Frequently asked questions.

The Data Company is a UK and South Africa data and AI consultancy that turns complex information into working systems, clearer decisions and capability organisations can own. The practice spans data engineering, analytics, AI, FORGE orchestration and business application development, delivered by senior people who work alongside client teams rather than behind a separate delivery queue.

The Data Company operates as one connected practice across the United Kingdom and South Africa, with offices in London in the UK and Johannesburg in South Africa. Work moves between people based on capability and context rather than geography, so customers get local partnership alongside scalable engineering depth.

The Data Company's leadership brings more than 100 years of combined experience across entrepreneurship, engineering, finance, transformation and compliance. Experienced practitioners stay senior from day one, working close to decisions and delivery rather than behind translation layers, which keeps momentum high and reduces the risk of requirements getting lost between teams.

The Data Company's leadership team includes Kali Bagary (Chairman), Aju Alexander (Chief Executive Officer), Jas Bagary (Chief Financial Officer), Paul Henderson (Chief Operating Officer), Jags Dhillon (CRO / Data Practice), Wesley Pirie (Chief Technology Officer) and David Elliott (Head of Compliance), bringing different disciplines together around one shared delivery standard.

Yes. The Young Minds Programme is a six-week academy that gives graduates practical experience, structured support and the opportunity to build a working MVP, with the strongest participants able to continue their development as part of the team. The Data Company also donates technology expertise and time to Cancer Central, helping people affected by cancer find relevant local support more easily.

The Data Company delivers six connected services: Forward Deployed Engineers, Data Analytics, Data Engineering, Cloud Platforms & DevOps, Business App Development and Solution Architecture. These are built on a technology stack spanning our own FORGE orchestration platform, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Claude and DataWalk. Each service stands on its own, and each one connects to the same delivery team, so wherever a business starts, the rest of the system is already there.

The Data Company works most closely with insurance, financial services, construction and healthcare and life sciences organisations, alongside data-intensive businesses more broadly. Partnerships with other service providers extend delivery into FinTech and other sectors too. Across every industry, the focus stays the same: connecting fragmented information into trusted, governed products that support faster, better decisions.

Alongside its six core services, The Data Company connects to broader software capability including custom software development, web and mobile application development, UX/UI and product design, legacy application modernisation, cloud-native development, containers and orchestration, infrastructure as code, observability, business analysis, delivery management, quality assurance and ongoing software support. These sit alongside the core practice rather than replacing it.

An FDE works alongside business and technical teams in day-to-day operations rather than behind a remote ticket queue. Using Claude, they prototype, automate and deploy solutions shaped around your data, systems and ways of working—delivering value in weeks rather than months.

Forward Deployed Engineers focus on claims triage and investigation, natural-language reporting over Corporate Data Platforms such as Databricks and DataWalk, document and contract intelligence, and multi-step process automation. Generative AI is applied to practical problem-solving, decision support and process automation inside the systems a business already runs, rather than treated as a disconnected experiment.

Claude can reason over complex unstructured business data, orchestrate multi-step agentic workflows and safely use tools to take action. It adds a conversational, agentic layer to Corporate Data Platforms such as Databricks and DataWalk while retaining enterprise safety, governance and control, letting teams automate real decisions rather than just generate text.

Production-focused. The Data Company applies generative AI to practical problem-solving, document intelligence, decision support and process automation rather than treating AI as a disconnected experiment. Claude is layered onto governed data platforms with enterprise safety and control retained, so agentic workflows can be trusted with real business decisions rather than left as prototypes.

Delivery moves through three stages: a discovery sprint identifies the highest-value problems and shapes a clear, bounded plan; an embedded build phase works alongside the client team to build, test and iterate in short cycles; and handover and enablement trains the team and transfers documentation and ownership, so the capability stays with the business after the engagement ends.

Data engineering covers pipelines, integrations and governed data products that connect fragmented sources into a dependable flow for analytics, applications and AI. This includes data integration across systems, databases and platforms, real-time and IoT event processing, and cloud platform and DevOps work across Azure, AWS, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, with quality, observability, security and ownership built in throughout.

Well-organised and transformed data enables better decisions. We structure data around your requirements by identifying key entities, defining relationships and modelling the business processes that matter. We automate extraction, transformation and loading into your chosen data lake or warehouse, using technologies including Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and AWS.

Data engineering builds the pipelines, integrations and governed data products that connect fragmented sources into one dependable flow. Data analytics then works on top of that foundation, analysing data in depth to identify patterns, trends and relationships, and delivering dashboards, self-service reporting, predictive models and responsible AI that turn raw data into clear, actionable insight.

Yes. Scalable streaming and event-processing solutions ingest and combine data from connected devices, sensors and event-driven systems as it is generated. This can monitor equipment, track assets, detect anomalies and power live alerts and dashboards, giving operational teams immediate visibility and the ability to automate a response rather than reviewing information after the fact.

FORGE is The Data Company's data orchestration platform. It moves, transforms and manages data across enterprise ecosystems through durable, stateful workflows called Blueprints, executed by containerised Runners deployed either as a managed cloud service or inside a customer's own infrastructure for data sovereignty and control.

DataWalk is an investigation and fraud-detection platform that The Data Company implements for clients, using AI and machine learning to reveal activities and connections across diverse data sources. It supports fast, interactive visual analysis for complex and collaborative investigations.

Yes. As a certified Databricks partner, The Data Company brings data engineering, analytics and machine learning into one secure, governed and collaborative lakehouse platform. This covers streamlined collaborative workflows, scalable cloud analytics, AI-powered insight and enterprise security and governance, supported by training, consultation and ongoing expert support tailored to each organisation's priorities.

Agentic AI is built into our software development life cycle: Claude drafts and refactors code, writes and runs tests, and prepares changes for review, while our engineers direct the work, review every change and own the architecture. It replaces lengthy up-front specifications with a short mini-plan, iterative build sprints and regular playbacks, using microservice architecture and Corporate Data Platforms to configure new applications quickly.

Engagements start small enough to learn: a focused mini-plan aligns the people, information, technology and measures needed to prove the opportunity, followed by a bounded working slice that demonstrates real value. Regular playbacks replace status theatre with something stakeholders can test and challenge, and architecture, governance and operating ownership are then scaled deliberately around a result that has already proven itself.

Every engagement moves through the same four stages. Shape identifies the real business question and the most valuable starting point. Build works in short cycles as one multidisciplinary team. Prove demonstrates working capability early and measures the result. Transfer hands over knowledge, documentation, controls and ownership, so the way the practice engages is never a mystery and the handover is never a surprise.

As an embedded team. Senior people work inside a client's delivery rhythm, alongside business, data and technology teams, shaping priorities together and showing progress regularly rather than reporting status from a distance. Specialists contribute their discipline without work being thrown across organisational boundaries, and knowledge, documentation and ownership are transferred throughout the engagement, not only at the end.

Yes. The Data Company is ISO 27001:2022 certified, meaning information security is managed to that international standard across the practice. This sits alongside a broader approach where security, access, auditability and operational controls are treated as part of every data product and platform delivered, not as a final compliance stage added at the end.

FORGE separates orchestration from execution. Its control plane schedules work, manages state and coordinates dependencies, while containerised Forge Runners can be deployed either as a managed cloud service or placed inside a customer's own infrastructure. That means raw data can remain inside the customer environment when sovereignty and network boundaries matter, with persisted execution able to resume from the last confirmed state if infrastructure fails.

Governance is built into delivery rather than added afterwards. On Databricks, enterprise controls apply across the whole platform, and FORGE adds telemetry, auditability and governed access into every workflow it orchestrates. For financial services data products specifically, security, access, auditability and operational controls are treated as part of the product itself, not as a final compliance stage bolted on at the end.

The Data Company builds on Databricks and Microsoft Fabric for data platforms, and Microsoft Azure and AWS for cloud foundations. DataWalk provides graph analytics for investigation and fraud detection, and Claude powers agentic AI and analytics work. FORGE, The Data Company's own platform, handles orchestration and operations across all of these environments.

Application engineering work spans Python, TypeScript, Java, .NET and Go. FORGE's language-agnostic SDKs let teams extend execution in any of these languages, which is what makes the platform suitable for integrations, migrations, data quality, AI enrichment and operational automation without locking every workload into a single runtime.

Databricks is the one formal, certified partnership The Data Company holds today. Microsoft Fabric, Azure, AWS, Claude and DataWalk are all platforms the team builds with regularly, but describe what the practice works with rather than a formal partner status. Data engineering and cloud work is designed and managed across Azure, AWS, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric depending on what a customer already runs.