The Lokad Business Model

I wanted to expand on the idea of forecasting software for business and the Lokad model mentioned in my previous post. I like the idea of uploading data through a web interface, get your forecasts and in the processes optimizing your business- see http://www.lokad.com/ . There is a lot information that can be gleam from the site with respect to pricing and subscription models. Furthermore, they talk about the forecasting technology they use and being a econometrician with univariate and multivariate time series expertise, I can see plenty of opportunities to expand simple Box-Jenkins models they use into elaborate stochastic volatility models, neural network designs, decompositions with wavelets and integrative co-integration models.

Along this train of thought, it would be nice to have these models available as a web service that graduate students from other disciplines can subscribe to without have the necessary expertise to build the model, just use it. Lokad uses
SourceForge.NET, http://sourceforge.net/projects/lokad/ , to provide open-source integration into 3rd party application. Of course, we are not limited to just temporal dimensions, but spatial models as well for fMRI and EEG.

I want to point out that they also have a sandbox development server so researchers can develop software products using their forecasting technology. Finally, their customer support section has executive summaries, documentation, questions and answers, and support only products. I think that any company that wants to use the web services subscription business model can benefit from the replication of these ideas and content contained on their web site.