A frog in a data lake
Hollie Whittles founded Purple Frog Systems with her husband Alex in 2006 having worked in the corporate world and discovering that there was a gap in the data analytics space. Purple Frog Systems now employs more than 20 people and boasts clients from banks and High Street retailers.
“Every organisation has data but it’s surprising how many companies just don’t know the value in the data they have,” Hollie said. “Some clients say to us that their data is amazing but often it needs to be cleaned – to remove human errors – so that it doesn’t generate bloated reports that are of no use either to informing strategy or telling the company about their business.
“What we find is that many systems within a company don’t talk to each other; an accounting spreadsheet over here does not integrate with an HR database. We put all that data into a warehouse, a data lake and we put reporting over the top of it create visual dashboards which are easily used and understood by leaders. We then apply things like machine learning to predict patterns and help our clients to make better data-driven decisions.”
Some Purple Frog clients enlist Hollie and Alex to manage a service for them, others bring them in to set up the infrastructure so they can run it themselves.
Married to each other (and the business)
“I guess you could say we’ve got data on the brain,” Hollie said. “I’m always thinking about it, but my role is more about the people. Alex is more tech and architecture, but we bring the right mix to the table, just not the dinner table as it’s important to separate our personal lives and the office. And managing people in an office was never really part of the plan, it just kind of evolved and we really love it. I’ve gone full circle, from a corporate role to just me, the cat and Alex to now employing 22 people at Purple Frog. Seeing them develop and grow along with the business is really special. As we started to grow and recruit more people, we knew we needed some additional help.”
“I am excited about the future potential of the data analytics industry,” Alex added. “There will be a further upswing in the use of machine learning systems across various industry sectors, it’s therefore imperative that we can scale our business as effectively as possible to cope with growing demand. We were grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the Natwest Business Accelerator.”
