Repent ye inefficient – the ‘Palantir-ization’ of IT services is upon us
Palantir's former IT boss just took over as CEO of Thrive-backed AI MSP platform
Former Palantir CIO Jim Siders has departed the company to join Shield Technology Partners as CEO, in a bid he says is meant to bring AI to bear in the sprawling managed services landscape.
With the new CEO announced on Monday, Thrive Holdings has pulled in Palantir talent just weeks after OpenAI took a stake in the business. Shield has described the global IT services market it's targeting as worth more than $700 billion.
Shield was announced in June as an AI-enabled platform uniting four established IT services providers, backed with over $100 million in initial funding from Thrive Holdings and ZBS Partners. The individual owners of those IT shops continue to run their businesses, while Shield provides centralized support, shared tools and capital to help scale what they’ve already built. The structure appears similar to the business structure of what are known as Master MSPs – such as IT By Design and The 20 – that manage the help desk functions of smaller shops.
Siders has a strong background in help desk management, having started his career with Palantir as an IT support technician in 2013 before rising to tech ops analyst, then support team lead, and eventually Head of IT in February 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
His prior responsibilities at Palantir included IT operations, the corporate network, physical security, and the company’s global IT spend.
“AI is rewriting the economics of service delivery at the exact time IT service providers are rethinking how they operate," Siders said in a statement that accompanied the announcement.
Forrester VP and principal analyst Charles Betz told The Register he sees this as the start of the ‘Palantirization’ of IT services.
"Vendors as well as this new services company want to start operationalizing the Palantir playbook, which is heavy on data and ontology-driven and really focuses on building, what – these are Palantir’s words not mine – an 'ontological flywheel,'" Betz said. "A lot of what they do involved forward-deployed engineers to work with the client to really understand what it is that you do and how do you talk about it."
Betz said the semantic question is critical to succeeding with AI. He believes it is one of the drivers behind Atlassian’s purchase of Secoda announced in December, and ServiceNow’s May purchase of Data.World, and Salesforce's acquisition of Informatica.
“Salesforce did not buy Informatica because they wanted to move into legacy, batch commodity ETL processing,” Betz told The Register. “They bought Informatica because if you own the meaning of the words it means you own the means by which intent is articulated, and if you are helping customers along those lines you are going to be very valuable to them.”
The Palantir-inspired services play will likely have fast followers, Betz said.
“I’m sure that Deloitte and Accenture are watching this extremely carefully,” he said.
Shield has two internal products that are focused on improving the work of IT engineers and the service desk by triaging and automatically resolving repetitive customer tickets: Sentinel and Spectre.
To Betz's point about forward teams with OpenAI, Shield will bring a cross-functional team of research and applied AI specialists to work alongside product engineers, operators, and industry experts and integrate AI into the businesses it partners with.
The core partners at Shield Technology Partners include ClearFuze Networks, a Los Angeles solution provider with a CISSP designation, and a Microsoft Silver partner ranking; IronOrbit, an IT services company formed in 1997 that is a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for Desktop As A Service; Delval Technology Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based help desk and managed services business that administers to 5,000 endpoints; and OneNet Global, a managed IT and telco provider out of Minnesota. ®