Sometimes we use the blog for shameless promotion, but often I like to talk about people who have been important to Middlegame. We call these our “heroes” entries. Earlier this year, we had a soft launch of our cloud-based simulator studio software . It leverages an integrated stack of primarily SQL and Python to process the data as well as some incredible HTML to provide the user interface.
An incredibly gifted data scientist and outstanding programmer named Alejandro Tobón Gonzalez took the original Middlegame software that was created in SAS and translated it into the cloud-based stack. He was a distinguish professor teaching data science at Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería ‘Julio Garavito’ in Bogotá. Alejandro streamlined the process and gave us the ability to generate scenarios about five times as fast as we were before he started implementing his far more efficient ways to code the SQL joins. I am always looking for better data structures and he taught me a lot.
All the HTML is written by Kike Vesga who Alejandro introduced to me. I was later delighted to find out the Kike and Alejandro were best friends since they were 8 years old. Sadly, there is a reason why I used the past tense when I described my interaction with Alejandro. Late last year, he was killed in a horrible accident while riding his bicycle. Kike was the one who was forced to break the news to me.
Kike did an incredible job of flawlessly taking the entire system out of Alejandro’s development environment and into production mode. It is amazing how Kike stepped somewhat outside of his technology comfort zone to join us on the analytics side, and I am forever grateful. However, the whole system would never have existed if it wasn’t for Alejandro. Therefore, when you see the Middlegame ATG Simulator Studio and wonder why it is called “ATG,” it is an ongoing tribute to one of our heroes … Alejandro Tobón Gonzalez (ATG). He is incredibly missed by the whole Middlegame family.
Middlegame is the only ROMI consultancy of its kind that offers a holistic view of the implications of resource allocation and investment in the marketplace. Our approach to scenario-planning differs from other marketing analytics providers by addressing the anticipated outcome for every SKU (your portfolio and your competitors’) in every channel. Similar to the pieces in chess, each stakeholder can now evaluate the trade-offs of potential choices and collectively apply them to create win-win results.