Snowflake News

New Snowflake Website - New Blog

2012-03-12T15:24:07Z

To coincide with ATC Global 2012 and as a 10 year birthday present to ourselves we've had a make over and revamped our website. To make things even more accessible to visitors we've put everything in one place, including our blog.

You can now find all our News on our dedicated Snowflake News pages including press releases and event reports but you can also find our Techy blog on our brand new Snowflake Labs!

We'll still keep this blog 'up' as a historical archive but if you're looking for the new stuff then head on over and bookmark our new pages.

ATC Global 2012: Modernising ATM with Open Standards

2012-02-23T14:33:16Z

We’re off to Amsterdam on 6^th-8^th March for ATC Global 2012, the largest international ATM exhibition of its kind, so it is pretty timely that yesterday the OGC announced the recent progress by the global aviation community in the adoption of an international framework of standards to enable communication in a net-centric, globally interoperable Air Transport System.

As you may already be aware, we have been involved in the OGC prototyping testbeds (OWS-6, OWS-7 and OWS-8) which have assisted in the evaluation and adoption of AIXM and WXXM, both of which are based on the GML encoding standard.

If you want to find out more about AIXM, WXXM and the value of open geospatial standards, the OGC, in collaboration with EUROCONTROL and the FAA, has organised a workshop at ATC Global 2012 - "Use of Open Standards in the Modernisation of ATM" – on Tuesday the 6^th March from 10.00 - 13.00 in the Workshop Theatre, Hall 9 which Ian (Managing Director here at Snowflake) will be participating in.

The workshop will cover the role of open standards in supporting and accelerating the ongoing modernisation of ATM. It will be a great opportunity to hear from industry leaders including George Percivall, Chief Architect and Executive Director, Open Geospatial Consortium; Paul Bosman; SWIM/EA Unit manager, Agency AIM focal point, EUROCONTROL; Kevin Haggerty, FAA International Program Officer for Europe, Africa, and Middle East; Hubert Lepori, AIXM Change Control Board, Information Management / Enterprise Architecture Unit, EUROCONTROL; Frank Suykens, Head of Research & Development, Luciad; Ulrich Kaage, Product Manager, Comsoft; Fatimah Madari, SmartAIM Product Manager, Frequentis; Paolo Stefani, Project Manager, IDS and senior representation from SESAR JU; and of course our very own Ian Painter.

If you are heading to ATC Global on the 6^th-8^th March (just over a week away!) then you won’t want to miss Ian’s seminar on SWIM (System Wide Information Management) on Wednesday 7^th March. With the Aviation Thread of the ninth OGC Web Services testbed (OWS-9) set to advance the Aviation Architecture to support several Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) Joint Undertaking (SJU) project requirements as well as the FAA's AIM and SWIM AatS (Aircraft Access to SWIM) requirements Ian will provide an overview of the data/net-centric approach to SWIM using examples from the OGC testbeds we have been involved in. Head to the Seminar Theatre, Hall 9 for 11.30 -11.50 to catch Ian’s seminar.

Make sure you drop by our stand, D519a, to chat with Ian, Debbie or Peter about modernising ATM with open standards. You can also pick up our white paper summary of Ian’s presentation after his seminar on the Wednesday.

So we look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam. You can register for your ATC Global 2012 exhibition and conference tickets at http://www.atcglobalhub.com/register.

See you there!

A week in the life of UK Location�.

2012-02-14T15:37:12Z

So last week was an interesting and busy one for me. On Tuesday I was invited to the UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group meeting held at the Environment Agency, Bristol and then presented at the UK Location INSPIRE Data Providers Winter Workshop in London on Thursday. With so much going on here’s my highlights from the two meetings.

UK Location INSPIRE Data Provider Winter Workshop – 9^th Feb 2012

Things are happening!! The INSPIRE Data Provider Winter Workshop was, in my opinion, the best meeting to date that the UK Location and AGI have hosted. It was really good to see lots of new faces in the audience, in particular those organisations that are responsible for the Annex III themes.

The Agenda was a really healthy mix of presentations, ranging from the high-level strategic objectives of the UK Location and INSPIRE to technical sessions demonstrating the tools and applications that are available to support implementation, including:

Metadata
Data.gov.uk
Data Download Services
Data Transformation

There were several real high points that I took away from the meeting:

Implementation Statistics:

95% of all identified datasets that fall within the scope of Annex I and II have metadata defined for them
Most data providers have also established view services

Data.gov.uk:

New and improved discovery and view application is looking good
Despite the small team involved, Defra and OS are providing a lot of support to data providers to improve the quality of their metadata and view services

INSPIRE Download Services:

Ian James (OS) gave a great presentation, providing a sneaky peak into the forthcoming Technical Guidelines for the INSPIRE Download Services
There have been three types of download services initially proposed (these will be extended once the Annex III themes have been finalised):
Option 1: Atom Feeds for pre-defined datasets
Option 2: WFS serving pre-defined datasets
Option 3: WFS serving features (preferred)

Although I didn’t expect that this would be where the Technical Guidelines are heading, I’m actually impressed. And a little relieved - we only need to update our marketing materials not our software as we already support all three of these options. Interestingly, the preferred option, Option 3, is the easiest of the three download services to implement using GO Publisher.

Keep an eye out on the forthcoming Labs section on our re-vamped website later next month for example videos demonstrating how to configure GO Publisher for setting up Download Services.

Transforming data into the INSPIRE Data Specifications:
It was good to see similarities in the key messages from both presentations that demonstrated how to transform data into the INSPIRE Data Specifications, specifically:

The data specifications are not as demanding as organisations initially expected
Time taken to transform data is significantly lower than expected (It took a team of people from Natural England 1 day to transform the Local Nature Reserves dataset into the Annex I Protected Sites theme)
ransformation and data publication requires input from multiple stakeholders within an organisation

You can see the presentation that I gave describing Snowflake’s approach to data transformation and publication using the Environment Agency Detailed River Network dataset on our SlideShare at:

UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group – 7^th February

After an invitation from Alex Coley, Chair of UK Location Architecture & Interoperability Board I attended the kick off meeting for the UK Location Registers & Registries Working Group. It was a really lively kick off meeting with lots of discussion about the scope of the working group and what UK Location wants to achieve in relation to both INSPIRE and Linked Open Data. Some of the key initial outcomes of the meeting were that the Registers & Registries Working Group will focus on two streams of work:

Firstly – Registers to support the publication of common re-usable resources:

Namespaces
Dictionaries of terms (i.e. codelists, vocabularies etc.)
Coordinate Reference Systems
Portrayal (styled layer descriptions, symbology)
Application Schemas (UML/XSD)

These are registers required to underpin INSPIRE and must be established by Member States.

And secondly - Registers that provide a wider framework for managing, discovering and re-using reference objects:

URI Sets
Individual spatial object URIs

Again it is exciting to see the UK take the lead in the development of such services as they shall provide the foundation for both INSPIRE and Linked Data.

Meet the Snowflakers at the University of Southampton

2012-02-06T10:23:12Z

Tomorrow the team is heading back to University. We’re attending (and sponsoring) the ECS (Electronics and Computer Science) Careers Fair at the University of Southampton and we’re really excited. It’s always great fun meeting up and chatting with the ECS students, finding out what they’re studying and what they want to do after they have finished their studies. As a graduate of Southampton I'm also personally excited to be heading back to Uni for the day.

We’re holding our first TweetUp at 1pm during the event so if you’re an ECS student then make sure you drop by the Careers Fair at 1pm to meet our team at the TweetUp. AND! If you are one of the first 20 students to show us your tweet of 'I'm at the @ECS_news Careers Fair at @unisouthampton and attending the @sflakesoftware TweetUp' then you could win yourself a small (and yummy!) prize. Make sure you show Ian, Sheila, Niha or me (Cat) your tweet from 1pm onwards for your chance to win*.

So if you’re interested in finding out more about what we do, who we work with, the fun we have, and how you could be part of it all then head to Building 40 (Garden Court), Highfield Campus tomorrow, 7^th Feb, and come and say hello! We'd love to meet with you and hear what you're interested in.

*Only one tweet required. Only one prize per Twitter account. Prizes allocated on first come first served basis. Prize non-transferable

Thoughts on DGI 2012 (Defence Geospatial Intelligence)

2012-02-02T09:53:34Z

Last week I attended the annual DGI 2012 show held in London at the QEII Conference Centre. With approximately 750 delegates DGI 2012 was the largest in its history. Recently Snowflake has been growing in the Defence and Intelligence space so this show is becoming a must attend for us. Initially I was just going to attend but a last minute offer to showcase some of our Air Traffic Management testbed work on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) stand was too good to turn down.

First speaker was Major General Jerry Thomas. Now if ever there was a lesson in public speaking this was it! Major General Jerry Thomas was incredibly animated, passionate and totally owned the stage. No matter what the talk, when you see somebody like this in action it's just fascinating to watch let alone listen. Anyway, his talk on 'Multi Intelligence Support to the Warfighter' was in my opinion one of the best of the conference and contained some classic quotes: "Geospatial is the backbone of intelligence - without it you're a soggy heap on the ground", a nice addition to a Vanessa Lawrence (Director General of Ordnance Survey) quotation "Everything happens somewhere" adding "Everything happens somewhere in the future" referring to intelligence needing to know where and when. But my favourite was "If you don't know where you're going, and what's there when you get there, then there's no point having all the latest shiny kit!". Anyway, enough of the quotes, Major General Jerry Thomas gave a really interesting insight into the changing world of intelligence with the advent of Social media resulting in over 80% of intelligence already being in the public domain on chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook etc. The problem is making sense of it all and here's where 'the' geo-int buzz word comes in, it's all about 'Fusion' (multi-int Fusion to be precise). It's no good gathering all this information, it needs to be broken down and re-assembled in order for it to be meaningful, much like baking a cake - the ingredients on their own taste awful but baked in the right way you have a good end result. Here in the UK our 'geo-int baking' will be performed in the Defence Intelligence Geospatial Fusion Centre which is a new purpose built facility due to open in Summer 2013.

A couple of quick mentions, John Day, Director of Defence, ESRI gave a talk on utilising Cloud for Geo-Int. Interestingly his talk wasn't a technical one but a financial one. With the defence cuts across the board, John made a really good financial argument for Cloud, stating that Cloud based services could be procured only when required operationally and so could be funded from Operational Expenditure rather than Capital Expenditure making procurement a much less painful process. John also had a great quote: "The definition of Legacy, is that Legacy is the stuff that works". A quick mention of Barry Barlow from NGA, Barry is Director of Acquisition and showed a live demo on an eAIP (electronic Aeronautical Information Procedure) on an iPad. It was great to see this centre stage as this is something that Snowflake has worked on in the OGC AIM testbeds. In fact we've worked on the next generation of the eAIP so watch this space - I might be up there one day!

Last talk of the plenary was from Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller and she was first class. One of the best talks at a conference I've seen in a long, long time. 'Call me Eliza' she said coming on stage. Eliza was Director General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and gave a really insightful talk on her experiences of leading MI5. In the wake of 9/11 MI5 had to radically change and one of her first challenges was to get the government to double MI5's budget, this happened overnight. Now I can't think of any government department ever doing that yet I can see how it got the nod - I for one would definitely not mess with Eliza. Interestingly under her leadership MI5 opened up and for the first time staff could tell there families what they did, in fact staff could actually invite their families in for open days! One point Eliza made was that as Director General of MI5 you are judged not by what you stop but by what you don't stop. With the realisation that not everything can be prevented, to me that makes it one of hardest jobs in the UK. Eliza also gave some great leadership advice which I do no justice by summarising: look after your staff, go out of your way to encourage ideas, recognise the value of criticism (no matter what your role or experience), don't think you know it all, have humility and finally no matter how serious the situation have fun in what you do!

To round off the plenary was a panel session and Vanessa Lawrence was one of the panel members. Vanessa stated one of the challenges of geo is understanding the users situation. Now I've heard that so many times at various geo shows that it just washed over me at time. It wasn't until I saw a picture of a soldier up to his neck in a ditch of water with gunfire all around and using a tablet PC to find a way out, then I realised that understanding the users situation and making geo usable can be the difference between life and death.

After a really good morning I did my duty for Open Standards and manned the OGC stand showing off our Aviation testbed work not to mention evangelising GML and all things standards. OGC has done a great job in Defence and Intelligence and sharing the stand with my good friend Steven Ramage (Executive Director, Marketing and Communications) is always a great experience. You can't help but stand back and admire the networking master class Steven gives. If I say so myself Steven and I worked it pretty well, so much so that I didn't manage to get into any of the talks for the rest of the day. During my time on the stand I noticed one passer by go past with a Snowflake Software sponsored Cambridge Conference Exchange bag. With much excitement I just had to grab a quick picture.

Unfortunately Day 2 was pretty much the same and I spent the majority of my time on stand, that said I did make it to Vanessa's talk in the morning to listen to Ordnance Survey's activities for the Olympics. It's good to see the OS using its considerable geo capabilities to help the Defence and Intelligence community gather the intelligence information required to manage such a huge event. Due to its secure nature it's all a bit behind the scenes but it's clear that for the Olympics a lot of government departments are working together sharing resources and expertise - good to know as I have tickets! Whilst we're talking about Ordnance Survey, its amazing how powerful the OS brand is in this community, unlike other events where there's always a bit of OS bashing going on, you will never hear a bad word said and OS is held in the uttermost regard. Due to it's history you get the feeling that the Defence community have never quite let Ordnance Survey go and they still see it as part of the family.

To sum up ... all in all I'd recommend attending DGI. If you're into geo, geo-int doesn't get a more interesting application and the pace of change in this field is frightening. OGC has a lot of momentum in this space so you can expect open standards to play a big role in opening up the Defence and Intelligence space to a wider community than ever before. See you there next year. In the meantime do what you can to see Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller speak.

Online GML Fundamentals training is the first of its kind available worldwide

2011-12-13T10:23:16Z

Following the recent launch of our new online training portal, we are is pleased to announce that our special introductory offer for the Online GML Fundamentals course sold out in less than 48 hours. As part of our 10 year anniversary celebrations, Snowflake offered a special 10 for 10 for 10 promotion enabling 10 people to take the new course for just £10. We donated all proceeds from the sell-out offer to Soft Power Education, an NGO that supports health and education projects in Busoga, Uganda.

The Snowflake GML course is the only self-paced, online GML Fundamentals training course available worldwide which takes registrants through a modular framework allowing them to work at their own speed and fit training around their requirements. Led by our in-house GML Trainer, Ballal Joglekar, the course is designed to be truly interactive with audible in-depth explanations and end of module quizzes enabling self assessment of learning objectives. Importantly, students benefit from CPD credits on completion of the AGI accredited course.

“The Online GML Fundamentals course makes GML training accessible to anyone, anywhere. It gives employees and organisations additional choice and flexibility for learning”, explains Ballal Joglekar. “Following our experience in providing interactive ‘classroom’ style training we have designed the online course to go beyond traditional ‘e-learning’ slides by incorporating voice over explanations, interactive diagrams and quizzes to engage students and enable them to assess their own progress.”

Sheila Drake, Training Manager at Snowflake comments “The training is available 24/7, to a worldwide audience, expanding our mission to support the industry in the use of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard, GML. When training and travel budgets are being reduced, online training such as ours is an efficient and affordable option for continued professional development.”

“The GML Fundamentals course is just the first of our popular training courses to be made available in this self learning, online format, with additional courses being made available as part of the online training portal during 2012,” continues Sheila Drake.

Following the 10 for 10 for 10 promotion, we received excellent feedback on the quality and accessibility of the course including that the format is “very easy and clear to use” and that “being able to do self-paced stuff is great.”

The Online GML Fundamentals course is available to purchase online, with a credit/debit card, for the regular retail price of £250 (ex VAT) and can be started immediately.

Thoughts on INSPIRE and Aviation at the Brussels OGC TC

2011-12-02T17:06:10Z

Following on from my pre-event bloggage I thought I'd sum up my thoughts on the three days I spent at the Brussels OGC TC ...

Firstly this TC (Technical Committee) continued the pattern of the last three, more new faces, more content and a bewildering amount of parallel sessions on all things standards. In the last couple of years the OGC has been developing more and more standards and as a result its membership continues to grow (particularly in Europe).

Hosted at EUROCONTROL in Brussels, this OGC TC had a distinct Aviation feel about it, which pretty much kept Debbie and I busy for the first three days. Not just that but this was the first TC that Snowflake sponsored and I'm pretty proud that we were able to do our bit to help our friends at the OGC out.

Starting early Monday morning, I attended a really great session on INSPIRE in the amazing Europa conference hall at EUROCONTROL. For those of you who haven't been to EUROCONTROL, the Europa hall is a small version of the UN voting chamber with the speaker in the middle with rows and rows of attendees sitting in a circle around the speaker. They even have translation booths at the back (note to the EU - I didn't see a Welsh one).

Chaired by Athina Trakas from the OGC, Michael Lutz and Ioannis Kanellopoulos from the JRC INSPIRE team gave an update on the current state of Network Services, Data Interoperability and finally the concept of INSPIRE Compliance. I was due to give a talk on Snowflake's experience of INSPIRE but given the really active discussion and questions there was major overun and my talk got bumped onto the following day at the Europe forum. You can get a copy of my slides on Slideshare.

The discussion during the Monday INSPIRE session was really interesting and included my two biggest issues with INSPIRE:

1) Is a standalone Transformation Service required?

2) What is INSPIRE compliance?

Firstly, in addressing the requirement for the Transformation Service the JRC made it very clear that a standalone Transformation Service is an optional requirement and its up to member states on whether they want to implement such a thing. As long as organisations create data in accordance with the Implementing Rules then it doesn't matter how its done. The JRC team even went as far as saying they don't expect to update the Transformation specification - so in my mind we probably won't see a data transformation service get stood up as every implementation I've seen so far either embeds the transformation inside the Download Service or performs some offline ETL prior to upload to a Download Service. Interestingly, the JRC mentioned that they clarified that exact same question with the UK, which led to a question from the audience asking why clarifications are not made public. I couldn't agree more with this and personally think that this would help greatly to stop the rumor mill.

Secondly, the really tricky subject of INSPIRE compliance. Interestingly this has also come up on the AGI INSPIRE Action Working Group that I sit on. The problem stems from the fact that the INSPIRE Implementing Rules and the Technical Guidance are not normative documents and so organisations can never really know when they have fully met their INSPIRE obligations and achieved the nirvana of INSPIRE compliance. So what is INSPIRE compliance? Is it when your data is valid to an Annex I, II or III schema and your Network Services pass the appropriate OGC compliance tests? Or, is it more than this and includes Data Completeness and not to forget Data Quality? Unfortunately there wasn't anything that really cleared this up and the most common answer seemed to be ...when you adhere to the Implementing Rules. But given that the implementing rules are not normative it looks like INSPIRE compliance can pretty much mean anything you like as long as it's aligned with the Implementing Rules. In my view, this lack of normative compliance is going to have to change otherwise interoperability is going to suffer badly if not fail altogether.

Okay, onto Aviation. On Monday afternoon I led a two hour session on the Aviation WFS Guidance document that Snowflake (Debbie) has been editing as part of our work in OWS8-AIM testbed. After much deliberation we've now agreed a way forward to make the final changes to the Web Feature Service (WFS) specification in order for it to support the Temporality Model needed for Aviation. Now that all sounds very detailed (and it is) but we're now at the level of ironing out the last remaining issues for the WFS 2.0 specification to be used in an operational context within the the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry. Given that this is the same standard utilised for INSPIRE that's a great message for OGC: the same data standards, the same service standards but two totally different domains.

On Tuesday morning I did some demos of the 3D Globe Aviation Viewer that Snowflake is developing with the University of Southampton using NASA WorldWind, followed in the afternoon by our first face to face get together of the MOSIA consortium. Led by SINTEF, the MOSIA consortium is a group of companies working as Associate Partners on the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR Joint Undertaking). For Snowflake, playing one of the lead roles in MOSIA is a massive win for us. We've worked really hard over the last two years to build momentum in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry and so being a part of this flagship research programme really puts us in a great place to further develop and grow in the ATM space. We've got some great ideas and I'm really looking forward to getting started in the new year ... should be fun!

Finally on Wednesday, Debbie and I attended the last Aviation DWG session of the TC. Primarily consisting of results from OWS8-AIM testbed Snowflake got quite a few mentions, firstly in the core OWS8 Engineering Report, then in the Single Authoritative Resource Security ER and finally in the AIXM 5.1 Benchmarking Technical Report - note you'll need to be an OGC member to access it. If you're into data compression the benchmarking results were fascinating. Developed by AtosOrigin and Atmosphere, the benchmarking work tested delivering AIXM 5.1 over low bandwith comparing numerous compression techniques namely EXI vs FastInfoSet vs gzip vs WinZip. Now I can't do this excellent piece of work justice in a blog (so please read the report), however, here's my one sentence summary... if you have a small number of coordinates and simple data models then EXI comes out on top, but if you have lots of coordinates and complex models then plain old gzip comes out on top.

For me Wednesday was my last day at the TC, I wish I could have stayed longer but I needed to get back to Snowflake to welcome our new Marketing Manager Cat Stormont. Now Cat seems to be settling in nicely as she's already hassling me for this blog post.

Ian

Snowflake sponsors Brussels OGC TC

2011-11-25T09:00:02Z

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

We're off, we're downing tools for the day!

2011-11-15T11:19:47Z

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

Two years more history

2011-11-14T18:28:44Z

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

Online Training Portal

2011-11-09T15:17:44Z

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

First loading tool with support for AddressBase GML products

2011-11-03T12:22:06Z

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

Ghoulies, Ghosts and GO Publisher 2.0

2011-10-31T13:36:11Z

From ghoulies and ghosties,
And long-leggedy beasties,
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver GO Publisher 2.0!

(Anon. OK, so I've actually tweaked the wording, but you know what I mean!)

It might be Halloween, but our Cauldron is busy bubbling away all year round (and by Cauldron - I guess I mean all the team here at Snowflake) - and the result today is a major release of GO Publisher - GO Publisher 2.0.

Data exchange doesn't have to be scary

Upgrade to the brand new version of GO Publisher (GO Publisher 2.0) for even easier and more powerful data publishing capability.

Publish data files from your database with GO Publisher Desktop
Automate bulk data delivery and ordering with GO Publisher Agent
Deliver data via standards based web services using GO Publisher WFS
Visualise data in consumer mapping applications such as Google Earth

Top 10 tricks and treats for GO Publisher 2.0

There's a lot of improvement in GO Publisher 2.0, just take a look at the full release note if you don't believe me. So to be extra helpful, we've compiled a list of what we believe are the top 10 tricks and treats, here's the top 3:

Web Feature Service 2.0 for INSPIRE Compliance - Distribute your data via the latest web service standard.
Integrated data validation - Validate, preview and fix your XML/GML within GO Publisher 2.0 before deployment
Temporal queries - Improve decision making and business efficiency with this enhanced GO Publisher 2.0 feature, enabling 4-Dimensional spatio-temporal data queries

For the full top 10 including bitesized video snapshots that walk you through each feature, take a look at the GO Publisher microsite.

Tried and tested by you

Because we run an 'Agile' development process, we're able to push out new updates and minor release versions every couple of weeks or so. Existing customers can join our Early Access programme which means they can get their hands on new versions and minor releases prior to them being made available commercially.

We use the valuable feedback and suggestions from our customers to decide what goes in to new products, and we also get them to help with the testing! Of course, we do our own comprehensive testing as well but you can also thank our current user base for contributing so much towards this major release.

Get your hands on GO Publisher 2.0

If you're an existing customer, we'll be in touch really soon to point you in the right direction for this exciting upgrade. If you can't wait, all you need to do is log into the Customer Portal and go to the installers page.

If you're not an existing customer, don't worry, you can easily join one of our webinars or talk to our experts about how GO Publisher 2.0 can take the scary out of your data publishing needs.

Melissa Burns | Head of Marketing | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com | www.twitter.com/sflake software

Webinar: OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network (ITN) and Road Routing Information (RRI)

2011-10-05T13:25:49Z

As part of our Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) support we are hosting a series of webinars to support organisations manage and load their data.

Tomorrow, we have the second in the series: Load, manage and visualise OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network (ITN) and Road Routing Information (RRI).

Load, manage and visualise OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network (ITN) and Road Routing Information (RRI):

Part of our Public Sector Mapping Agreement series of webinars, this 30 minute webinar will show you how to load and manage Ordnance Survey's MasterMap ITN and RRI theme data into your database and visualise in your GIS using GO Loader and specific productivity enhancing plugins.

webinar details

Date: 6 October 2011
Time: 14:00 - 14:30 (UK time - BST)
Presenter: Richard Rombouts

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

Aerospace, Aviation & Defence KTN Conference

2011-09-18T14:30:25Z

This week, Snowflake Software is exhibiting for the first time at the UK Aerospace, Aviation & Defence (AAD) Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) conference. A sign of what you can expect from Snowflake in the future as we ramp up our activities within the Aviation domain.

Active in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) market since 2008, we've built our reputation through playing a lead role in several FAA/EUROCONTROL sponsored testbeds.

Building on our success within the testbeds, we're also an active consortium member within the FAA Aeronautical Information Management Development (AIM-D) programme and the FAA Special Activity Airspace Pilot.

Hot off the press

We've also been selected to support SESAR as an Associate Partner as part of the MOSIA Consortium, supporting the framework to modernise information and data exchange (Aeronautical Information Management) within Air Traffic Management.

The conference provides a forum to discuss and exchange concepts and practices related to the newly released National Aerospace Technology Strategy (NATS) within the UK. It will also provide a check point on the progress for the large scale aviation initiatives NextGen (USA) and SESAR (Europe).

Event details

Date: Tuesday 20 September 2011 - Wednesday 21 September 2011
Where: Magna Science Park, Rotherham, UK
Conference website: https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/2nd-aad-ktn-conference/overview

Snowflake at the AAD KTN Conference

Eddie Curtis (CTO) and Debbie Wilson (Business Consultant) will be attending this event where Snowflake Software is exhibiting. If you'd like to talk to us about our solutions for modernsing AIM and our experience with the Aeronautical Information Exhange Model (AIXM) and other aviation data exchange models (such as WXXM, FIXM, Digital NOTAM) then please do drop by the stand.

We'd also be happy to talk about our participation in recent aviation advancement projects such as:

MOSIA Consortium - (Sesar associate partner)
FAA Special Activity Airspace (SAA)
FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-8
FAA AIM-D
FAA AIM-OES
FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-7
EUROCONTROL Digital SNOWTAM project

Hope to see you there!

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