "lucky" and qualify for "living condition pay" it's another percentage on top of that. I have some associates here in the D.C. area that tell me at the height of the Iraq War they were pulling down ~$300k/yr all added up, on base salaries of $80-90k.
Jabbles 12y ago
Agencies can browse GSA Advantage! by accessing the Internet World Wide Web utilizing a browser (ex.: NetScape)
arikrak 12y ago
How 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.
- pvarangot 12y ago
  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.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Yes: GSA prices are IIRC the result of a pro-forma (and totally BS) discounting process.
  - m0nastic 12y ago
    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).
aliasaria 12y ago
Favourite 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."
- jamesash 12y ago
  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."
  - Huggernaut 12y ago
    As a somewhat frequent visitor to The Hobbit in Southampton, the litigation is laaaame.
hendzen 12y ago
If 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.
- mmcclellan 12y ago
  Yeah but it's only $10k a core more. This job posting lists Oracle and PostgeSQL: http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000002LiKaAAK http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000002...
- dfc 12y ago
  I think it is Postgres.
cyphunk 12y ago
Can't access gsaadvantage.gov via Tor. hmm
ottertown 12y ago
was this link not meant for the public? getting a 404 now. mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0MII0P.2RKUT8_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRTSCS012814.PDF http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadv...
desmondrd 12y ago
Archived version of this file on the Internet Archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0MII0P.2RKUT8_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRTSCS012814.PDF http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadv...

225 points by thebyrd 12y ago

phmagic 12y ago

pretty affordable compared to most enterprise software packages

bicknergseng 12y ago
"per core"
- trhway 12y ago
  with 90 days warranty :) Can it rot? Anyway, from their Gotham page https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-gotham/ "Working closely with the customer, our engineers integrate and map all of the relevant source data—regardless of type or volume—into a single, coherent model. ... Once the model has been created, data flows continuously from its sources into the Palantir Gotham platform. ... They can search across all of their data sources at once, visualize relationships, explore divergent hypotheses, discover unknown connections, " Pretty much my 2009 pitch, and in the hindsight i see that my main weakness was that i couldn't even imagine $150K/core. Man, it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :)
  - gerbal 12y ago
    > it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :) Imagination and lucrative government contracts.
    - crazypyro 12y ago
      And a billion dollars that was used to pay off a competitor after stealing their technology.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  kdb, a database engine I consider extremely simple compared to Palantir costs $50k/yr/core.
  - mmcclellan 12y ago
    simple but competent for time series. and the 32-bit version is at least available for free now.

judgardner 12y ago

132-51 | IMS | Implementation Ninja Services

fishcakes 12y ago

Pretty affordable considering many other things on the GSA don't work once you buy them!

jonknee 12y ago
Luckily for Palantir whether or not it works is classified. I have my doubts. I'm sure it "works", but I'm also sure it's a giant waste of money and Americans are not safer because we're funneling millions of dollars to Palantir.
- bane 12y ago
  I messed around with the demo they used to have on their website. It seems to be very much an answer to the 9-11 failure to connect the dots problem. Unify search, build semantic links. It was a very manually intensive tool based on what I saw. Very little automation, more like those pictures and strings you see in crime shows on TV...but on a computer.

amalag 12y ago

You can't do diddly with an off the shelf install. They get you on the Implementation Ninjas and Support.

capkutay 12y ago
I think they get you on the off the shelf price too.. $150k/core...say you run it on a cluster of relatively puny machines ...($150k * 4 cores) on a 4 node cluster is already above $2m.
elblanco 12y ago
Their implementation periods are horrendous. Their marketing speak and sales drones make it sound like a turnkey appliance...like you just drop it in, point it to your database URLS and you're now playing with knowledge management. But in practice there's months of custom backend Java development (the entire tech stack is Java 1.6 or something horrible) to build the connectors and map the data into their backend, then months of ontology management meetings to build up the one-true-model (TM) for all your enterprise needs. Then months and months of post deployment tweaking and continuous work to keep the system alive and fix issues when some of the data sources change schemas or something. I've heard things like average time from purchase to full deployment is something like 9 months. But from my time dealing with them I think it's much longer.
- fishcakes 12y ago
  That is simply FUD – Palantir guarantees to customers that their software is working within 90 days AND has generated results. They offer a refund if not. Their homepage said this for a while!
  - elblanco 12y ago
    Well, feel free to buy a core and let me know how long it takes before you're up and running. Having been on the inside during 3 of their deployments, and on the outside of 2 more, I can definitely say 90 days is wildly optimistic. edit never mind, after reviewing your comment history, it looks like you probably work for Palantir. You should probably disclose that. I stand by my comments about deployment times.

bane 12y ago

For 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 purchase is $564k. Or about $11k per user. Each year after that, if you want software updates, it'll cost you $113k or or about $2.2k per year per user. So let's say you use the system for 3 years. That's over $15k of software per user over that time. Plus there's training ~$2k per user. Or another $100k in training costs. And then who knows how many hours of engineering and "ninja" services. But a CONUS (within the U.S.) FSR is billed at about $300k per year for a full-time person on staff. Let's say you need two of them to support those 50 users. Added up for 3 years of Palantir: $1.5million I'll let you decide if that's good value, but that works out to around $30k per user partial TCO (not including power, security, networking, local IT staff support, etc.).

nostrademons 12y ago
Not that out of line for what much other enterprise software costs. A Bloomberg terminal runs about $24k/user/year: http://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-costs/ http://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-co... When I was doing enterprise financial software it wasn't uncommon for contracts to run in the millions per year.
- bane 12y ago
  Yeah it kind of depends how you look at it. Is it specialty software that provides some critical function they can't get elsewhere? Or is it Microsoft Office, everybody gets it and it should really be like $150/seat. I should have also added to my original post, this is their GSA schedule. For these specific line-items, the government considers this the "prenegotiated lowest price". This simplifies purchasing. So if somebody in the government wants buy another core (item 132-33) they just ring up Palantir or their GSA schedule VAR (reseller) and ask for a 132-33 volume:1 and they know that it'll cost $141k and be good for 1 year of O&M. The downside of being on the GSA schedule is that it means that there are limits on your ability to change prices year to year to reflect a change in business environment. Say next year you want to drop the price by 50%. That's not allowed, since it would basically mean that you weren't selling your software at the lowest possible prenegotiated price. Similarly if you want to increase it, you're limited in that as well. I think the +- variance can't exceed 10% in a single 12 month period, but I might be wrong. The other downside is that this basically provides your prices in public so your competitors can see what you charge, which can be critical information in contract bids. There's always a loophole. For example, convince your customer to not buy off of the GSA and sell them a "package" at some discount off of GSA. That "package" counts as a different SKU and the GSA doesn't apply. So for example, you could make a Palantir "starter kit" composed of 2 core license (normally $282k) 1 extra year of O&M maintenance for both cores (normally $56k) 500 hours of Ninja Services @ $150/hr (normally $98k) 500 hours of CONUS FSR Service @ $120/hr (normally $73k) all for the grand total of $350k or some such, instead of the normal price of $510k. A $160k discount. Any government purchaser would fall over themselves to try to make this happen since it's a >30% discount off of the normal GSA schedule prices (which they can refer to and are governed by various rules). This looks fantastic on their yearly performance eval "-saved government $160k on purchase of Palantir package deal" This is the crack model. When the O&M runs out in two years and they come asking for more, well, there's no deal anymore, and the GSA schedule prices on O&M and people have gone up 20% in that time. edit keep in mind that this company has raised almost a billion dollars and is valued at something like $9 billion dollars.

incision 12y ago

All 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.

sien 12y ago
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.
- meowface 12y ago
  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.
- elblanco 12y ago
  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.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

So 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.

mbesto 12y ago
> Just hire a few data scientists and give them a map/reduce cluster That's exactly what Palantir is... companies like (SAP/Oracle)+(Accenture/Deloitte/IBM) can't compete with this since the "Just hire a few data scientists" talent is near impossible to attract without the sexiness of a company like Palantir. Palantir packages the whole thing up in a nice bow. Having spent a lot of time in enterprise software (mainly SAP), Palantir's value proposition is extremely attractive to BigGov and BigCo, with largely a higher rate of success and lower cost.
bane 12y ago
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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f86VKjFSMJE It's big data in the sense that using google's search box is big data. But from my time using their demo a couple years ago, the actual tool is fairly small in focus. I don't even think the chart view can show more than a few hundred things.
- AJ007 12y ago
  Interesting, it looks a lot like Maltego.
  - kevinschumacher 12y ago
    Both use yEd http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yfiles_about.html http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yfiles_about.html

xacaxulu 12y ago

So Palantir is hiring if you have a clearance :-). Time to get your tax dollars back. Looks like SAIC all over again.

xamdam 12y ago
You don't need a clearance. We have large commercial deployments.
- bane 12y ago
  I did some consulting work with the NYPD and heard you guys also have some deployments with them and other large police forces. Those are nice non-clearance, but cool, jobs as well.
  - dreamweapon 12y ago
    "Cool" I guess, if you consider working for the NYPD to be cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner [2] https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/nypd-muslim-surveillance https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/nypd-muslim-surveillance [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
    - bane 12y ago
      I do. All big organizations do bad things in specific cases and have problems that need to be addressed - the NYPD is no different. For every one of these examples I can point to a hundred cases where some officer put their life on the line to do their job and help do their part to make NYC a decent place to live. To give you an idea of how big the NYPD is as an organization, it's about a third larger than the active duty Army of Australia. My couple times working with them showed most of the officers I encountered to be genuinely concerned about their city and a strong desire to do a good and fair job. And yes of course there's lots of rallying together and supporting each other, even when that support often doesn't make sense to an outsider. But they really don't have anybody else they can rely on for their safety and support. And they take enormous flak and disrespect from the public on a daily basis for pretty much exercising any aspect of their function. But as a large police force, the NYPD is basically a model for other large municiple forces and are heads and tails above deeply problematic large forces like the LAPD.

mikegreen 12y ago

Do not confuse the GSA schedule with actual implementation cost (or TCO as mentioned below). The prices are a starting point and as with any relationship, they can (and will, if the buyer is smart) be negotiated. Source: sold & implemented alot of software for the gubbmint.

dlinder 12y ago

132-51 CONS CONUS FSR Support hourly rate. CONUS rates will be billed for Services performed outside the continental U.S. unless in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as an 8-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 146.60 132-51 OCONS OCONUS FSR Support hourly rate. OCONUS rates will be billed for Services performed in a warzone. Normal business hours are defined as a 12-hour work day (rate is 15% more outside of normal business hours). $ 195.47

bane 12y ago
I'm actually surprised how cheap their OCONUS warzone rates are. Many contractors will pay hazardous bonuses, time in theater bonuses and living condition bonuses on top of the CONUS base pay. Added up it can far exceed this kind of rate. But this is probably helpful for people getting into consulting to see what hourly rates are for this kind of work. In my experience these rates are actually fairly cheap. I'm used to seeing $170-200 for most things billed to the government. But I've also heard Palantir has fairly conservative pay caps, that might account for the low rates.
- janjongboom 12y ago
  What's a "time in theater" bonus? Never heard of the term & can't find it on Google either.
  - bane 12y ago
    It's a bonus paid after spending n months in a warzone. e.g. After 4 calendar months, $5000, after 8, $10,000. Hazard pay is usually some percentage on top of base pay and if you're "lucky" and qualify for "living condition pay" it's another percentage on top of that. I have some associates here in the D.C. area that tell me at the height of the Iraq War they were pulling down ~$300k/yr all added up, on base salaries of $80-90k.

Jabbles 12y ago

Agencies can browse GSA Advantage! by accessing the Internet World Wide Web utilizing a browser (ex.: NetScape)

arikrak 12y ago

How 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.

pvarangot 12y ago
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.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Yes: GSA prices are IIRC the result of a pro-forma (and totally BS) discounting process.
- m0nastic 12y ago
  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).

aliasaria 12y ago

Favourite 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."

jamesash 12y ago
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."
- Huggernaut 12y ago
  As a somewhat frequent visitor to The Hobbit in Southampton, the litigation is laaaame.

hendzen 12y ago

If 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.

mmcclellan 12y ago
Yeah but it's only $10k a core more. This job posting lists Oracle and PostgeSQL: http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000002LiKaAAK http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000002...
dfc 12y ago
I think it is Postgres.

cyphunk 12y ago

Can't access gsaadvantage.gov via Tor. hmm

ottertown 12y ago

was this link not meant for the public? getting a 404 now. mirror: http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0MII0P.2RKUT8_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRTSCS012814.PDF http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadv...

desmondrd 12y ago

Archived version of this file on the Internet Archive. http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0086U/0MII0P.2RKUT8_GS-35F-0086U_PALANTIRTSCS012814.PDF http://web.archive.org/web/20140916215429/https://www.gsaadv...