They are deceiving investors into believing that the company has a real product.
To be fair, this description makes it sound like an ETL tool, just like Ab Initio, Datastage or Teradata, where the companies involved all make serious amounts of money from consulting (and the server licenses don't come cheap either!).
These tools can be pretty powerful if set up and programmed correctly; it's definitely not as simple as pointing them at a bunch of data sources and expecting magic to happen.
If Palantir haven't found a magic way to integrate data sources without any configuration, it does sound rather deceptive.
That said, if they manage to get systems up and running without 30-stories-high stacks of never-to-be-read paper, that'd be a revolution in itself.
To be fair, this description makes it sound like an ETL tool, just like Ab Initio, Datastage or Teradata, where the companies involved all make serious amounts of money from consulting (and the server licenses don't come cheap either!).
These tools can be pretty powerful if set up and programmed correctly; it's definitely not as simple as pointing them at a bunch of data sources and expecting magic to happen.
If Palantir haven't found a magic way to integrate data sources without any configuration, it does sound rather deceptive.
That said, if they manage to get systems up and running without 30-stories-high stacks of never-to-be-read paper, that'd be a revolution in itself.