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Lokad staff posts here tips, news and tutorial either related to Lokad or related to business forecasting in general.

Check our archives for a selection of posts to help your business with insights about forecasting.

Entries in azure (3)

Wednesday
Jun232010

Honored by the Windows Azure Partner Award of 2010

Today, Lokad has been announced as the Windows Azure Platform Partner of Year by Microsoft. This year, Lokad has been chosen among the nearly 3000 entrants worldwide for those awards.

This award recognizes Lokad for demonstrating innovation, competitive differentiation and customer value by using Windows Azure. The Microsoft Partner Awards recognize partners that have delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions over the last year.

The Lokad team is extremely proud of achieving this level of recognition. The last French company to get an equivalent award was Dassault Systèmes, the largest French software company and it was two years ago.

As outlined in our previous post, we have been working hard to really get the most of Windows Azure. We did not just port an existing technology toward the cloud, but we did re-design from scratch a cloud-native architecture.

Our ambition is to deliver the most accurate and most scalable forecasts of the market. Windows Azure has already demultiplied our efforts and the results we bring to our clients on a daily basis, but that's only the start. We firmly intend to keep up with the hard work to unleash all Windows Azure potential for the next generation of business analytics.

Friday
Jun112010

Designed for large scale forecasting with Windows Azure

Lokad is a proud user of Windows Azure, the cloud computing plateform of Microsoft. Our forecasting technology would be nowhere as scalable and accurate without Azure.

Cloud computing opens tremendous opportunities as far reliability, security, performance and costs are concerned. Yet, to get the most out of the cloud, apps have to be natively designed for the cloud. Our current cloudy architecture is drawn below.

Our migration toward Azure costed us about 1 year of efforts that spread from late 2008 to early 2010 (which was still pretty fast considering the tremendous challenge it represented to redesign the architecture from scratch).

Best patterns and practices for entreprise apps in the cloud are still a very nascent area. At Lokad, we want to share our experience and get feedback from the community.

Although Lokad is not an open source company, we release as open source components that we believe to be applicable to other businesses. As a matter of fact, we are supporting multiple open source projects such as:

  • Lokad.Cloud - an O/C mapper for Windows Azure (object to cloud)
  • Lokad.CQRS - Command-Query Responsibility Segregation for Windows Azure.

 Willing to design an enterprise app on the cloud? Make sure you check those two projects.

Monday
Dec142009

Where does Windows Azure folks get their inspiration?

At PDC'09, Microsoft and Lokad unveiled a case study about Windows Azure. Yet, what was our surprise when discovered the following video at the Windows Azure booth (check for video links below).

Once upon a time, there was a little company with little funds, but great ambitions.

Data Analytics with Windows Azure

The little company wanted to process truckload of historical data. Yet, it could not afford buying tons of computing stuff.

Import and export data in Windows Azure

Yet, through Windows Azure, the little company was suddently able to process truckload of data, and to output truckload of forecasts too. 

Feed IT systems with Windows Azure

The massive amount of forecasts would then flow into the IT systems of large retailers to optimize their companies.

The little company produced lots of profits, and its employees lived happily ever after. THE END