Lokad Announces Cloud-based Sales Forecasting for the Retail Industry, hosted on Windows Azure

Today Lokad announced Salescast, a web application for sales forecasting hosted on Windows Azure, at National Retail Federation's 100th Annual Exposition and Conference.

To meet the sales forecasting challenge in the retail industry, Lokad delivers forecasting as a cloud-based, on-demand service that requires little or no manpower on the retailer side. Because it is pay-per-use and delivered by the cloud, the Salescast service can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively to speed time to value and it delivers the most accurate forecasts in the retail industry in minutes rather than months. Without the cloud computing capabilities of Windows Azure, Lokad was not able to scale its forecasting service and could only serve small midmarket retailers. Windows Azure enables Lokad to deliver much more accurate forecasts at a much larger scale.

“Classically, forecasting a large number of product sales requires manually building and tweaking a model for every single reference – a laborious process that would require larger retailers to hire a dozen statisticians to complete the job,” said Joannes Vermorel, CEO, Lokad. “At Lokad, we leverage the unprecedented processing capabilities offered by Windows Azure in order to automate the whole forecasting process, assessing the best forecasting model for every product and establishing correlations between products. The results are more accurate forecasts, delivered within 60 minutes instead of months, and at a cost that simply doesn’t compare to classical solutions.”

More information about Lokad’s Salescast application is available here. To learn more about Lokad’s experience with Windows Azure, check out the Microsoft case study.