The Surveyor USV (pictured above) is the largest Saildrone vehicle. The company has teamed with Palantir to streamline its processes and accelerate scale in response to growing demand for its products. (Saildrone)
Saildrone has announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies to integrate its artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure to enable rapid scaling from manufacturing and supply chain to fleet operations, according to a Saildrone statement on 13 March.
“We've reached an inflection point with the company where scale requires new systems,” Richard Jenkins, founder and CEO of Saildrone, told Janes on 17 March. Company systems have evolved organically over time, whether for manufacturing or missions, and may not be connected.
“Saildrone is unique because we have not traditionally sold vehicles,” Jenkins continued, instead offers its unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and data collection as a service. This model means the company does “everything from prototyping through experimentation through to mass production, fitting sensors and devices to mission operations … maintenance, servicing, data flows, cloud compute, and then the front-end product that we deliver to the customer”, he said. Saildrone is looking at moving to a government-owned, contractor-operated model in the future, Jenkins noted.
Because Saildrone primarily delivers “information and not necessarily a nuts-and-bolts product”, it has many different teams and bespoke services, he continued. There are around 140 boats in the fleet, with about half deployed on missions around the world. “It just becomes too onerous to manage,” Jenkins said. Palantir offers a “sophisticated suite of software tools that enables” Saildrone to take its home-grown processes and “put them into one coherent cloud system all the way from manufacturing through mission operations”, he said.
Digital backbone
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