AE Stories

Our Analytics foyer took place last Tuesday. At this festive end-of-year edition, we’ve proudly welcomed 79 attendees to conclude 2018 together. It became an interesting afternoon and evening during which the public was introduced to several customer cases and the potential of Artificial Intelligence. Our take home message? Analytics turns data into useful insights that take your business to a higher level.

Innovation … A word used and misused so often that we can safely speak of a cliché. We hear and read success stories on Twitter and LinkedIn, and various hip events around innovation compete for the most attention. At the same time, we also hear stories from behind the scenes of companies that want to innovate. And those stories turn out to be a lot less rosy than is sometimes portrayed. To separate facts from fiction around the theme of innovation, we started talking to a number of companies about their challenges. We spoke to people from 14 organisations, spread across 5 sectors, and were able to test 10 assumptions.

In-memory columnstore databases are all the rage nowadays. But did you know SQL Server already used them back in 2012? The release of SQL Server 2012 introduced columnstoreindexes to the SQL Server database engine for the first time ever. Borrowing technology from the Power Pivot engine (now found in Power BI), these indexes drastically improve the performance of large analytical queries – exactly the kind of queries used in data warehouses.

At AE Financial Services we try to keep up with the various trends in our rapid changing landscape. Looking back at the various conferences which we attended in the last few months, it appears that the search for authenticity and human relevance in this digital world remains top on the agenda.

Seth Godin, one of the speakers at Supernova at the end of September, was probably the one who best summarized this quest for a human connection in his presentation in a few striking quotes:

The world we live in today is highly competitive. Competitors lurk around every corner, customers become increasingly demanding and new technologies are able to devour your existing business model. Knowledge, and - even more importantly - sharing it, are essential in such times. Organisations and people who learn faster and more efficiently take the pole position.

Equally within AE the acquisition and sharing of knowledge is important. There are several different ways to do this. In this blog post, we introduce you into how we creatively tackled this in our financial service community via an in-house crypto competition.