Michael Mainelli was honoured with the prestigious British Computer Society (BCS) “IT Director of the Year” Award 2004 in the Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) category for Z/Yen’s work on PropheZy, the world-class risk/reward prediction engine. Z/Yen’s PropheZy work extends the Foresight Challenge award-winning, “alpha science” work from the Financial £aboratory that made waves from the FT to Wired magazine in 1996 and 1997. Other successful contenders at the BCS awards 2004 included the Hawk-Eye tennis and cricket system, plus a lifetime achievement award for Dame Stephanie Shirley.

PropheZy is a suite of statistical software that classifies, models and predicts events. Clients use PropheZy to identify favourable or adverse patterns or anomalies in order to get a “detailed grip on the big picture”. PropheZy can be used by people having no greater computer understanding than Excel, yet they can build global, real-time applications.

PropheZy builds a non-parametric, general classifier from historic data that can be used immediately for a tremendously wide range of real-time applications such as:

• Consumer Analysis - credit scoring, predictive consumer & business profitability;
• Wholesale Finance - fraud detection, deal failures, investment opportunity scouting;
• Information Technology and Communications - network routing, revenue enhancement, revenue protection;
• Management Information – comparing performance of diverse sites or clients, finding anomalies that matter, real-time MIS.

Z/Yen uses PropheZy to help organisations prosper by making better choices. Ian Harris, Z/Yen’s COO and in-house jargon buster explains; “PropheZy is based upon sophisticated statistical techniques that classify and model historic multivariate data in order to make predictions on new data. PropheZy works on continuous numerical data or discrete, categorical data and, with some pre-processing, time series and text.”

Michael Mainelli, Z/Yen’s CEO, collected the award to rapturous applause. Unable to thank everyone from the plumber to his mum on the night (the BCS wouldn’t let him), in the cold light of a new day, Michael says, “we are absolutely delighted that the BCS has awarded this honour to Z/Yen for PropheZy. We would never have guessed that this would happen to us, although PropheZy of course would have predicted it. Z/Yen is immensely proud to win an award in such illustrious company.”

For further information, please contact Michael Mainelli or Ian Harris, tel: (020) 7562-9562, e-mail: michael_mainelli@zyen.com or ian_harris@zyen.com

More information on PropheZy is available on the Z/Yen website.

Z/Yen specialises in risk/reward management, an innovative approach to improving organisational performance. Z/Yen’s clients include blue chip companies in banking, technology and professional services as well as charities, government and care organisations (see http://www.zyen.com).