Strategy
The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do.
This page describes in high-overview our strategy and the common threads that guide us in the strategic decisions that we will take along our journey. This page will be divided in the following five sections:
SWOT
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and a SWOT analysis is therefore a technique for assessing these four aspects of a business. We have done the exercise for Astrafy and hereafter are the results:
Core Business
Our core business is well defined in our stack webpages and we have put a lot of efforts detailing those core activities as we want to stick to those and not be sidetracked. We are experts in the journey of data and automating the flow of data from source to activation of this data. In that expertise we have a well defined stack and are always open to broaden it with new tools. Aside from our expertise we will always offer our services if activities not related to our core business come in support for the good realization of the project (for instance setting up a shared vpc that will then serve for you data ecosystem) but we will not carry out dedicated projects in areas that are not in our core expertise. This clear line ensures we get recognized for our proficiency on the following expertise:
Data Engineering
Business Intelligence
Data Science
DevOps/DataOps/MLOps
Data Governance
Google Cloud
A second pillar of our core business lies in education for which we are passionate about. Most of the co-founders have been teaching assistant at some point in their lives and have always cared about sharing their knowledge with peers or students. We also see education as a natural business unit aside of our professional services offering. It can be summarized as "we teach in a pedagogical manner everything we are experts at". Within this education core offering, we have a vision to revolutionize Data Analytics education via a dedicated bootcamp in a developing country in Africa. This goes hands in hands with our willingness to expand as well on this continent. Goal of this bootcamp is to shape the best data leaders of tomorrow without any barriers to entry.
Partnerships
Our business relies on:
using top-notch technologies and implementing those at customers - Professional services business unit
educating students and employees on those same top-notch technologies - education business unit
We therefore have a strong dependencies and affinity with the technologies we rely on for our stack. For this reason we have a strategy to tie strong partnerships with those technology providers. The list of those partnerships can be appreciated on our "partnerships" webpage. Being partner brings a lot of key benefits that allow us to excel in our two business units:
First in line for new releases and private access to new features
Opportunity to be a speaker at key event
Two ways collaboration with pull request from Astrafy on features we see as relevant
Support for our education value proposal
Market expansion
We started naturally in Switzerland where we all meet each other but all except one of the four co-founders are native from different countries. Belgium, Italy, Morocco and Switzerland defines our geographical DNA. We have ambitions to expand in Belgium and Italy in the short-term/mid-term as well as in Morocco and DRC where some of us have relatives and business contacts that could jump-start our business on that emerging continent.
We see our expansion as follows:
Europe:
Switzerland - Headquarter
Belgium - Q4 2022
Italy - Q4 2023
Africa:
Morocco - H1 2023
Kinshasa - H1 2024
Key differentiators
We strive to differentiate ourselves with the following key points
Focus on a clear stack
Full value chain of data --- from ingestion to activation of data
Very strong company culture with open-source at its core
Strong emphasis on design before implementation
Education offering as one of our main business unit
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