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225 points by thebyrd on Sept 16, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 100 comments
bane on Sept 16, 2014 | next [–]
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.).
elblanco on Sept 17, 2014 | parent | next [–]
I've done a bit of work with Palantir. This is basically spot on. They're really cagey about the core/user requirement in real life so I'd be comfortable in saying most customer over purchase cores. They usually staff 2-3 full time guys for every 30-50 people and the implementation takes forever. I know of more than one place that didn't have a working system a full year after purchase. Meaning the maintenance had already expired on that first year.
Your later comment about the crack model is also spot on. There's a fairly long list of disgruntled places that bought on discount and are now being hit with huge O&M maintenance fees and are looking for a way out. I think they're government customers are slowly going away.
They're starting to show up more overseas here. Palantir recently opened up a Seoul office. But how much of whatever business they get out of it is government and how much of it is commercial is anybody's guess.
Cthulhu_ on Sept 17, 2014 | root | parent | next [–]
Sounds... Actually doesn't sound as bad as SAP, Europe's largest software package/manufacturer for... IDK, business software. IIRC, every implementation requires you to hire half a dozen SAP engineers for a decent hourly rate just to set up the system, then keep them on to train and maintain the system.
mbesto on Sept 17, 2014 | root | parent | next [–]
Former SAP guy here. Yup, on the surface Palantir appears to be cheaper and more specialized. Slightly different business model - Palantir does the software/hardware/implementation whereas SAP focusing mainly on software.
wahsd on Sept 17, 2014 | root | parent | prev | next [–]
"cagey" is the perfect one word description for Palantir.
I am not quite sure if even this community quite understands what Palantir is and does. Things aren't quite what they appear to be.
1337biz on Sept 17, 2014 | root | parent | next [–]
So what are they "really" doing?
0xbadcafebee on Sept 17, 2014 | root | parent | next [–]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-o...
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