What's in a name?

Visual Data Group just passed our ten year anniversary. We started small, grew, 'resized', and are growing again. More importantly we have matured as an organization. Not matured as in old and stiff, but matured in our capabilities, confidence, and in what we offer to our customers. We are fortunate to have a loyal group of customers and I am fortunate that everyone here concentrates on delivering value to the customer.

The first 10 years were focused on business intelligence, data visualizations, and analytics. Working with our customers, common threads always appear. Customers would ask for help with data acquisition, or sales analysis, or product and customer profitability, or operational efficiency, or inventory analysis, or ... Each customer's hot spot may have been different at the beginning, but over time and by working with them, it would become apparent that what many companies lacked was a broad organizational planning processes.

These are all well run and successful companies, but it is hard to work on running the business and planning the business at tactical and strategic levels all at the same time. And, as more and more data is exposed and shared, opportunities present themselves.

I may expand on the planning process in future articles, but by now you are surely asking, "What does all this have to do with the title 'What's in a name'?" With the 10 year anniversary, it is time to look to the next 10 years and what we should be focusing on. How can we truly deliver value to our customers. 

In the months ahead, Visual Data Group will be implementing important changes and additions to our products and services. These changes are additive. We will continue to work with our current customers and product partners as we always have. The additions will let us focus on a broader set of problems, and offer a broader set of solutions. We have created strategic partnerships with a leading inventory planning and optimization platform, a powerful and elegantly simple analytics platform and a very robust data acquisition and manipulation platform.

Our name, Visual Data Group, has served us well, but it is not representative of what we are becoming. Some may argue that it never really was - we always did more that just visualize data. Our company and people will remain the same. The corporate structure and ownership will stay the same. 

This is a busy time for us, but don't worry, customers always come first, no matter what we are called.