At JTA we have our sights firmly set on helping clients reach their full potential with bespoke data solutions. To accomplish this we use the principles that have been instilled in JTA since the very beginning. This means we take on every project with innovation, transparency and a commercial focus. Working with JTA gives you more than just data, it gives you cutting-edge insights into your industry.
JTA was founded in London during the last few months of the 20th century. Our founders had careers in commerce and chartered accountancy. They both bought specialisms to our fledgling company; the audit and interrogation of large data processing systems, deep knowledge of market and competitor intelligence, commercial and mathematical backgrounds.
During the early years, JTA concentrated on finance and business strategy, helping companies that had started during the dotcom boom to develop. Our work was mainly with mobile operators who were reshaping their businesses around the new possibilities of mobile data services.
We were awarded a project to build a data warehouse for the World’s largest software company. We are extremely proud to have won that project and we continued the work over the ten-year lifespan of the warehouse.
We started selling new and innovative add-ons to our data warehouses. This really enhanced their value. An early example was to ingest a news feed from The Economist allowing textual data to give context to the numbers.
The company relocated to Portugal. Our clients have always been based all over the World and Portugal is a modern, vibrant country that has a buoyant technology sector and excellent communications. Naturally, the food, weather, landscapes and architectural splendor also helped to convince us.
We introduced reporting engines to extend our data warehouses to facilitate adding executive dashboards and reports. We also started selling technology to monitor how the reporting systems were being used, which allowed us to measure the return on investment (“ROI”) on the costs of data acquisition and curation.
We broke into the market in the USA. Until this time most of our work had come from London and Paris but the balance suddenly changed. The USA is now our largest market.
We were inundated with work to build BI and Data Warehousing solutions. JTA was getting noticed and valued more by our clients. They appreciated our multiskilled resource that can deliver innovative approaches, continuous evolution and turnkey delivery.
We move to larger premises in the centre of Porto and start a recruitment drive. Like many others we were feeling the effects of the financial crash but we took the time to train staff and develop new skills and technology. Although business confidence was not high we concentrated on our core BI and data warehouse clients and were rewarded with steady business.
We take over an important market modelling project for one of our largest clients. By automating the project in R we shaved weeks off the production time and brought new techniques to the project. We also showed how BI solutions can be integrated with modeling to great effect.
Our modeling work is recognised and appreciated and we take over another large contract. This new model requires us to invest in building more powerful smoothing and forecasting techniques which we have used ever since.
To cement our position as a first-class service provider we strengthened our links with Portuguese universities where we are often invited to participate in the debate over the future of data sciences. This connection has been extremely valuable in allowing us access to the brightest new graduates and cutting-edge research.
We are awarded an exciting new project to deploy text matching, market modeling and visualization to radically improve a telesales process for a Fortune 50 company in the USA. Making a difference to the revenue of a company is an exciting and privileged role.
Something interesting is happening in Portugal. According to a study by freelance marketplace PeoplePerHour, Portugal’s capital ranks fourth in a global list of the best places to start a new business, way ahead of stalwarts such as San Francisco and London. In another recent report from Startup Europe Partnership, Portugal’s startup ecosystem is said to be growing twice as fast as the European average.