Timeline of Cobalt Sky

Cobalt Sky (at the time, named ATP) starts offering consultancy services around Quantime software. At this stage it’s just Quantum, the data processing package.

Ralph Westwood, becomes our first employee. He works on car clinics for Burke Germany and also starts helping Burke Sweden with the conversion of one of their major trackers to Quantum. Ralph is working alongside his future wife, Berit Pettersson, but doesn’t know it yet. Fast forwarding to 2020 and Ralph has just celebrated his 30th anniversary working for Cobalt Sky.

Rishi Khanna becomes Cobalt Sky’s first ever graduate recruit. Graduate recruitment will go on to form the backbone of our hiring strategy, and Rishi will go on to manage our Data Processing department.

We release Winyaps, a program to convert standard fixed-font tables into presentation quality output. Winyaps is still extremely popular in the industry, being used by many companies.

We start offering internet survey scripting and hosting as this side of the industry starts becoming popular. We use Quancept Web, and are already familiar with the scripting language meaning that we're able to hit the ground running.

ATP changes its name to Cobalt Sky and we celebrate with a big client party at The Atlantic Bar and Grill. Sadly, England lose to Portugal in the Euros that night but it doesn't put too much of a damper on our festivities. 

We move out of our offices in East Sheen, relocating to Putney in order to take advantage of better transport links. We're still in Putney to this day.

Our data collection department move from Quancept to Dimensions (now Unicom IBM SPSS) for scripting online surveys, offering us the ability to script more and more complex surveys. This remains one of several softwares that we use to script our surveys.

Along with The Simpsons, Taylor Swift, and Cher's song "If I could Turn Back Time", Cobalt Sky turned 20.

The Market Research Society starts "The Oppies", a yearly awards ceremony aimed at recognising the work put in by operations providers in our industry. Cobalt Sky wins the top award, Operational Excellence for the first time. 

Having narrowly missed out on the top award in 2015 and instead being awarded 'Highly Commended', Cobalt Sky return to winning ways in 2016 picking up the Operational Excellence award for the second time. We celebrate with industry colleagues at the ceremony held in Revolution near Tower Bridge.

For the second year running and third time overall, Cobalt Sky win the Operational Excellence award. Some of the team also take part in Ride London, a charity event raising money for Scope.

Rebecca Cole takes over as Managing Director with Alastair Sweeney becoming Head of Data Collection. This means that all management positions at Cobalt Sky are held by people who joined as graduates.

The Operations Award ceremony is held at The Curtain in Shoreditch where we win the Operational Excellence award for the fourth time. Our Data Collection team are highly commended.

Cobalt Sky turns 30 and we celebrate in style with a party at rooftop venue Madison, opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral.

We sign the MRS Inclusion Pledge and the MRS Net Zero Pledge, commiting to creating a safer and more representative workplace and to become sustainable by 2026 respectively. 

Cobalt Sky are awarded Best Data Collection (Online) at the 2021 edition of the Oppies. Having been selected as finalists 8 years in a row, it's a proud moment for the team.

In an amazing night for the company, Cobalt Sky are named as winners of Best Data Collection for the 2nd year in a row AND Operational Excellence for the 5th time.

An unprecedented hattrick for the Data Collection team as they pick up their 3rd Best Data Collection (online) trophy in as many years at the oppies. Cobalt Sky were also awarded the main Operational Excellence prize for the 6th time in total. 

Another incredible Oppies night saw the team win the premier award, Operational Excellence for the 7th time. It was the 3rd year in a row we won the trophy, and makes a total of 10 Oppies wins for Cobalt Sky.