Palantir: Data Analysis
March 24, 2009
In the last month, three people have asked me about Palantir Technologies. I have had several people mention the work environment and the high caliber of the team at the company. The company has about 170 employees and is privately held. I have heard that the firm is profitable, but I have that from two sources now hunting for work after their financial institutions went south. The company is one of the leaders in finance and intelligence analytics. The specialities of the company include global macro research and trading; quantitative trading; knowledge discovery and knowledge management.
If you are not familiar with the company, you may want to navigate to www.palantirtech.com and take a look at the company’s offerings. Located in Palo Alto, the company focuses on making software that facilitates information analysis. With interest in business intelligence waxing and waning, Palantir has captured a very solid reputation for sophisticated analytics. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies “snap in” Palantir’s software to perform analysis and generate visualizations of the data. The company has been influenced by Apple in terms of the value placed upon sophisticated design and presentation. Palantir’s system makes highly complex tasks somewhat easier because of the firm’s interfaces. If you want to generate a visualization of a large, complex analytic method, Palantir can produce visually arresting graphics. If you navigate to the company’s “operation tradestop” page here, you can access demonstrations and white papers.
When I last checked the company’s demos, a number of them provided examples drawn from military and intelligence simulations. These examples provide a useful window into the sophistication of the Palantir technology. The company’s tools can manipulate data from any domain where large datasets and complex analyses must be run. The screenshot below comes from the firm’s demonstration of an entity extraction, text processing, and relationship analysis:
A Palantir relationship diagram. Each object is a link making it easy to drill down into the underlying data or documents.
Each object on the display is “live” so you can drill down or run other analyses about that object. The idea is to make data analysis interactive. Most of the vendors of high-end business intelligence systems offer some interactivity, but Palantir has gone further than most firms.
The company has a Web log, and it seems to be updated with reasonable frequency. The Web log does a good job of pointing out some of the features of the firm’s software. For example, I found this discussion of the Palantir monitoring server quite useful. The Web site emphasizes the visualization capabilities of the software. The Web log digs deeper into the innovations upon which the graphics rest.
Be careful when you run a Google query for Palantir. There are several firms with similar names. You will want to navigate to www.palantirtech.com. You may find yourself at another Palantir when you want the business intelligence firm.
Stephen Arnold, March 24, 2009
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