DATPROF, the origin

Before 2010, DATPROF was an unnamed part of ITCG, a consultancy company. This consultancy company was specialized in data warehousing. To carry out these consultancy project properly a toolset was developed. This proprietary software was only used by ITCG for the execution of projects, but it was also increasingly left behind with the customer. More and more attention was paid to the further development of this toolset and it proved difficult to run a company that does two different things: consultancy and software development. Two business models can get in each other’s way: different goals, different type of organization. Too many compromises led to the decision to set up DATPROF independently.

The origin of DATPROF Subset

The challenge that often occurred with data warehousing was to provide usable test data within the project for the data warehousing project. For such a solution you want to integrate different data sources, large databases with a lot of data. You actually need small subsets from those large production databases for practical reasons in order to test your data warehouse; you can test quickly with small sets. We thought of what we do could do ourselves to solve that problem of our customers. That’s where the DATPROF Subset solution came in. That product also turned out to be very good on its own; create small test sets for all kinds of purposes – not just data warehousing.

We figured out how to generically solve the subset problem: 1) how to smartly pull a subset from a standalone database. Data must remain logically connected and be functionally complete, and 2) if you have a chain of systems in production that have mutual connections, you also want that in your test environment. If you are going to subset multiple systems, you want to extract data from all those systems that have the same mutual relationships that they also have in a production situation. That solution did not exist yet,?so we built it ourselves. And we protected this idea; we applied for and got patent on the part of the selection mechanism; go through the data model in a smart and efficient way and extract that data in such a way that you can make very targeted test sets containing complete and meaningful data.

The origin of DATPROF Privacy

We were not very commercial, we were mainly concerned with consultancy/service/projects. DATPROF Subset was introduced to existing customers and that quickly led to the next problem: test sets containing personal data. At that time, the legislation was not as strict as it is now, but our customers wanted to deal with it as neatly as possible. They were missing an anonymization function.?So we built it. The first serious version of Subset had the built-in ability to anonymize data on the fly. The first customer was very happy with that, but the second customer had their own solution for making test sets, so they only wanted to anonymize. No interest in subsetting. Then we decided to put the solutions separately. At that moment, when the 2nd product (DATPROF Privacy) came into existence, the feeling came that we were starting a new business. The products we made were able to serve a much broader purpose than just the problems we saw at customers/projects. We were able to help many more teams/organizations, not only in the field of data warehousing.

The growth of DATPROF

DATPROF evolved, we developed more products so we also had to increase our production capacity; more people, more clout, more knowledge in-house. Professionalism grew. We learned how to grow as a company. The concept itself has not changed, the essence is still to help customers with their (test) data challenges. In the meantime, more and more functionalities are built in into the software. Originated from the needs of the customer, but also continuously adapted to the?changing?needs of the customer and the changing landscape. We believe that if you deliver products, you also have to ensure that you stay up to date. So that’s what we do.