A view on data

In 2021, a small, dedicated team within Label A was formed that brought together experience in the data analytics market, data science and engineering skills and a relentless drive to solve real problems. They set out on a quest to understand what challenges organisations were facing on a daily basis, that were truly hurting their data innovation and that were not being solved yet.

Eyk is that teams attempt to solve the problem they identified.

This document describes our motivation, what we have identified as data problems and how we intend to solve them.

The modern data analytics challenge

Data, or the logging of facts, has been with us since the first words were written down by humans and if you include images even earlier.

After computerised databases came up in the 1960’s and relational databases enabled us to query databases in the 1970’s, SQL became the standard language to query databases in the 1980’s. Then, the rise of the internet in the 1990’s allowed for server client setups which boosted demand for databases significantly. 

Today, leveraging data is on the priority list in every organisation. The main goal often being to drive business value from data that is living in applications and systems.

For data teams to be able to reach that goal, the current data technology stack is roughly divided into four categories; Extract, Load, Transform & Use

In the data ‘Use’ category we find business intelligence and visualisation tools, as well as an increasing amount of (low code) machine learning applications. Data usage is closely tied to business operations and the required skills to leverage the available tools in this category include business sensitivity, analytical thinking and storytelling. 

The valuable use of data is heavily dependent on the three preceding categories and this is where the challenge for the modern analytics professional comes in.

Technologies that can be leveraged in the Extract, Load and Transform categories require a completely different set of skills then the Use category. Think of coding in Python, writing queries in SQL and database management experience.

Most modern data professionals do not possess, nor should want to possess these skills. So they end up not leveraging data engineering technologies but instead spending way too much time creating a manual data flow with tools and architecture that is simply not made for this. The result is that their time and skillset are not being used to create maximum value for the business.

One way to fix this is to simply hire more data professionals so they can spread the workload and still deliver the expected business value. But building a larger data team brings along its own problems for most organisations, including increased costs, the war on talent and additional data topics like security and governance that do not correspond with the organisation's data maturity.

The data engineering challenge described here prevents many organisations from driving true value from their data and being able to innovate and scale their data initiatives.‍

Why we built Eyk

We believe driving value from data does not only have to be for large enterprises with extensive data teams. We believe every organisation can leverage technological innovations, take care of its data and drive value from its data. 

In order to do this, many organisations, especially medium enterprises, will have to overcome the data engineering challenge and shift their focus from quick, flashy dashboard output, to fixing their data fundamentals.  

And that is why we built Eyk. 

It is our mission to empower all organisations to solve their data engineering challenges, take control of their data and drive recurring and scalable value from it. Now and in the future.

What is Eyk?

Eyk is like setting up your own team of data architects and engineers, but wrapped up in a powerful platform. During the creation of Eyk, we combined our experience in data engineering, data science and business with the best open-source frameworks in the world. This resulted in a data platform that gives organisations the power to utilise their data and unlock their way into data innovation.

If in the future your company has grown and you are capable of building your own dedicated team of data architects and -engineers, Eyk enables you to take over full control of your platform. Eyk will give you the tools to make your own connections and build your own models.

Eyk connects your cloud applications and let's you schedule the data replication. It sets up a cloud data warehouse with your provider of choice, then manages and optimises it, so you can store and curate all your data for today's business challenges and future innovations.

On top of that, the Eyk data platform also transforms your data through pre-built data models and even joins different sources to each other if you want, so you can easily make the connections you need between different data points. This gives you the ability to relate your accounting data to your customer data and combine it into one trusted marketing funnel.

At Eyk, we like to compare data to an oak (Dutch: Eik) tree. It’s beautiful, powerful and will last for centuries. It blossoms and gives back to the earth, as long as it’s cared for. That’s how we feel about data. When you take care of it, it will blossom and give back to you and your business.

With Eyk, all organisations, regardless of engineering resources and skills, are able to set up a data platform, develop a data culture and innovate with their data.‍

The time of waiting is over

Take action

Drive value

Blossom

Innovate

Eyk.