David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

Organizations are managing and analyzing large datasets every day, identifying patterns and generating insights to inform decisions. This can provide numerous benefits for an organization, such as improved operational efficiency, cost optimization, fraud detection, competitive advantage and enhanced business processes. By bringing the right, actionable data to the right user, organizations can potentially speed up processes and make more effective operational decisions.

Many organizations are taking steps to advance current technology and improve the analytics life cycle. Decision intelligence is an emerging discipline that connects decision support, decision management and big, complex systems. Fields such as financial services, healthcare, and supply chain benefit from using data and artificial intelligence to automate and accelerate the decision-making process. By 2024, we assert that one-third of organizations will adopt an analytic operations approach similar to - and integrated with - data operations processes to enhance responsiveness and agility.

Palantir is a data analytics software company that offers a suite of applications for integrating, analyzing and visualizing data to enable decision intelligence. It supports various datasets, including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal and geospatial. Palantir went public in 2020 and is well known for its work with the government and law enforcement agencies. Palantir offers three software platforms – Palantir Gotham, Palantir Foundry and Palantir Apollo. Gotham and Foundry offer the capability to transform big data into an integrated dataset and surface insights. Palantir Apollo is its continuous delivery system that powers Gotham and Foundry. It enables organizations to manage and continuously deploy the software wherever it’s needed.

Data projects often run into roadblocks because the steps and methods used to build data pipelines are difficult to understand and recreate. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research shows that data preparation, reviewing data for quality issues and waiting for data and information are some of the most time-consuming processes. By having all the data in one platform, organizations can better manage the processes and data pipelines. Foundry is Palantir’s fully managed cloud-computing platform that offers the capability to collect data from multiple sources, analyze it and create insights. It enables users to experiment and test new ideas.

Palantir Foundry was initially focused on public-sector customers such as the U.S. Department of Defense, but has since evolved to serve numerous companies in the private sector. Organizations can use Foundry to collect data from databases, internet of things devices and other systems.

Palantir Gotham is broadly used in government functions and the financial services industry. It can enable organizations to find patterns in datasets and also facilitate the hand-off between analysts and operational users, enabling operators to plan and execute real-world responses to threats that have been identified within the platform.

Palantir recently announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to support digital transformations and accelerate operational analytics in commercial industries, including retail, financial services and supply chain and logistics. With this partnership, Palantir’s Foundry platform is now available on Google Cloud and Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing organizations to utilize its numerous services to enhance data analytics operations. This enables organizations to gain new data integration, management and business intelligence capabilities to synthesize data and address operational problems. Users can also use Foundry’s capabilities with Google Cloud Cortex Framework for data analysis and management on Google Cloud. In addition, Foundry can be used with Google BigQuery. Organizations can also bring SAP-based data into the Cortex Framework through its reference architecture so it can be analyzed and managed on Google Cloud. Palantir Foundry was selected for our 14th Annual Ventana Research Overall Digital Innovation Award in 2021, and written about by our CEO and Chief Research Officer Mark Smith.

Organizations are running on multiple clouds and have to maintain systems in multiple locations. Palantir Apollo is a standalone platform that runs as a layer between its applications and underlying infrastructure. It can manage production software in various environments, including private cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud configurations. Apollo offers the ability to apply the constraints that are declared by developers and other stakeholders when performing environment updates. The Apollo orchestration engine is the core element that ensures these constraints and rules are satisfied when applying changes to managed software installations.

I recommend that organizations with complex systems and heavy data requirements consider the capabilities of Palantir. Its platform encompasses end-to-end data processes and allows workers to deploy artificial intelligence and machine language for operational decision-making across various domains. With its decision modeling and situational intelligence capabilities, organizations can transform and automate traditional decision-making processes through an integrated infrastructure.

Regards,

David Menninger