02-16-2021, 03:35 PM
(02-16-2021, 03:18 PM)vbin Wrote: "Moat is growing" it's not there yet. A lot of their rev comes from big corps and govt contracts and once these customers sign up they don't go away, dependency gets build up on the software/tech and stays like that for years unless the provider becomes incompetent over years and decades.
These integrations intentionally are designed hard to integrate and hard to decouple. Usually providers will give full support and discount for integration in order to facilitate the "hard to integrate" part and once onboard since these are hard to decouple systems, they stay with the customer for long time.( Think about all the logistics, architecture, training, budgeting, approvals) it takes months and years.
From what I know it was purely an engineer company with little emphasis on sales and that's changing.
The problems they are solving( unstructured data) is very hard to solve etc etc etc. What a lot of people don't realize is that these systems can be deployed in multiple domain and areas and opens up new frontiers for PLTR other then defence contracts. I will suggest some reading on them.
Their move into the corporate space is much more recent. PLTR initially received seed money from the CIA over a decade ago, as the agency saw the obvious national security implications of being able to spot meaningful trends in unstructured data. Unsurprisingly, law enforcement/homeland security/defense are some of their longest-standing customers. Their focus for the majority of their pre-IPO history was government contracts (steady, sticky, dependable income).
There's the apocryphal story told by American Airlines' former CEO Bob Crandall, that the airline learned it could save over a million a year by removing one olive from each dinner salad served onboard. At the risk of oversimplifying for fenders and anyone else looking at the company, PLTR basically vacuums up data from a company's entire operations, and automates finding opportunities for trimming olives, or otherwise streamlining workflows.
They have also mastered the art of making their software indispensable for employees at every level of a company that uses them. Once established within an organization, it would be extremely disruptive and traumatic for the organization to disconnect and use a different provider (similar to how IBM successfully entrenched itself in corporate America starting in the 1960s with computing and data services, but PLTR is just copying that move in the SaaS/analytics/workflow automation space).