As a company we are rapidly approaching our 18th year of delivering ‘Data Management & Warehousing’ solutions to our clients.
We started trading on 1 July 1995 and by 25 September 1995 we had our domain name – we used Demon Internet to get the domain name and because we were in the UK and wanted a .com domain there was a pile of paperwork to complete – no online service in those days.
So how early did we get on the internet – well the Netcraft survey says that at the end of September 1995 there were 19,705 domain and today there are 672,985,183 registered domains, so we are older than 99.997% of all domains and we looked like this:
And using the Wayback Machine you can view over 150 versions of our website that range from raw HTML through phpWebSite and now WordPress. Some of them make me cringe now!
In that time we have delivered our services in London, New York, Pretoria, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Kuwait, Riyadh, Paris, Rome, Bern, Barcelona, St Petersberg, and many other places beside.
Our clients have including telephone companies, insurance companies, food and beverage manufacturers, retail organisations, transport services, printers, police services and being an expert witness – thank you to one and all.
The technology has changed and stayed the same – we still have Oracle, Sybase DB2 and have seen the emergence of MySQL and Postgres, We’ve seen column stores such as InfoBright, Sybase IQ, etc. and appliances like Exadata and Netezza. Some have been acquired, divested or both
Linux has taken over from Unix and Windows is still around – and there is more open source code in all software categories being used in large corporates. Businesses have virtualised and are also starting to trust putting their data ‘in the cloud’.
ETL tools have come and gone – do you remember Constellar – whilst Ab Initio and Informatica remain.
Business Objects, Microstrategy and Cognos remain but are now being challenged by tools like Tableau and Qlikview for great data visualisation and now we view the reports on browsers and mobile devices instead of the locally installed software on the desktop.
SAS remains the big weapon of statistical tools but R is an emerging technology that, given the number of students around the globe being trained in it, will surely become a dominant force in the market.
And then there are all the NoSQL database and the Big Data technologies – Map Reduce, Hadoop, Casandra, Mongo and their associated ecosystems, low-cost, high power systems that will change the speed of how we look at information and the volume that we can process but won’t replace the human factors of people and organisations in the ability to use the data they have access to and exploit the investment they have made.
But the challenge of delivering good information remains – organisations still find it difficulty to exploit the wealth of data they have and we have all the skills and knowledge to help you do it – so contact us and see how we can help with your data problems, after all it is all data management!
