Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers

“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long time.” “Doing FDE” involves sending top consultants to a client, without tying them to a project. Instead they get a mission to build something valuable using new techno