Interview with Loqate, best software-as-a-service provider, Computing Technology Product Awards

Computing catches up with Loqate, winners of a host of big awards in 2018

Loqate won best software-as-a-service provider at the Computing Technology Product awards earlier this year.

Stuart Nash, Global Data Expert at Loqate, also won the Tech Hero award at the same event, and to top things off, the firm also won Development Team of the Year a Computing's Digital Technology Leaders Awards.

Computing caught up with Paul Flew, CTO of Loqate, to discuss the latest win, and what it means to his firm.

Computing: What did you think of the awards event itself?

Paul Flew: We've supported the Computing Awards for many years now and have always been thoroughly impressed with the process. We also won the ‘Development Team of the Year' award in the Digital Technology Leaders Awards earlier in the year. For anyone working in technology, the Computing Awards are the highlight of the events calendar.

CTG: How did you feel when you heard that your entry had won?

PF: We were over the moon to receive these awards, in what were both two highly competitive categories. 2018 has been a fantastic year for the business, what with our brand unification at the start of the year and our continued global expansion, but this has really been the icing on the cake for us. It's great to see that all of our hard work has been so well received and recognised publically in these prestigious awards.

CTG: What do you think made your entry stand out?

PF: Loqate has recently combined the best technologies, capabilities, data and customer services of five brands into one global solution. This makes Loqate the world's most-trusted data specialist in location intelligence.

While many of you reading this may not have heard of Loqate, you will have undoubtedly used our technology before, as we provide the software which powers thousands of customers worldwide. Some of our clients include ASOS, Cancer Research and Dow Jones who all use our address capture technology to improve UX online and enhance data quality.

At Loqate, we're passionate about User Experience and making life simpler for our customers. Developing the highest quality product possible and providing customers with the best advice for implementation is our bread and butter.

Unlike other address capture tools, Loqate's technology enables users to enter a fragment of their address to return the full and validated address. Similar to predictive typing in search engines, Loqate's technology works in real time to update the list of suggested addresses with each keystroke. Fuzzy matching ensures that only accurate international address data is captured at the point of entry.

CTG: What does the win mean for your team, and your organisation? How will it help you?

PF: While the awards are a fantastic achievement for us, we're not the type of company to rest on our laurels. We are continuously developing our technology to strengthen what we offer to our customers and have some really exciting product announcements next year.

CTG: What does the future hold for your organisation, what are the priorities for 2019?

PF: We are extremely excited about the future here at Loqate as we have some great new innovations taking place in 2019, which we think our customers will find really interesting. Stuart Nash, Global Data Expert at Loqate, and winner of the Tech Hero award, is continuing his work leading Loqate's data engineers to allow GBG to become owners of the best worldwide location intelligence datasets possible.

We're scaling our platforms to deal with the increased demand that we're seeing now and predicting in the future, using the latest technologies and approaches to keep pace with the deployment and usage scenarios that our customers expect. Finally, we're investing in machine learning and other techniques to both improve the variety of scenarios our software can handle and how quickly we can react to changing customer needs.