To do any sort of business planning, you need forecasting. Our reason for existing is to help our customers drive success from their data, so, around two years ago we began to research adding automated forecasting to our cloud analytics platform. This did however present a huge challenge. Take the typical lifecycle of a forecasting project. It’s an iterative process of refining a model, generating a forecast and evaluating the results to understand how to further refine the model. This cycle is repeated until you are happy with the results. Evaluating the results and refining the model are usually manual…

Business planning can be a challenge at the best of times, but during a period of unprecedented disruption like the current Covid19 crisis, it’s particularly so. Not only is the disruption on a scale none of us have seen in our lifetime, it’s unpredictable in the extreme. Governments are changing rules with massive repercussions almost weekly (most of us would agree with good reason), and the estimates of when we might return to something like normal vary alarmingly. So, we’ve been working with some of our customers to build forecasts to guide their business planning during the crisis. We’ve used…

Like most people in the IT industry of a similar age (close enough to 50 to see the hairs poking out its nostrils), I’ve seen a lot of change. That said, it’s hard to think of any technology that has the potential to change so many working practices and industries as the current developments in machine learning and data analytics. For an analytics vendor like DataPA, staying at the forefront of such developments is a constant (but exhilarating) challenge. Bringing fresh, new ideas into the business It’s one of the reasons we at DataPA often take on students for a…

We’re never short of candidates for “the next big thing” in the IT industry. Not surprising given the rate of change, but even for those of us working in the industry it can be disorientating. One of the latest contenders is "Serverless Cloud Technology". So, what is it, and how the heck can you run any software without a server? Well, you can’t. The term “serverless” refers to the developers experience of the platform, not the underlying architecture. Serverless cloud computing is simply an evolution of existing cloud technologies. Ultimately, cloud computing is about delivering Software as a Service (SaaS),…