Palantir: Traditional ERP Contains Some Deadly Ingredients

**Bob Evans** (0:00)
Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. Can it be that the software that helped build the current economy we're in is reaching a point where it has to change radically or else it's gonna begin to cause harm? Talking about traditional ERP, which has been so valuable to so many businesses over the last few decades, but as we move in to the AI economy, is it possible that some of the rigor and discipline and standards that traditional ERP brought to organizations, their processes, how they do things, and what they don't do, what they can't do, what they're not allowed to do, is that beginning to become a problem. Now, that's a case that Palantir made in a recent blog post. It's interesting in a longer detailed piece I've got later today on cloudwars.com. I offer some pretty compelling excerpts about this, and I dig into this idea of what's the trade-off here. But the point that Palantir is making is that while there's a great value that traditional ERP can offer for some parts of an organization, the rigor, the standards bring for things like auditing and security and some predictability, on the flip side out of it, I think what Palantir is saying that too much standardization in the current very fluid economy we're in, where so much is changing based on the new innovations around AI, is over standardization going to become a problem. So have we moved past, I think, this age of standardization?
Are we in a post-standardization world here? And one of the things they bring about, if everything is uniform, how do companies stand out? There's an interesting quote in this blog post from Palantir. They said, Uniqueness is not a bug that software should erase. Rather, said, it is the feature that keeps you ahead.
And another one where they're talking about the value that ERP gives you, they mentioned different things. They talked about a clean core. Now, that's definitely a reference over to SAP. But the too much emphasis on this clean core, making it the absolute top priority, they said, if you do that, you're sacrificing the organization's identity, its differentiated processes, and the ways it actually creates value for customers. So this is not a case where Palantir is saying ERP overall is bad. It's just rather the way we've looked at it for the past two or three decades, is becoming like the primary governing way of looking at things, the mindset, the policies of how businesses operate. Has it hit a point now where, okay, we got to pick and choose the places where this approach of standardization applies? And more so though, in this AI economy, where AI is changing so many things, giving so much additional capability and choice to customers, where they can get exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it. Do businesses then need to stand out in different ways? And is this overly standardized traditional ERP approach going to stifle the ability of companies to create competitive advantage by those unique capabilities and qualities and personality that traditional ERP in the view of Palantir stifles? Now, of course, Palantir is saying, hey, we are the solution to this. We can help you, you know, interconnect these new ways of doing things, a modern layer with your traditional ERP. So they're not saying you have to get rid of it. Lots of companies are trying to do this, take all the value that's in the traditional way of doing things, link those up through modern systems of what's going forward here.
And it's interesting that Palantir brings this up because their partnership with SAP appears to be deepening, right? As I've mentioned several weeks ago, SAP Chief Operating Officer Sebastian Steinhauser made a video testimonial where they're talking about, you know, the capabilities that Palantir and SAP together are able to deliver to customers. So it's a very interesting time. And I think what this really points to is the stuff that got us here is not necessarily going to get us there with AI causing so much upheaval and disruption and bringing new capabilities to what businesses can do. So interesting times here as we enter the second half of 2026 Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars Minute. I hope you have a fantastic day.