The Builders — Founders Spotlight: Stacktical
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Describe Stacktical in one sentence:
Stacktical is a platform that helps service providers offer performance and reliability guarantees to their customers and automatically compensate them when agreed service levels are not met, using service level agreements on the blockchain.
Now please tell us more specifically what Stacktical does:
While interesting on paper, service level agreements are so costly to define, negotiate, monitor and enforce that they can only be offered by big pocket providers to big pocket customers, in exchange for a premium.
By turning them into smart contracts, Stacktical makes service level agreements more efficient for providers and more gratifying for other stakeholders:
- Engineering teams and product owners can define meaningful service level objectives using predictive analytics;
- Customers can stake tokens to streamline the negotiation of their performance and reliability requirements;
- Once deployed by providers, service level agreements are automatically enforced according to good and bad service levels;
- Agreements can be crowdfunded by providers, partners and insurances to automatically compensate customers for service level violations and reward operational excellence.
DSLA token owners will also have the ability to exchange tokens for service collectibles and service time on the Stacktical Service Time Marketplace.
What inspired you to start Stacktical?
The heart of the Stacktical platform was originally prototyped in 2014, during a consulting mission at France Télévision, France’s national broadcast TV channel. As a web architect, Wilhem was looking for an automated way to plan the capacity of two new platforms he was responsible for at the time.
After learning the ins and outs of modern data science for a couple weeks, Wilhem was able to showcase a working script that would fit load testing results into a mathematical prediction model and surface more actionable scalability insights about the tested system.
Although it had the potential to significantly shorten the duration of load testing campaigns and pave the way to more efficient operations at France Télévision, the technology was not adopted by his client at the time and was shelved until December 2015.
As he was looking for a new entrepreneurial challenge to tackle, Wilhem decided to reach out to JeanDaniel and form a team to further explore what he had barely experimented a couple months before with scalability prediction.
“We were going to create a product that makes it really easy to use the power of predictive analytics to improve the scalability of systems.”
This was the vision the newly born Stacktical SaaS platform, back in December 2015.
When our Proof of Concept went live three months later, our objective was to reach product-market fit within 30 months, leading us to September 30th 2018 as a hard deadline to validate the need for a solution like Stacktical.
We positioned ourselves as a Developer Tool, meant to be integrated in CI/CD pipelines to accelerate load tests without impacting the velocity of development.
The first results of our strategy being encouraging, we ended up incorporating Stacktical a year and a half later, in May 2017, and started accelerating our business initiatives and further validate the CI/CD use case through managed services.
“We were collaborating with engineering team to help them quickly detect scalability regression in their release candidates by adding predictive scalability testing to their Continuous Delivery pipeline.”
Our managed services experience has been instrumental in challenging some key product assumptions about Stacktical and its ability to become a true self-service platform. It’s also been a key driver in our decision to focus on Blockchain service providers as our target customers. Successes put us in a position to confidently engage with more cryptocurrency pioneers, such as the arguably world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.
As the fastest growing company around, Binance should have been a perfect fit for Stacktical. But Binance was much more interested in improving their customer service than improving the reliability of their platform.
From there, it was pretty apparent that improving the scalability of systems wasn’t just a matter of preventing performance incidents from happening.
It was also a matter of **nurturing trust in bad situations**.
What has Stacktical achieved so far?
Stacktical has enabled fintech companies like TenX to audit the scalability of their systems and ensure that they meet the performance and reliability requirements of their technology partners and customers. Our predictive technology translates into a 3x-5x increase in system performance on average without impacting the velocity of developments.
We have partnered with SmartHab and the HAB platform, a black box for Smart Cities, to work together on ensuring the reliability of Smart Cities and Smart Buildings using decentralized SLAs.
What do you hope to accomplish within the next few months?
Our focus for the next few months will be to ensure the proper listing of the DSLA token on exchanges and grow our network of partners across different verticals such as Supply Chain. SLA can be used in a wide variety of situations and industries.
Give us 3 tips for people who are doing/plan to do an ICO?
- Work on compliance from day one.
- Start building the product as early as possible from the ICO contributions.
- Create content, keep the conversation going and build a vibrant community.
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Stacktical has recently released the new one pager about the project. Please read here to learn more about the token sale.
🚀You can also join their community channels and stay updated on the latest news:
- Telegram: https://t.me/stacktical
- Bounty Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4696580
- Medium: https://medium.com/@stacktical
- Meetup: https://meetup.com/stacktical
- GitHub: https://github.com/Stacktical
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stacktical/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stacktical/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/stacktical
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/stacktical
The ZILLA Team
