Palantir’s Plan for Partnerships
What I think Palantir’s approach with clients is and what is going to be, based on current data
A week ago we saw the news that Panasonic and Palantir extended their relationship to a multi-year partnership to deliver “Smart Factory”, a platform built on top of Foundry. We now know what the entity makes reference to, but this is yet again a new confirmation and a testament to the power of Foundry, that existing clients benefit from the platform well enough that they expand their reliance on it.
Also the day before, the company made public a deal with Amazon to launch Foundry for Manufacturing on AWS Cloud, “a comprehensive solution that helps manufacturers integrate and contextualize their data assets and unlock powerful applications.”
I’m using these 2 examples to make the following point. Palantir is not changing but evolving their strategy on how to sell their product. They started back in the day with a more direct approach, to deliver to one customer with one specific need.
Today they decide to partner with the big guys of their target sector, and with established relationships with infrastructure leaders (in this case Amazon) they can deliver Foundry across multiple streams of future revenue with the same effort and expenses that before was destined to one sole client.
We can use the Acquire, Expand and Scale graph of intentions Palantir have themselves to explain how they plan to capture revenues from their clients. The “Scale” phase will come once large companies establish Foundry as their main OS and require smaller companies to use the same platform.
Of course, I’m talking about securing small companies in their efforts of getting a big one. It’s a safe assumption, but it will start paying off in the future, if Palantir’s plan goes ahead, which seems to be the case today (look at the big names officially using Foundry and those I’m assembling in the DataBase).
They are performing a risky task today so that they will be able to scale tomorrow. This was noted in one of our friend
’s tweets - . Palantir needs to be able to supply the largest organization in order for them to be ready to supply every organization in the same industry. A sort of trickle down strategy.
So Palantir adopting this strategy, which is by no means new, is something that requires time. And not just time but also some macro conditions to happen. If this goes through, we will see extraordinary growth across dozens of industries, and for this to happen we also need to capture the leaders in each field. Palantir is already succeeding in this area and the examples speak for themselves.
I don’t think that the irruption of companies like C3.AI or DataWalk is a bad thing, since it not only validates the purpose that Palantir is pursuing to serve, but it also enlarges the pool of responsibility. We shall see if they eventually receive controversial contracts and how they deal with them internally, because this goes deeper than a 1 v. 1 competition. This is about values and a look into why the company was built.
Serving the West or Serving the company, with the sole objective of having lots of clients and, as these 2 companies and some others have done in their marketing efforts, promote themselves mainly as a Palantir competitor. Is C3.AI going to sell their product in China? Have they already done that? There will come a time, if these companies end up surviving, when these questions will be asked and the very purpose of them will arise.