Palantir Foundry's 3 Pillars: Turning Data into Competitive Advantage
Palantir is focused on delivering Exceptional Enterprise Software for businesses to run their daily operations, gain insights from their operations and develop a meaningful competitive advantage
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Palantir is focused on delivering Exceptional Enterprise Software for businesses to run their daily operations, gain insights from their operations and develop a meaningful competitive advantage by harnessing the power of Data and execution. They are working on this vision through their Foundry Product.
What is Foundry?
Foundry helps businesses transform their operations by creating an abstraction/operating system for their data. It helps users easily integrate all their data in one spot quickly and visualize that data in the form of data pipelines.
The following Image breaks down Foundry into 3 pillars:
Data & Ontology
Digital Twin & Modeling
Operations & Actions
Now, Let's understand why each of these pillars is important.
Data & Ontology
Foundry makes the marginal cost of data integration effectively zero by automating the creation of data pipelines and ontology.
The users can quickly get started and finish data integration within a few hours and can build extremely useful and powerful low-code applications on this data within a few days. This reduces the operational burden and expense of doing incredibly expensive data projects down to approximately zero.
This powers an important competitive advantage for Palantir too, the speed with which users can experiment and test new ideas is what makes Palantir's software sticky and is a core part of their moat.
So how has this been used in the past? Think of the following question and the implications of answering that question using Foundry.
How long will it take you as the federal government to integrate with each of the 6,000 hospitals in the U.S., to create the first national level visibility into ICU bed utilization and PPE consumption rates?
In Foundry by creating software-defined data integration, where essentially the software is writing the data pipelines, it’s not people, Palantir's Foundry was able to radically transform the pace at which the above question was answered during COVID.
Digital Twin & Modeling
Foundry builds a digital twin for businesses and enables them to assess the impacts of various opportunities and threats on their business and create models and test(simulate) them easily.
This enables businesses who use Foundry to be always a step ahead of their competition by enabling them to make better decisions, fewer mistakes, achieve operational excellence, and allows them to survive and endure longer than others.
Businesses using foundry will rapidly capitalize on upcoming and current opportunities and grab a huge market share in a short span of time. Also, when faced with business destroying threats like COVID or competition they will be in a better place to endure and survive and come back strong.
This powers an important competitive advantage for Palantir too, if Palantir's clients can endure and be more resilient in their operations, that means Palantir will also be guaranteed success for a long time with their sticky software
Operations & Actions
Foundry makes the marginal cost of data-driven software/application development effectively zero by automating & removing the pain of the creation of applications using their low code development tools.
All the data integration we do is really useful only if we use it to power operational insights and decisions and not valuable without it. Importantly, it's applications, not dashboards. This is not read-only insight into some data assets. It's actually about making decisions, making decisions as a blue-collar worker.
Palantir benefits from this as users can quickly develop and modify applications as needed without having any business downtime, which increases switching costs for users
Foundry creates a connection between the data scientists and the front line and translating that to action.
If you go to any Chrysler factory in North America, you'll find Foundry on the factory floor used by every single team leader at the assembly line to make quality decisions in real-time.
- Shyam, Palantir
That's all I wanted to cover on Palantir's Foundry product. Hopefully I have been successful in laying out my thoughts on "Why Palantir's Foundry is Turning Data into Competitive Advantage" for both Palantir's customers and Palantir themselves.
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Chet @ Modern Growth Investing