Hillsborough, CA

Dave Kellog wrote a nice post a couple of months ago about Palantir. I worked for a year maybe 20 feet from Dave at Ingres but I don't think we ever really talked. Too bad, I really like his outlook on marketing.

He talks about Palantir as a new style SI or new style ISV. I think this is a trend, even without the cult aspects.

Customers still want it the way they want it but are more ready to here "productize" because they are stuck in the concrete of "customizable" solutions now and can see that no customizations might lead to better results.
The open source route of paid feature prioritization has been working for a few years now with good success for products that do real work.
"Engineers" in the field can sometimes have better connections/respect by HQ than "Implementation Consultants".
Palantir isn't the only firm doing this - there are a number of firms, some even not VC backed - who are turning a profit in various corners of the ISV world while not caring so much about consulting vs. licensing.
Particulary where the deployment platform is standardized or cloud, some of the platform specific deployment issues can be standardized more than they might have been in the past.