Comment by slashclee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slashclee | Hacker News Reader

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I should probably mention that I work at Palantir, but [insert boilerplate disclaimer here].

Yes, you definitely need a person to define the mappings across data sources. However, this is basically a one-time setup task; once the mappings have been established, new data from the existing databases can be continuously imported. I don't have any stats on how long this initial setup phase takes at real customer sites, and if I did I'm sure I couldn't share them publicly, but the goal is definitely for it to be something that doesn't require an entire team of consultants to deploy and babysit.

If you want to see the actual government product, and how it works, you can sign up at https://analyzethe.us/ for an account. This is a real live Palantir instance with real data from data.gov and it's open to the public.

At the dozen or sites I'm aware of, only a couple are where I'd say are in "full operational mode" after 7-9 months. I've known a couple that have been in a protracted (even by that standard) deployment stage for >12 months. Every place I've seen has a 2-4 Palantir engineers working F/T there during the deployment phase and at least 1 or 2 FTEs to maintain the ontology as mission requirements change ("oh, now we need VIN numbers associated with vehicles!").

I'd imagine it's getting faster as staff gets trained and various little ETL tools are built to funnel data into the backend. But it's been a very frustrating process for most of the customers to drop the money on the deployment and not have an operational tool for the better part of their first year, and the maintenance tail has been reported to be some percentage higher than the original purchase (that may have changed, I've noticed the pricing structure has been changing quite a bit over the last year).

Of course, I also understand that when the customer says "pump data source X into Palantir" and data source X requires a 6 month approval process to hook up to, it can just take a while.

Awesome. Thank you.

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