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
