CYBAEA is an independent consulting organization. We support our clients defining, communication and delivering their strategy for the use of technology. Additionally, we provide independent research that identifies and analyzes major trends in technology and their impact on business.

Here you can learn more about our business, our location, our people, and our name.

Our Business

CYBAEA typically works with very large and very small companies. For large enterprises we provide technology strategy consulting, especially for organizations that are faced with disruptive technology innovation in their markets. For small companies, startups and their investors, we provide support in technology and company evaluations, and in defining and executing their strategy to market.

In all cases we work closely with our clients to add measurable value through each stage of the process of realizing their business objectives. Our approach is no-nonsense, honest and upfront, and above all practical.

Our work is supported by our proprietary research. We are continuously scanning the emerging technology landscape to determine what innovations will have a disruptive impact. We work closely with entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts from across the globe.

We make parts of our analysis publicly available in our Research section, and you can keep up-to-date with our latest thoughts through our Journal.

Large Enterprises

We support established organizations in defining, communicating, and delivering their strategy in the face of disruptive technology innovation.

History is littered with the corpses of companies that made assumptions about their future based on known technologies, only to be swept away by innovation rendering entire industries obsolete.

Such disruptive innovation can be a threat or an opportunity. It all depends on how prepared you are.

CYBAEA provides a external and unbiased expertise and experience of your markets and of the new innovations that are affecting your industry. We have decades of experience in working with large organizations. We can help you understand how to benefit from new disruptive innovation and leap ahead of the competition or create new markets for your products and services. Or we can help an organization that is faced with disruption in its markets respond efficiently, providing immediate and long-term benefits.

We work closely with our clients to add measurable value through each stage of the process of realizing their business objectives. From vision through research and on to actionable strategies and their implementation: CYBAEA is there to support you.

Startups and Investors

We work with startup and growing companies providing CTO or marketing skills, help defining and articulating offerings, and supporting the creation and execution of a delivery methodology.

We work with many different companies in many different industry sectors. The common theme is that they have disruptive technology (in the sense of creating new markets) and are primarily targeting large corporations as their customers (thus tying together our main activities).

Often the challenges for small companies are about execution: they have great ideas, often great products, but very limited ability to execute and get their ideas into the enterprise. And usually it is the last thing on their minds which means that they end up with these great opportunities and no way of completing them. It is all very frustrating, but also very rewarding when we do manage to help a company and can see it succeed.

With private equity investors or companies seeking investments, we often get involved either at the seed or mezzanine financing stages. We provide unbiased company or product evaluations and can support the company in defining and articulating its vision and strategy. Often we continue our engagement and provide services as above.

Our Location

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

As consultants we work where our clients are. Our headquarters are in Luton near the center of the "Golden Triangle" between London, Oxford, and Cambridge. We are equidistant from Oxford and Cambridge, the two main research centers and science parks in the country. This is important for our work with start-up companies.

For finance and the investor community, and for general networking, we are close to London with good connections (about 40 minutes by train). We are near the main motorway (M1) and with a local airport.

We have local offices in Cambridge, Oxford, and London.

Our People

The company was founded by Allan Engelhardt, an expert in technology strategy and its business applications.

Allan has worked with large organizations throughout the world to help them define and implement their business strategies, including household names such as Amazon.com (Seattle), Citibank (New York), Worldcom (Europe), Vodafone (UK), O2 (Ireland), and SR.Teleperformance (Global).

Work with smaller organizations has lead to several new companies being formed, and Allan plays an active role in many of them, including The PCA Group Ltd.

The company now includes an international network of over 20 researchers, consultants, and thought leaders. Specializations available in our network include:

Telecommunications
Software
Retail finance
Commercial and institutional finance
Automotive industry
Defense, intelligence, and law enforcement
Consumer packaged goods
and others...

Please feel free to contact us to discuss your specific requirements.

Our Name

[Ship's Wheel] Our name is Latin:

cybaea (latin), ae, f.: trading vessel; a transport, cargo, or merchant ship.

It refers to a merchant ship of Greek origin that was common in the Mediterranean. We prefer the translation "trading vessel" - isn't that what every company is? Pronunciation was probably with an initial [k] sound but everybody uses a [s] sound, like cyber-, so that is that we go with, with the final e and a each pronounced separately.

Your can listen to a computer generated pronunciation: Download MP3 or Ogg Vorbis formats.

Legal information

CYBAEA Limited is a private limited company incorporated in England and Wales with company number 4471476. VAT registration GB 797 1063 04. Registered office: Vaughan Chambers, Vaughan Road, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 4EE, United Kingdom

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Recent blog entries

Area Plots with Intensity Coloring

On 2010-07-13 07:47:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

I am not sure apeescape’s ggplot2 area plot with intensity colouring is really the best way of presenting the information, but it had me intrigued enough to replicate it using base R graphics.

The key technique is to draw a gradient line which R does not support natively so we have to roll our own code for that. Unfortunately, lines(..., type="l") does not recycle the colour col= argument, so we end up with rather more loops than I thought would be necessary.

We also get a nice opportunity to use the under-appreciated read.fwf function.

Employee productivity revisited

On 2010-06-22 11:45:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Journal:

We have a mild obsession with employee productivity and how that declines as companies get bigger. We have previously found that when you treble the number of workers, you halve their individual productivity which is scary.

We now re-do the analysis four years later and, just because we can, we are using the leading companies of the London stock exchange instead of the largest American companies.

The results still hold. We called it the 3/2 rule: treble the number of workers and you halve their individual productivity. Large companies with ten times the number of employees are ¼ as productive as their smaller competitors.

Employee productivity is a big issue. If all the FTSE-100 companies achieved their average profits per employee, then the index would generate almost £1 trn of additional net profits for the economy.

Employee productivity as function of number of workers revisited

On 2010-06-22 11:20:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

We revisit the analysis for the FTSE-100 constituent companies and find that the relation still holds four years later and across a continent.

Comparing standard R with Revoutions for performance

On 2010-06-17 09:05:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

Following on from my previous post about improving performance of R by linking with optimized linear algebra libraries, I thought it would be useful to try out the five benchmarks Revolutions Analytics have on their Revolutionary Performance pages.

Faster R through better BLAS

On 2010-06-15 10:21:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

Can we make our analysis using the R statistical computing and analysis platform run faster? Usually the answer is yes, and the best way is to improve your algorithm and variable selection.

But recently David Smith was suggesting that a big benefit of their (commercial) version of R was that it was linked to a to a better linear algebra library. So I decided to investigate.

The quick summary is that it only really makes a difference for fairly artificial benchmark tests. For “normal” work you are unlikely to see a difference most of the time.