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This week I took the long road to Karsruhe in southern Germany to visit our Germany Business Partner grit GmbH, who were exhibiting at INTERGEO and we joined them on their stand.  Although the show has now shrunk to two halls, boy it was still worth it.  It’s been a very long time since I've been to a show with so much positive feeling around it. 

Much of the show was focussed on the German market with customers flocking to the stands to get a glimpse of the future and to understand the technology. We were no different.  We had a steady stream of knowledgeable and interested people to the stand. There was a strong international contingent to the customer mix and many were from eastern Europe as well as some from the UK. It seems that INTERGEO is still considered to be the show to visit in Europe for geo people.

Snowflake sponsored the CC The Exchange Conference this year.  Held at the headquarters of Ordnance Survey, it attracts a good number of Heads of National Mapping Agencies, and other notable industry Government departments across the world. As sponsor, you get a stand and a chance to meet the delegates during coffee - to speed date them towards your point of view.

So was 5 minutes discussion over coffee enough to get our message across?  Well, judging by the look on most of the faces when we told them "trust me this will save you time and money but you need to change your way of thinking" I would say no. I know we have a great proposition because we have an increasing order book from around the world, great case studies. However, a 5 minute conversation on something so important and so fundamental is never enough.

We did get other chances to discuss our value and technology advantage, but with even more great food and drink plus the national song of Norway (or was it the Geography song of Norway), who am I spoil the party. Anyway all that singing made me smile, not forgetting singing happy birthday to Vanessa in many different languages, which was great and interesting at the same time.

So my point in all of this is that important people need important messages and this is ours...

To evolve, National Mapping Agencies need to adopt new infrastructure and embrace new technology. The trick is to be in charge of change and take positive steps to ensure that change delivers real business benefit. Snowflake technology is providing real benefit at the infrastructure level across many markets and many countries. So Heads of National Mapping Agencies, be bold and take 5 minutes over your next cup of coffee to think about changing your business.

Long before I joined Snowflake, training courses were being carried out here, on "basic" GML and "hands on " GML . They have always been successful and widely talked about around the world. Up till now Eddie Curtis was the only person we could spare (and he wrote the courses) to carry out the training, with increasing demand from new markets we found the need to carry out more training. To provide these new courses we needed more trainers and we have great people in our Pre and Post sales team with fantastic  industry knowledge so who better than these guys to deliver industry focused training. Eddie embarked on a "train the trainer" course for the guys with the result that we have 2 more trainers in Ballal Jogleker and Richard Rombouts, raring to go.

Then two things happed. A customer wanted to know the value of training  so they could sell that to the boss to get the permission to come on the course. That got me thinking, well actually that got Sheila Drake ourTraining Manager thinking, because she runs all the courses, what is the value of training?

We did our investigation and these are our thoughts:

We are in the midst of a global recession and training is one of the first budget lines to be cut when the need to drive out cost is critical. But good companies taking the longer-term view recognise the value training brings to an organisation on both a corporate and individual level.

Successful companies train successful people.

In other words companies are successful because of fully trained people.

From an organisational perspective professionally delivered, relevant training delivers this value:

Reduced management costs - It is cheaper to train existing employees than to recruit new employees.

With a fully skilled workforce, good shared knowledge and skill base, managers are better equipped to manage the risk to their business of long term absenteeism or loss of key employees.

A trained workforce will make succession planning easier for managers.

Training and qualifications will strengthen your employees commitment to your company.  They'll stay longer and you'll save money on recruitment costs.

From an employee perspective you understand that professionally delivered, relevant training delivers:

Employees feel motivated, confident and are better able to do their jobs thereby gaining greater job satisfaction. 

With greater skills levels, employees benefit from increased salary, greater responsibility and possible promotion.

Skilled employees are more likely to have a successful career path.  

Training can give employees a strong sense of feeling valued by their employer increasing morale and enthusiasm. Attending training courses is not just about what is learnt but sharing ideas and experiences with other professionals ? that leaning is then reabsorbed back into the business.

The next thing that happed was that we had to run two courses simultaneously. Not only that but one held in the UK and the other in Europe! That's a first for Snowflake Software.
So major achievements for the team in such a short space of time and it will only get better as we have a new programme of courses coming up (please check out the Website) and a possible move to bigger premises due to demand.

Training in recession for survival is a requirement and essential!

What would you say if I told you Snowflake software had changed? by changing it's approach to business and customers!

I don't mean we sell different software now, we have changed our approach to business because we know what we are as a software vendor, a solutions provider in data exchange that makes a difference to it's customers!

Many of you who know Snowflake software, have been great supporters of what we do and have been watching the company grow for many years, some since it started in 2001. But it's true, we have changed because we realised that we don't just sell products, we sell solutions. We have become a "Data eXchange company" providing transformation solutions with GML/XML data into relational databases or publishing to the web to customer requirements. Its that simple.

At the GSDI conference in Rotterdam last week we launched our new market sectors and "The Data eXchange Company"as the company headline and it went down exceptionally well with the GI community. In fact we had more people talking to us from the GI world about the broader IT perspective of the technology of data exchange, than we had expected. So it was us who had to keep with level of knowledge and appreciation of data exchange because you are demanding it.

This wave of knowledge became very evident when Eddie Curtis our CTO gave a workshop at the conference on Monday regarding "data translation". We had over 80 people listening with some standing outside the door taking note of Eddie's presentation and talk. I would say that at least 50% present were from the commercial side of their businesses and not just technical people. At the end the session the level of questioning showed that indeed people there were looking into the issue of "data translation" as a business issue not just a GI technical issue, wanting business answers to their business problems.

With our new markets launched, a new Snowflake Software company look and feel now visable in the business world, plus on the web, where are we going to take our solutions? Well that's up to you our customers. We are developing a product development programme that all our customer who want too, can get involved in to help shape our products and their solutions. This is one of our Managing Director Ian Painters dream, to involve the customer at the heart of our solutions and push the boundaries of what we do. We know developing customer solutions never stops. We also know some corners of the market are not quite ready for us yet, but at least they are looking in our direction and asking the right questions of us. Watch this space for the "Product Development Programme" and future solution developments.

A big thanks to the GSDI organisers for a great conference this year and to all the people who dropped by the Snowflake stand or attended this years workshops. We had a great conference and time the Netherlands and met lots of new and interesting people and hope to see you all again soon.

For more information on our markets and enabling INSPIRE please check out our website.

So we're nearly there and at this years GSDI11/INSPIRE Conference you will see a very different Snowflake.  After a huge effort behind the scenes we're using the show to launch a new company approach, a substantial website overhaul, two new major version of our products and GO Publisher Desktop Community Edition - a FREE, yes FREE, version of GO Publisher.

With GO Publisher Desktop Community Edition you can "get GO'ing" with INSPIRE, using this free offering to transform and validate your data to the INSPIRE themes.  With a one click deployment  to our enterprise options you can "keep GO'ing" with INSPIRE using GO Publisher Agent and WFS to deliver enterprise ready download and on-demand services. Check out our website from the 15th of  July for more details and to pre-register for Community Edition.

If you're coming to the show you will find lots of information and very interesting workshops to build your knowledge of INSPIRE. We have a new INSPIRE brochure to help explain how we see INSPIRE developing and how best we can help provide you with a complete solution using you existing infrastructure. On our stand (No 12) will be demonstrating INSPIRE data exchange with the production releases of GO Loader V1.6 and GO Publisher V1.4.  We also have new Training website pages detailing our training solutions in each of the markets, so be sure to check those out and see what training we can provide you with.

On Monday afternoon Eddie is taking a  workshop on our experiences with GO Publisher during INSPIRE testing, during the week we also have a white paper on "Data Model transformation for INSPIRE" and as usual Eddie will explain the why, the how and what to do.

We look forward to seeing you at the GSDI 11 show or at the new Snowflake website www.snowflakesoftware.com