The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has agreed on a three-year partnership worth £75 million with Palantir to support its digital transformation.
It will involve the software company working with the Defence Digital agency to exploit data for a military advantage and to support decision making across the defence sector.
Under the enterprise agreement, any organisation withing the MoD family will have access to Palantir software across multiple classifications.
Announcing the deal, the company emphasised the importance of its ‘ontology’ concept for data modelling, which allows users to see data not as rows and columns but objects, properties and the relationships between them. All of the data ingested into Palantir software is cleaned and mapped to the concept.
It said this will enable MoD personnel to perform advance scenario planning, testing hypotheses an modelling how they would play out in real time. This can apply to activities such as frontline operations, budget decisions and maintenance planning, providing the potential to understand outcomes before making decisions.
It also said that personnel will be able to use its suite of no code and low code application builders.
Integration and data exploitation
Caroline Bellamy, director chief data at Defence Digital, said: "As a strategic partner in a complex defence data ecosystem, Palantir products and services are helping defence to become a truly integrated digital enterprise, with data exploitation at the heart of a faster, better, and more integrated defence.
“A defence where real time, interconnected data better informs decision making, our people are digitally connected and empowered, and step changes in digital capability have been made for our war fighters and across our business operations.
The MoD has a longstanding relationship with Palantir that has covered fields including analysis, the space domain, personnel management and DevSecOps.
