November 2011 Archives

As you know Snowflake is a big fan of the Open Geospatial Consortium and all things standards. Snowflake has been a member of the OGC since 2002 and we've pretty much attended at least two of the four Technical Commitee meetings (TCs) each year since then, not to mention the 8 OWS Testbeds we've worked on.  

The next TC is a little different for us at Snowflake as we're sponsoring it! Hosted at the EUROCONTROL headquarters in Brussels the November TC has a packed  Agenda. As you'd expect, firstly there's plenty of Aviation on the agenda: there's two meetings of Aviation Domain Working Group and there's an Aviation focused Interoperability Day on the Friday.  On the Monday afternoon, Snowflake is leading the discussion on the WFS profile for Aviation that we authored as part of our OWS8-AIM work.  

Outside of Aviation there are open sessions on INSPIRE, The Internet of Things and the Digital Agenda for Europe and in parallel to those sessions are the meetings of standards in the making. There are two types of meetings at a TC: Standards Working Groups (SWG) and Domain Working Groups (DWG). SWGs are the nitty gritty of standards and in order to attend an SWG you need to be registered beforehand, DWG's are more open groups and tend to focus more on best practice, outreach and discussion around a particular domain. 

If you haven't been to a TC before, its worth a trip. That said, it takes a while to get used to a TC and I'd definite recommend attending the new member orientation on the Monday . The OGC membership is full of some great thought leaders and at times the discussion can get very heated and down in the micro detail.  OGC members are passionate about standards which for a newbie can be a little bemusing, that said this is what these meetings are all about ... to work through the detail so that when a standard hit the streets its well thought through a fit for purpose.

Debbie and I will be in attendance next week so please do catch up with us

Registration is now open, so you can register here

Yep, we've had enough. We've been working hard for 10 years and now we're all having a day off this Thursday and closing the office!

No Sales, No Support, No Consultancy, No Accounts, No Training and you know something is definitely up when there's NO CODING going on in Snowflakeland.  Yes for one day only we're downing all our tools so all you'll find at Snowflakeland is tumbleweed rolling down the open plan.

To celebrate Snowflake's 10 year anniversary the entire company is having a day off together. We could lie and say its a team building exercise or some master strategy day. But its not! We're just all going to head out, do some cool things together and have some beers and good food along the way! As for what we're going to do ... well I'm afraid I can't tell you! Myself and the Office Management team (Sonia and Sheila) have been keeping the days activities a secret from the wider Snowflake team. 

Curious???? Well I'll give you some criptic clues ...

1) We'll be wearing some interesting gear;

2) Taking a vote on a few things;

3) Eating some very rare food (there's only 1 restaurant serving this type of food in the whole UK);

4) Finally we will end the day with a 'little' tour

On the day you'll get to find out as we have strict orders from Marketing to make sure we keep Facebook and Twitter up to date.

I hope you don't mind us all taking a day off, after all it is our first day off in 3673 days of business. During that time we've worked really hard to look after all of our customers.

Come Friday we'll be back to normal ... that said its probably best to phone about 10am onwards as we may be a little thick headed in the morning!

Ian

So, its been 2 years since I last added to the history page on our website, a lot has changed since then so here's a quick update - you can read our full history here

Firstly a worldwide recession has come along and with it UK government spending has pretty much ground to a halt! The one thing I've always liked about Snowflake is that no matter how long we've been doing things there's always something around the corner where I learn something for the first time and so this is my first experience of running a business in a recession. For the first 8 years of Snowflake's life its been a reasonable easy ride and in some ways that's a bad thing because when things get difficult you're lacking experience in how to handle things. When I look back at the changes we made three years ago to become market focused and diversify that was a pretty good call (particular the Aviation market which is now a large proportion of our revenue) and to some extent it protected us from the recession, if we'd stayed UK centric I think Snowflakeland would be much smaller place. Luckily we've never had to downsize in our history so that's an achievement in own right.

So what have we been up to over the last two years ... well commercially we've made big changes, for one we've got organised and have put a huge amount of effort into Customer Support, Sales and particularly Marketing. On the Marketing side we've done massive amounts of work on getting a consistent and simple message across. So when you ask a 'Snowflaker' what does Snowflake do? You will (hopefully) get the answer 'Data Exchange' and from there we drill down into all the nitty gritty. Its just two words but its taken us nearly ten years to really get our heads around a simple message that you can hang the entire business off. On the Sales side the biggest change we've made is brought in Salesforce.com - its transformed us and our commercial team pretty much live in it. We also used Salesforce to implement a customer portal. Other more techy things we've done ... moved off MS Exchange to Google Apps, brought in VMWare, extended our SAN from 3Tb to 13Tb plus we bought a load of new desktop kit and widescreens for everybody.

Eddie and Simon continue to run the Development side of the business and in the last two years they've moved us to Agile. Agile has had by far the biggest impact of anything we've done. Our productivity is massively up, our skills and knowledge are evenly spread across our entire dev team and we're now churning out product releases faster than ever before - our biggest release being GO Publisher 2.0. The other big change in the development team has been six new developers joining in the last year. Six is a lot for Snowflakeland (we're running out of space at Carlton Crescent so we'll probably start moving next year) so a big welcome to Niha, Michael, Pradit, Deep, Vera and Tom.

With all these new developers joining (not to forget Rosie who joined our P&P team and Sonia who joined our Accounts team) we have more of a multicultural mix than ever before. We have people from Wales (that'll be me), Scotland, England, Germany, Netherlands, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, New Zealand and India. Not just that, but we must be one of the only software houses in the UK with nearly 50% women, both of these things make Snowflakeland an easy place to come to work in the morning.

Finally, last month was the 10 year anniversary of Eddie and I starting up. 10 years! Its been (and continues to be) an amazing experience, of course it has its ups and downs but its remains an absolute passion. I'm very proud of what we've achieved in our 10 years of business. We've gone from two techies to a truly international business. What's more we've done it ourselves, we still remain privately owned and we're growing.

There's a lot more history to come from Snowflake so watch this space!

Ian

Today, we announced the launch of our brand new, sparkly Online Training portal. What's more, we're launching it in style. With some BIG TENS :)

You can read our formal press release (onlinetrainingpress.pdf) announcing the launch in detail, which starts with our GML Fundamentals course. We're really proud, as this is currently the only self-paced online GML training available worldwide!

10 for 10 for 10 - This offer has now SOLD OUT

The £10.00 introductory offer has now sold out. A massive thank you to all our supporters. We will make the £100 donation to the Soft Power Education charity. You can still purchase the training at the normal retail price by following the links in this blog.

Online GML training

Ballal, our GML trainer, narrates the online training and has built several interactive steps along the way to ensure you get an enhanced learning experience.

• Pace your learning at a speed convenient to you
• Listen to in depth explanations
• Understand with interactive diagrams
• Check your learning with end of module quizzes
• Continue your professional development with this AGI accredited course

Get trained today

The new GML Fundamentals online training course can be purchased online with a credit/debit card and can be taken immediately. The course retails at £350.00 but a limited introductory offer is available to the first 10 people to take the course - only £10.00.

For more information and to purchase the training please visit our new online training webpage or email training@snowflakesoftware.com

Melissa Burns | Head of Marketing | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com

Press Release: Snowflake Software announces first loading tool with support for AddresBase GML products

We're showcasing our market leading loading tool, GO Loader, at the ‘Everything Happens Somewhere’ conference in Nottingham, on 3 November 2011 (today!).

GO Loader is the first tool on the market to support the recently announced AddressBase products from Ordnance Survey and GeoPlace.

The generic, standards based data loading tool, has been supporting customers in loading Ordnance Survey mapping products for several years, including OS MasterMap, OS VectorMap and the OS OpenData suite of products. The additional support for the new AddressBase products makes it a first in the marketplace.

Ian Painter, Managing Director, comments:

“GO Loader is the first loading tool on the market to support AddressBase products. Customers can load and manage their AddressBase product into Oracle, SQL Server 2008 or PostGIS and connect and visualise to a choice of GIS including ArcGIS and MapInfo.”

He added:

“Because GO Loader is built on open standards using interoperable technology, existing customers can start using GO Loader for AddressBase without the need for costly upgrade or coding.”

Ian will be joined by Rosie Partington (Technical Support Consultant) at the GeoPlace ‘Everything Happens Somewhere’ conference and they will be holding demonstrations at the Snowflake stand in the exhibition.

Anyone wishing to understand more about loading AddressBase products that cannot make the conference should visit the Snowflake Software website.

If you're not at the event, we'll be updating all our fans on Twitter and Facebook - and you can follow the conference using the #ehs2011 hashtag.

Melissa Burns | Head of Marketing | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com | www.snowflakesoftware.com