To start, let me be crystal clear - silos develop naturally. For example, let’s take a look at how the agricultural revolution ushered in the age of specialization.

Ten years ago I was a typical nerd, compiling Linux system from the source code, working for the digital company První multimediální as a Linux admin. Switches, VPN and whole LAMP stack was my daily bread. On the side me and my good friend Mirek Burkon got a project - building project management tool for some NGO. The product promise was somehow similar to Basecamp (which I haven’t heard of at the time). It was a success and we decided to turn it into a product.

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), provides IT services, professional services, and solutions for large corporations. With an annual revenue of USD 12B, the company has approximately 74,000 employees worldwide.

Heureka is the leading e-commerce shopping platform in Central and Eastern Europe, with millions of products from approximately 50,000 online stores in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Under the control of Rockaway, a venture capital firm and the owner of Heureka, the group has expanded into Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, through the acquisition of Arukereso in 2017.

Where do you start? Our experience based on working with hundreds of clients worldwide, both rapidly growing companies and enterprises, is that the one place to start with any digital transition and data innovation is (drumroll) - Managerial reports.

In the Czech Republic, Sklizeno needs no introduction to healthy living enthusiasts and fans of local, organic products. The chain of grocery stores stocks mostly Czech but also imported food, with clearly marked origins and guaranteed quality. The first store opened in Brno in 2011; today, Sklizeno Foods, together with the Náš Grunt chain, which the company acquired, operates 46 grocery stores in total.

Until last year, it was called Cetelem, a provider of consumer credit and credit cards. In the autumn of 2017, BNP Paribas’ subsidiary was transformed into a new bank. Hello bank! caters for retail clients and has come up with several new products, so far not made public, for them this year. We visited the company for comments and news from the bank’s data back-office.

Czech fashion brand Pietro Filipi has been producing clothes since 1993; since autumn 2017, a new owner has been at the helm. Michal Mička’s C2H investment firm bought 80% of Pietro Filipi, with the aim of reviving the brand’s prosperity and supporting its expansion both abroad and into e-commerce.

As we covered in our recent NLP blog, there are a lot of cool use cases for text / sentiment analysis. One recent instance we found really interesting came out of our May presentation at SeaTUG (Seattle Tableau User Group.)

We’ve recently experienced two fairly large system problems that have affected approximately 35% of our clients. The first issue took 50 minutes to resolve and the other approximately 10 hours. The root cause in both cases was the way we handled the provisioning of adhoc sandboxes on top of our SnowflakeDB (a few words about “how we started w/ them”).