As the Government continues its efforts in pushing Malta to be a digital hub in the heart of the Mediterranean, both public and private investment in the tech industry helps to achieve this goal.

This series catches up with the island’s foremost tech and digital entrepreneurs to understand what they do, and what the future holds.

(Standing, left to right) Kristian Zarb Adami, Edward Borg, Angelo Dalli, Johan Zammit & Gege Gatt / (Seated, left to right) Brian Zarb Adami, Simon Azzopardi & Stefan Farrugia

Those pictured form part of the 'Changing the tech game' series / Picture taken by Bernard Polidano

About yourself, your company and your greatest professional accomplishment to date…

For almost 20 years I have championed business intelligence services to customers. Data is my life’s passion and I have made it my mission to assist customers and organisations become data-driven. It gives me great satisfaction to help customers monitor their objectives and constantly re-engineer their processes to transform their businesses.

Eunoia was born out of that concept. Already fulfilling and supporting organisations in a number of verticals, we created a focused data analytics company which provides industry-focused business intelligence solutions. As a cloud-first company, we build solutions that deliver scale and speed, ensuring optimal ROI through highly engineered orchestration, paying only for the value consumed.

Today many of the platforms we use are commoditised as platforms which are consumed as a service. The partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks and Panorama Software gives us the flexibility to deliver these solutions, putting us in a position to deliver insights at the right time, to the right people, thereby helping our customers take decisions faster and supported by facts and figures. The journey has led us to build business intelligence products, specifically CFOUR which has been released as a software as a service, and is available on the Microsoft marketplace.

CFOUR is a financial consolidation tool targeting multi-group organisations, enabling them to generate their management accounts and financial consolidation reporting, whilst monitoring their financial performance.

Moreover, our operational business intelligence product shares a common data model which is used by hundreds of users daily, providing right on time and highly visual insights and placing our users in a better position to manage and improve business performance. Bringing this value to CFOUR enables new potential combining financial and operational reporting, exposing insights that would otherwise be hidden to the business.

Our objective is to actively empower our users to look for potential risks and opportunities, and increase the automation and correctness of these processes. The discussion on the use of machine learning and predictive analytics has long started, but it all boils down to how good the ground data is. Therefore, we apply rigorous cleansing methodologies to ensure the veracity of the base data to deliver on the promise of predicting outcomes.

What are the latest developments in your sector?

I believe that the drive towards cloud and the further need for data and analytics solutions have been more enhanced in the latest months and it is evident that, we as businesses, need to continuously monitor and measure to be able to react more efficiently to adverse situations, as we have seen with COVID-19.

The ability to access enterprise-grade platforms for the fraction of use required, has created an exciting opportunity for the size of the local ecosystem which can further deliver value and exciting new realities and insights to what was affordable in terms of ROI until recently.

Using these platforms to combine our operational business intelligence with CFOUR will create a 360 view from a financial to an operational level. We are extremely excited about this new development which will continue to bring value to our customers.

What developments do you foresee for Malta to become a digital island?

Entrepreneurs in the digital and tech sphere have made incredible strides to build new ventures which make Malta more attractive, innately creating new high-value job opportunities. I hope that further funding structures and ecosystems are created, both through European aid for innovation as well as venture and seed funding opportunities. These will be the catalyst of the future of the local tech industry and will enable faster offshore growth.

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with Malta’s leading tech entrepreneurs.

Read the first, with IO-Labs CEO Kristian Zarb Adami, here. Or check out the second, with Thought3D Co-Founder Edward Borg, here.

The third, an interview with Silicon Valletta President Simon Azzopardi, can be found here. And the fourth, with EBO.ai CEO Gege Gatt, can be read here.

You can read the fifth interview, with CyberSift CEO Brian Zarb Adami, here.

The sixth interview, with the founder and CEO of Smart Studios, Johan Zammit, here.

This feature was first carried in the 2021 edition of Digital Island.