Apteco User Group Conference November 2018

As always an excellent event run by Apteco.

We were at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, which was full of both Apteco partners and customers – it’s hard to believe that are that many of us! 50% Marketers and 50% Techies…but both audiences are catered for.

Any partners or customers out there that haven’t attended one of these yet I strongly urge you to make sure that next year’s is in your diary.

The event is extremely well organised, and as users it’s the first place we find out about what’s coming up in the development roadmap. I’m both a FastStats developer and an analytical user so my only problem is choosing which 2 of the 5 workshop streams to attend. This year I went for the Designer track where we learnt about the new Credentials Manager, which will eventually make all data connections easier to set-up and manage. Also covered was developments in the build process, further reducing build times. Another exciting development is system deployment using Docker Containers – making systems very portable and further reducing costs.

At TAP we are always looking for ways to improve on the (already excellent) software we support. With Adobe, for instance, our technical consultants have created a plethora of advanced features and extensions, for FastStats this has been more problematical because of the ‘closed’ nature of the platform. In my second workshop I learnt how this is all about to change with the release of the FastStats API. Apteco gave some great examples using R and Python of how this could be used. I can already see how we can help our clients further optimise their campaign performance by combining the power and throughput that FastStats provides with some of the advanced modelling we use in R.

As a partner we are able to bring our clients to the event and their feedback on the other workshops was as equally positive.

Workshops aside, the keynote presentations were excellent and at the start of the day we even learned the Haka as an icebreaker – this will come in useful the next time I play Klask (as I’m basically rubbish and intimidating my opponent is probably my only chance of winning).

Of particular note was the presentation by Tom Eburn of Data HQ and how they are re-energising Postal communications by the intelligent use of FastStats. Giving a good illustration of how versatile FastStats is for complex predictive analysis – something we use a lot for other channels.

The day was concluded with a very motivational presentation and an amazing demonstration of mind reading skills by David Meade https://www.davidmeade.co.uk, which has given me a really good idea for what to do on our next TAP on Tour (our legendary company away day). 

Oh, and on our way out the good people at Apteco gave us all reusable coffee cups. Last year was a reusable water bottle – Apteco is clearly committed to the environment.

The only sad bit about this was that only the day before I had received my TAP reusable coffee cup (we are equally committed) and now I have 2…so happy to donate one to a reader of this that is looking to do their bit.

Contact Darron, if you’re interested in his spare cup!

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