> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.

Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.