The Army has awarded Palantir Technologies [PLTR] a $115 million extension to continue its work on the Vantage data platform program for another year, the Pentagon said on Dec. 14.
The extension arrives as Palantir’s current contract for Vantage was set to expire, and as the Army begins its pursuit of a follow-up, multi-vendor program called Army Data Platform (ADP) 2.0.
“Palantir is honored to extend our work with the U.S. Army as it evolves into the Army Data Platform solution,” Akash Jain, president of Palantir USG, said in a statement. “Building on our shared history of operational excellence and innovation, our partnership has consistently provided the Army with a decisive edge in data-driven decision-making. This extension is evidence of the value we bring to the nation’s defense, including our joint efforts to provide more commercial technology providers the opportunity to equip soldiers with the innovation they need to meet their most pressing challenges.”
Palantir was originally awarded a $458 million deal in December 2019 for the Vantage program, which the company said at the time was “established to enable users to make data driven decisions, allowing the Army to leverage its data as a strategic asset.”
Following the contract extension announcement, Palantir said Vantage has “enabled the Army to recoup savings on over $700 million in additional de-obligated funds per year, amounting to nearly $4 billion since the program’s instantiation.”
“Army Vantage is instrumental in optimizing readiness, training, logistics, talent management, and contract efficiency, while promoting data-driven approaches that provide Soldiers and other Army partner organizations access to the data and tools they need to serve their missions across the entire Army enterprise,” Palantir said in a statement.
Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said in January the service intended to pursue a multi-vendor approach as its next step beyond Vantage, which he said would ensure “we can continue to make sure that we have the best that industry can possibly offer in terms of our approaches to visualizing and analyzing our data” (Defense Daily, Jan. 12 2023).
“The program is going to operate under the following principles. First, is continued progress on the data products to support our soldiers. We’re not paying to step back in any way on our push for unlocking our data. We’re going to pursue a multi-vendor approach that allows for testing with industry’s approaches and allows us to tailor products for specific use cases,” Camarillo said at the time.
The Army in late November published a Request for Information on ADP 2.0, which it described as “an enterprise data platform that enables self-service data domains and data product owners to create, manage and publish data products.”
“It will provide the enterprise data ecosystem mesh services to ensure federated discoverability, access, governance, and interoperability. ADP 2.0 will provide analytics environments, tools, and services to federated communities across the Army enterprise with the scalability and speed that current Army capabilities cannot provide. ADP 2.0 will replace the current Army Vantage program and must be available in sufficient time to allow the migration from Army Vantage,” the Army wrote in the RFI.
The Army noted it plans to take a multi-phased approach to moving from Vantage to ADP 2.0, reiterating in the RFI that it will “continue to maintain the Army Vantage program to enable capability availability and a seamless transition to ADP 2.0.”