Family-run data company from Hayling Island takes top spot at the first Innovation Awards

Datavault won the Digital Innovation of the Year category at the awards, which were held at The Village Hotel in Portsmouth for the first time last week.

The event, organised by The News and its owner JPIMedia, saw more than 140 people attend for a showcase of innovation, and to see who had taken the honours as the best businesses in this area.

The Digital Innovation of the Year, sponsored by Azets, was a hotly-contested category, however the judges felt that Datavault, a boutique IT consultancy, were head and shoulders above the other entries.

Its systems help corporate clients improve their use of data and analytics.

In fact, the judges were so impressed by its innovative work, that they also handed them the biggest honour of the night and named them Innovative Business of the Year.

This category, sponsored by GetSet Solent, was made up from all the winners of the nine categories – and was deemed the most prestigious accolade.

Sam Cole, from the firm, said they were shocked and proud to be honoured.

She said: ‘Thank you, we are a small firm in Hayling Island. We specialise in building data warehouses.

‘Most of our staff have joined us in the last few years and we have grown our revenue by 150 per cent in that short time.

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‘We are pretty proud of our system. It is helping large companies in America, Australia and all over the world. Thank you for the recognition.’

The judges had been wowed by Datavault’s submission after hearing about the growing important new data sources for businesses.

This growing demand has seen many corporations undertake digital transformation projects so they can use data to improve their business processes and customer experiences.

Many have found that traditional tools and ways of working with data are increasingly unfit for purpose which led to the creation of Datavault, an innovative tool that breaks through many of the existing constraints by embracing agile software development practices.

Developed over a couple of years, it was originally developed by a team of young graduate data engineers and software engineers for in-house purposes.

But from there, it was clear to see how useful it would be to others and it was made available on a free to use open source basis.

The judges praises its ability to automatically extract information from different business systems and load data into data platforms, which then allow analysts to perform analytics and gain new insights from their data.