Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

We have just added a Developer's section. Lokad has been designed to be easily integrated into any 3rd party application right from the start. Yet, the information targeting developers was somehow spread into many different sections of our website. Adding a Developers section was the obvious solution to this problem.

Although the Lokad services themselves are closed source, all the integration components have been released as open source. The two upcoming products Lokad Safety Stock Calculator and Lokad Call Center Calculator are also developed as open source products.

For the Lokad customers, key benefits of open source components are

• no spyware, no badware. We don't ask you to trust us, you go and check the code yourself. We do our best to maintain a documented code, nothing gets buried in the dark.
• greater control on your IT infrastructure. Having the source code means that you can't be locked in (through proprietary file formats that could not be migrated for ex.).

Yet, as Jeff Atwood is pointing out, open source isn't only about disclosing the source code. His definition of open source involve further requirements:

• An OSI approved license. Lokad is using the (new) BSD license that allows code reuse into both closed and open source applications.
• The project must use a commonly available method of public source control. Lokad is relying on the Subversion hosting of SourceForge.NET. Thus, Lokad can't just take the code offline on its own.
• The project must provide public evidence that it accepts and encourages code contributions from the outside world. Well, you can check the Ohloh page of Lokad to have a look to see how many people are involved in those projects.

Also, on a more technical side, we have also setup a public build server. Our continuous integration builds include unit testing, automated code guidelines validation, and documentation generation. Check it out!

Software quality is a challenge. As a software developer, you have to make sure that your code is going to run in all sort of unexpected situations, but still it has to work. Plenty of methods, tools and processes are available to improve quality. Lokad makes an intensive usage of those.

But there is another aspect, it's the perceived quality: the user's opinion depends on many (many) purely subjective aspects of your product. For B2C, product design and aesthetic are probably among the top factors in perceived quality (think iPod).

So far, so good, as a product developer, it simply means that you need to invest a certain amount of efforts in your product design. But what happens when perceived quality conflicts actual quality? (think to the devil's method to change your iPod battery).

In the case of Lokad, where we are delivering time-series forecasts, the situation is even more complicated because statistical forecasting is just so not intuitive.

For example, we have many customers who actually try out a couple of points to see what they get. Yet, this is really not the way to go to evaluate Lokad. The right way involves a proper training dataset and a testing dataset of your own actual business data (plus many other considerations, but it's beyond the scope of this post).

Unfortunately, for us, many customers are judging Lokad on the forecast they get after entering a dozen of points generated by some function like Cos(x) or Sin(x). Actually, it would be possible to hard-code a few heuristics in Lokad just to detect those attempts (and their underlying mathematical functions). But, by doing so those heuristics would actually decrease the overall accuracy for the users having real business data in their accounts.

Then, we have another issue: our forecasts are not exactly real time. You can retrieve your forecasts any time, but if you retrieve your forecasts 0.1s after finishing the upload of your data (through our Web Services API), Lokad won't have had the time to try complex/advanced statistical models. As a result, you will get real-time but naive forecasts.

Lokad does its best to provide an end-to-end forecasting service, but to some extend it can't escape the Law of Leaky Abstraction: in order to make the most of Lokad, one needs to understand, at least little, how statistical forecasting works and how the constraints are handled by Lokad.

Ohloh is a nice social network completely focused on open source software. Basically, it can extract all sort of information directly through source control extraction and analysis.

Based on the Ohloh estimates, developing the Lokad products should have cost us $1,766,626 assuming $55,000 per year per developer. To be honest, we did spend that much. :-) We are obviously a bit more productive that what Ohloh is expecting.

Do not hesitate to grant Lokad a few Ohloh stacks. We need your support to expand the coverage of our open-source contributions.

We are proud to announce that Paypal has listed Lokad in their solution directory. Indeed, Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting (and the setup instructions that are specific to Paypal) has been supporting Paypal since the version 1.1.3.

Because no matter how many Web 2.0 widgets you have in your eCommerce front-end, too much inventory is wasted money.

Sourceforge.net has started a community awards competition. Lokad has released many open source add-ons already. If you want even more open source goodies to be released, do not hesitate to support our open source project on SF.NET, you can vote for the Enterprise category.

We are relying on Sourceforge.net to release the source code of our add-ons as open source. The Lokad SF.NET project has now its own source code search engine. Through Krugle, it has become possible to navigate easily within the 20.000 lines of source code already released by Lokad.

Three weeks ago, we were launching the Lokad Forums, meantime we have been having a couple of issues (thanks for the support during the process). We have finally upgraded our forums to a more reliable hosted solution. The URL remains forums.lokad.com.

The forums have been renamed Forecasting for Business with a broadened topic coverage (basically, everything relevant to the forum title).
We hope to be able to develop a valuable community around this topic. The forums are monitored by the Lokad staff do not hesitate to post your questions, we will do our best to answer them.

The Lokad forecasting technology can be integrated into any 3rd party applications through our Web Services. We have just been featured  ProgrammableWeb along with 400 other major WS API available for custom application development. The Lokad Web Services are also listed on eSigma directory.

 Although the adoption rate of the Web Services has been slow (400 API providers is notmuch for a technology that was already available in 2001), Web Services are now recognized industry standard, gaining a large momentum since 2006. Below, the growing curse by ProgrammableWeb for the number of mashups relying on public Web Services.

Lokad was somehow lacking an industrial-strengh customer support system. In order to improve our customer assistance services, we have just started a new dedicated application for customer support on support.lokad.com.

you can't optimize what you can't measure 

For our customers, this dedicated application means the possibility to track the status of their support tickets. For the Lokad staff, it makes possible to actually measure on a regular basis how well we are doing with with customer support.