Palantir Foundry, a data integration platform popular by the CIA, Ferrari, Airbus, and Sanofi, offers centralized storage, ease of use, versatility, and digital innovation potential. Aqsone, specialized in Foundry, supports customers in their transformation and data science projects.
What do the CIA, Scuderia Ferrari F1, Scuderia Ferrari F1, Airbus, Sanofi, Fiat Chrysler and Credit Suisse have in common?
At first glance, it is difficult to find an obvious link between the famous American intelligence agency, a Formula 1 team, an aircraft manufacturer and a pharmaceutical company. But the answer is to be found in the use of Palantir Foundry ; this digital solution developed by Palantir Technologies has become more and more essential in the world of data. At least, that is the ambition of its CEO Alex Karp who declared a few years ago that “Palantir was founded to create software for the most important institutions in the world”.
In this article, let's try to explain what need the Foundry platform meets. How does she do it? What are the use cases? Finally, let's try to explain why we at Aqsone decided to develop expertise on Foundry.
Many businesses generate an astronomical amount of data during their daily operations. Think of the data generated by an airplane during a flight, or the data generated by the machines that produce car parts on an assembly line. These businesses often operate in separate silos. For example, production data will be found in systems that are different from maintenance systems. Very little, if any, visibility is shared between these two professions, yet a potential for cooperation could exist if the two professions understood each other. You can imagine the complexity that can exist between the different silos of industrial companies with tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of jobs and dozens of different departments.
Having data spread over several non-communicating silos is one of the first obstacles to digital transformation. This creates communication barriers between employees and prevents the creation of a climate conducive to the synergies, innovations and improvements that can emerge between the various business lines of the company.
Integrating data into a single platform (often referred to as Data Lake) is necessary to allow the proliferation of data-driven practices and digital-based services. It is here that Palantir Foundry intervenes brilliantly.
To reduce data silos, Palantir developed Foundry. This platform allows you to:
Thus, these capabilities allow engineers, data scientists or non-specialists to intuitively access the most relevant information in order to improve their jobs.
Airbus has been using Foundry since 2017. The platform allows it to collect, extract and centralize the set of heterogeneous data necessary for the production of the A350, including those from suppliers and those installed on the tablets of engineers and operators working on the A350. All assembly, operational, and safety data is consolidated on Foundry and presented in the form of customizable dashboards. This made it possible to better support the ramp-up in A350 production, and also to better anticipate and react to non-quality problems that could delay the delivery of the aircraft.
Foundry allows Scuderia Ferrari to combine the technical expertise of the team's engineers with the immense amount of data at their disposal. Telemetry, spare parts, simulation, simulation, testing, and pilot feedback data are integrated within Foundry. Instead of spending their valuable time integrating and cleaning up this data, Ferrari engineers in the factory or on the racetrack can focus on their most important tasks, using the data to make faster and better informed decisions. Foundry made it possible to have a digital twin of the car, on which engineers rely in order to better analyze performance, adjust their hypotheses and iterate quickly in order to converge on the best technical configuration to use for a given circuit.
Unlike Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud Platform, which represent very general cloud services, Palantir Foundry is focused on data: the platform is optimized for data ingestion, data engineering, data visualization and machine learning.
Adopting and using Foundry is very easy. On your web browser, you will have all the tools pre-installed, preconfigured, and maintained by Palantir. A one-hour training course will suffice for any operator to create filters, aggregations and simple graphs that meet their use case. Foundry contains both code-based tools (code repositories & code workbook) for experts, and non-code based tools (contour & data preparation) for non-technical beginners. This makes data manipulation accessible regardless of your level of technical expertise and is gradually removing the psychological barriers that can be encountered in adopting data-driven practices.
Foundry is designed to manage massive, structured, or unstructured data (including time series). It allows the ingestion, synchronization and monitoring of data. Pipelines can be developed collaboratively (Git) on several computer languages (SQL, Python or Java). They can be updated on a scheduled basis. A data lineage feature makes it possible to display the pipeline on a user-friendly graphical interface (monocle) very appreciated by Data engineers. Les Data analysts can create their data visualization using code-based tools for the most complicated visualizations or non-code based for the most common visualizations (bar chart, histogram, pie chart etc.). Les Data scientists will find the tools they need to help them from developing a machine learning prototype to putting it into production.
Thanks to its many qualities, the Foundry platform can become inevitable for a successful digital transformation. “We allow companies to regain power over the gold mines that are their data, and thus be able to catch up with digital-native companies”, assures Fabrice Bregier, the boss of Palantir France, the former CEO of Airbus.
We cannot overlook the success of Skywise, the Airbus Palantir Foundry, which in a few years became the star of the aeronautical world by integrating not only manufacturer data but also data from a hundred airlines and suppliers; the ambition being to become the beating heart of aviation. In fact, this is the slogan of Skywise.
Recognizing the importance that Foundry will have for our customers in the coming years, Aqsone has developed expertise on this platform and intends to rely on it in order to bring more value to its customers during their transformation and data science projects. From ingestion to exploitation, including machine learning, we support our customers from their first steps on Foundry and we offer them use cases inspired by our experience.
