News and Highlights
Alacra Hack-A-Thon!
In late March, Alacra hosted its first-ever Hack-A-Thon! Our development group was split into three teams, each team was given a project to complete in a little over 24 hours. The projects ranged from a workflow tool connecting buyers of business information (research centers, librarians, information professionals) with requesters/end-users; an overhaul of our popular Alacra Book user interface and an Alacra Store ‘plug-in’ tool for affiliates and partners.
In an incredibly close competition, the team headed by Orly Lipshtat edged out the competition to take "the Cup". Team Lipshtat developed a working prototype of an email request service for end-users and information professionals to request and fulfill premium content needs through Alacra. The service will help end-users to more effectively communicate their precise information needs in an automated and timely fashion. Expect to hear more about this upcoming enhancement in the next quarterly update. Congratulations to Orly and her team! Karl Kaebnick, Rosa Sac-Wilkins, Simon Vileshin, Alex Leytes.
AML Conference
Moneylaundering.com's 12th Annual International Conference and Exhibit held at the Westin Diplomat in Hollywood, Florida took place in March. Alacra was one of 73 vendors who participated in this show geared towards professionals who specialize in various aspects of Compliance including AML, KYC and EDD. This year, we demonstrated the advantages of Alacra Compliance along with our newest module - Alacra Compliance Batch. This Module is a fully automated, secure process that checks up to one million entities per day against premium content sources and regulatory data files. For more info, see the Applications update.
Alacra Employee News
Alacra welcomed several new employees to our global family this quarter and also made several internal promotions.
In March, Ben Gould came on board as an Account Director for the European sales team. Prior to joining Alacra, Ben worked for Equifax as a Major Account Manager, responsible for some of Equifax’s major commercial relationships. Previous to Equifax Ben worked at ICC Business Information and for Datamonitor’s eContent team.
Syed Islam has just joined Alacra as Systems Administrator in New York Operations. Syed previously worked at Volt Information Science as a Network Engineer for over three years. He was responsible for implementing and managing IT infrastructure for the company’s multiple locations. Prior to that, he worked for Wolters Kluwer in a similar role.
Marissa Sefton joined our London operations as Office Manager in January. Marissa will be responsible for administrative duties and providing support to the London sales team. Marissa hails from Australia and has lived in London since 2005.
Rob Barrons also joined Alacra in January an Account Manager working with the London sales team. Before coming to Alacra, Rob spent 6 years at Thomson, starting on the Help Desk then moving onto a technical support team. Following this he moved to an account management role in Telekurs.
Ajit Tharaken and Anthony Bruni have both been promoted to Vice President of Software Development.
Both Ajit and Tony have been with Alacra for a number of years and have made numerous contributions to the firms success. Ajit has been responsible for Alacra Book as well as many of our customer portals. Alacra Premium and the Alacra Store have been two of Tony's primary responsibilities.