About
Built by the people who kept being asked for it
Lake On Rails is a product of Scorchsoft, a software and data engineering company in Birmingham, UK, founded in 2010. We build web applications, mobile apps, integrations and data platforms for businesses that are too big for off-the-shelf and too small for an enterprise sales cycle.
Why it exists
The same conversation, every engagement
Every data platform we built ended the same way. The platform worked. The pipelines ran. And within a year the customer was asking who owned this table, why there were three versions of it, and what would happen when the one analyst left. The cloud had answered where the data lived. Nobody had answered who was responsible for it.
The tools that answer that question were built for companies with a governance team and a six-figure budget. Our customers had one to five people and a spreadsheet. So we built the operating model we kept writing in Word documents into a product, with the procedures and the responsibility matrix already in it, and priced it for the business we actually work with.
What it is
The organisational layer above the platform: ownership, standards, written procedures, evidence. It never moves, transforms or stores your data.
What it is not
Not a catalogue, not a lineage tool, not a quality monitor, not a pipeline. Those exist and are good. This makes them usable by an organisation.
Where it stands
A working product with a substantial test suite, connectors for Microsoft Fabric and AWS Glue, and no customer references yet. New, and honest about it.
Principles
What it is built on
Practical, not bureaucratic
If it feels like enterprise compliance software, it has failed. Every decision an owner is asked for is takeable in a browser, in a minute, without special vocabulary.
The organisational layer is the hard part
Technology is solved. Ownership, responsibility and process are not, and no cloud vendor sells them.
The owners are not technical
The people who know what the data is for run departments. A data strategy owned entirely by the data team is a data team's strategy and nobody else's.
Platform-aware, not platform-dependent
Understand what Fabric and AWS do, fill the gaps they leave, and stay above both. Never compete with the platform.
Opinionated out of the box, adjustable by the engaged
Ship the procedures, the tiers and the matrix drafted, so the first week is spent on your data rather than on configuration.
Say what it does not do
No testimonials we do not have, no customer logos we cannot show, no claim that this can be stood up in an afternoon. Configuring software is not agreeing accountability.
One team for the build and the operating model
Scorchsoft does the build side of a data programme too: data engineering, platform implementation on Fabric or AWS, integrations, and the applications that feed the platform. If it is useful to have the same team on both, and one contract, that is available. If you already have a build partner, Lake On Rails works alongside them.
Scorchsoft Ltd is registered in England and Wales, company number 07246693, at 13 Portland Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B16 9HN.
The first step costs you nothing
Forty-five minutes with whoever runs your reporting
We tell you honestly whether this is worth doing at all, and roughly what it would take. If the answer is not yet, you will hear that. "Not for us" is a fine outcome, and a better one than a slow maybe.