Powering Change with Palantir Foundry

A national billion-dollar gas and electric utility company urgently needed to revamp its data management and application development to address a critical safety concern: the risk of falling power lines, which threatened severe wildfires and the continuity of essential services, including hospital operations. The utility faced potential operational inefficiencies, substantial financial losses from reactive maintenance, reputational harm from possible outages and wildfires, as well as legal and regulatory consequences due to infrastructure failures.

That’s where we came in. Launch’s team of engineers partnered with Palantir Technologies, a software company specializing in advanced AI and data analytics software - dedicated to providing powerful platforms for integrating, managing, and securing data across various sectors. Our mission was clear: harness the power of the Palantir Foundry Platform, to establish robust data connections, execute sophisticated data transformations, and develop user-centric applications – all to ensure the identification and replacement of at risk power lines. Palantir Foundry is a data integration and analysis software designed to help organizations manage and analyze large and complex datasets. It provides tools for data integration, transformation, visualization, and collaboration, enabling users to make data-driven decisions and gain insights across various domains.

Launch provided highly skilled engineers to augment the utility’s ongoing data integration and application development efforts. The team undertook a multi-faceted approach:

• ‍Pipeline Enhancement: By revisiting and refining existing data pipelines, Launch engineers enhanced the accuracy and reliability of the data feeding into downstream applications.‍
• Innovative Application Development: The team engineered new end-to-end processes within the Palantir Foundry platform. This effort involved data ingestion, processing, transformation, and the delivery of applications that offered actionable insights to the utility's end-users.‍
• Geospatial Data Utilization: Leveraging geospatial analytics, we enabled the utility's personnel to visualize and interact with their data through comprehensive application maps, facilitating informed decision-making regarding infrastructure risks and remediation strategies.

The urgency of this project was underscored by our client’s commitment to underground 10,000 miles of power lines by 2030 -- a proactive measure to mitigate the risks associated with downed power lines and ensure the resilience of power supply to critical services.

Launch’s collaboration with Palantir yielded significant achievements in empowering our client to become a proactive steward of its data:

1. ‍Data Transformation and Application Development: We successfully implemented Palantir Foundry to streamline the ingestion, transformation, and application consumption processes. This facilitated a comprehensive analysis and planning for the undergrounding of at-risk power lines.‍
2. Innovative Analytical Tools: Our team developed a new application specifically designed to analyze and plan the undergrounding work. This tool, coupled with newly created pipelines capable of processing geospatial data, equipped the utility with enhanced capabilities to visualize and strategize the extensive undergrounding initiative.‍
3. Quality Enhancement: By critically evaluating and improving existing pipelines and processes,Launch ensured the delivery of higher-quality data and analytics. This enhancement supported the utility in achieving its ambitious infrastructure resilience goals, directly contributing to the safety and reliability of its power supply network. 

Through strategic collaboration and technological innovation, Launch and Palantir laid a foundation not only to address the utility’s immediate safety concerns, but also to embark on a long-term transformation of its infrastructure management practices. Targeted data optimization and application development drove significant improvements in public safety, operational efficiency, and environmental stewardship.

Launch is a proud partner of Palantir Technologies. As a leading software company, Palantir's innovative data analytics platforms are transforming industries like never before. They believe that with good data and the right technology, people and institutions today can still solve hard problems and change the world for the better - and that's something we can get behind.

Launch is on a mission to help every large and growing organization mature their product approach with data-driven and AI-First strategies. Is your org ready? Take our free Data Maturity Self-Assessment to find out.