Did Google Partner With The Most Evil Company In The World?

Palantir is an evil company. This is what many articles in the mainstream media highlight, going so far as to call the company a massive surveillance state and some even comparing it to Nazi Germany.

While their are many ways to debunk these arguments, one of the most interesting ways is to consider who actually works with Palantir. Late last week we got some pretty ground breaking news: Google is launching an official collaboration with Palantir.

So, what does this collaboration entail?

From the press release:

"We’re partnering with Google Cloud on three key fronts:

Palantir is delivering its Foundry platform for enterprise data management on Google Cloud. Customers will be able to quickly and easily deploy Foundry and take advantage of its features, while also benefiting from Google Cloud’s global, scalable, trusted and sustainable infrastructure. They can also deploy Foundry directly from the Google Cloud Marketplace.

Foundry will integrate with Google Cloud products to empower people throughout an organization to better work with data. Foundry users can bring together their data in Google BigQuery with a variety of other sources, and run Google analytics as well as AI/ML capabilities to help drive more effective decision-making and faster business value.

Google Cloud and Palantir are going to market in order to help solve key industry challenges for our customers, starting with retail, supply chain, and the financial services industry."

Google Cloud is a huge opportunity for Google. They were late to cloud computing and AWS got a lot of market share while Google was figuring things out, but now they want it to become a massive part of their business.

In order to do this, they need to provide the strongest cloud computing platform to clients. And the best way to do that is to integrate solutions around data, operational workflows, AI/ML capabilities, etc. with companies that are first in class in doing so.

Palantir is first in class. This is not just a silly press release or random headline, Google went so far as to make an entire promotional video with Palantir to show the world how significant this collaboration can be and how unique the opportunity is for people that work on GCP to also use Foundry to manage and understand their data.

Here's my reaction video to the partnership.

What This Means for Palantir

For Palantir, this is another opportunity to have a sales distribution outside of their own internal salesforce. GCP has thousands of clients that use google cloud for their storing, hosting, and overall cloud computing needs.

The amazing thing about Palantir is that it is cloud agnostic. It doesn't only work with google cloud, it can also integrate with AWS, Azure, etc. Palantir has already launched an integration with AWS months ago, so now launching with Google seems like the obvious next step to see if they can find more business from Google's existing customers.

Every company needs to buy compute. Most companies don't want to go through the pain of setting up physical servers. However, companies also are starting to recognize the value in operationalizing their data that is stored within the cloud, and in order to do that, there needs to be a big data/analytics platform that is facilitating that business intelligence.

So the existing clients on Google Cloud now essentially get an opportunity to see Palantir live on the marketplace and at least begin the process of potentially considering integrating Palantir into their operations, hopefully driving more organic distribution for the product outside of relying on cold calling companies to buy Foundry.

Sometimes You Need A Co-Sign

The most unique part about this partnership is that it gives Palantir a vote of confidence from one of the largest technology companies in the world.

It's hard to assume Palantir is the most evil surveillance company on the planet when Google, the company that refused to work with the US Government for certain contracts just based on the perception of how the public would interpret what they are doing, is now working with some evil company that wants to control your data.

What skeptics are missing is purely around the tech. They need to ask why Google saw an opportunity to recommend Palantir has a premier data analytics platform on their cloud marketplace to clients. It is rooted in the actually technology that Palantir has been able to create that is valuable to clients.

If Google didn't think it was that valuable or easily replaceable they would have just built their own version of it. They didn't need to give their clients access to Palantir if they could just upsell them on their own data platform.

The vote of confidence here for Palantir is strong. It's a multi trillion dollar company giving major credence to a $15B company.

The question now is how this partnership will translate to business success, and I'll be covering it as the partnership develops.

Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com. You can join our Palantir Facebook group here to participate in community discussions, polls, and more.