Blaise Roulet took over the role of Head of Sales Europe at Palantir at the beginning of May. It is a newly created position, informs Roulet on request. He should set up national organizations that look after existing business customers and win new ones.
Before joining Palantir, Roulet worked for Salesforce for around seven years. From 2015 to 2021 he managed the Swiss business of the CRM provider. In March 2021, Salesforce Switzerland appointed Petra Jenner as Managing Director – and Roulet took over the support of strategic customers in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Incidentally, Jenner will be leaving Salesforce at the end of June. She joins Splunk, where she assumes a position as senior vice president and general manager for EMEA.
Palantir has been particularly successful in the pharmaceutical and financial sectors as well as in industry in recent years, says Roulet. They want to build on this success and acquire more customers. Accordingly, new appointments in the sales area are planned in Europe – jobs will also be created in Switzerland.
In February 2021, Palantir settled in the canton of Schwyz. The company opened a “European hub” in Altendorf, where 20 to 40 software engineers are said to be working. Palantir also has two branches in Switzerland: one in Zurich and one in Geneva.
Palantir offers software for analyzing large amounts of data. The company is controversial for a number of reasons, including previous CIA funding. Customers include the US interception service NSA, the US Army and the US Federal Police FBI. They use Palantir’s software to discover suspicious data patterns – for example with the aim of locating terrorists and drug smugglers. Palantir’s largest shareholder is Peter Thiel, who also co-founded Paypal and financially supported Mark Zuckerberg in building Facebook.
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