Our History

... in the words of our Managing Director, Ian Painter

Read this before? Then just skip to the Nov 2011 update

In 2001, Eddie and I gave up our jobs at Ordnance Survey (the UK's National Mapping Agency) to set up Snowflake. With a passion for software development and spatial data we wanted to build a techy company to develop software tools that enable data exchange.

In the beginning we had to quickly build Snowflake's brand and so in true techy style we threw 'code' at the problem (afternote: we've learnt about marketing since then). In a little over 3 weeks we built our first product offering - a free OS MasterMap GML viewer. Free to download, the idea behind the viewer was to attract interest in the company ... 10 years later our OS MasterMap Viewer remains one of the most popular downloads for spatial community in the UK.

We started Snowflake with just under £9000, and so giving away software wasn't exactly the best business model to pay the mortgage. So we set about building our firstly commercial offering - GO Loader. We soon realised that the two us couldn't build the product quick enough and so we needed help. Simon joined the board and we managed to persuade Peter Woodsford - one of the founding fathers of the GIS industry - to join as a non-executive Director. With more manpower and a lot more experience we built GO Loader and sold our first licence to the Landmark Information Group (big shout to Terry Barnet of Landmark for having faith in us so early in), enabling us to move to a first premises in Carlton Crescent. At the time Landmark used GO Loader to build the largest spatial database in world - quite an achievement for your first customer and I'm very proud that Landmark still remain a customer today.

Don't get me wrong writing software is great, but, if I've learnt anything its that great software doesn't make a great business you need marketing, sales and on the ball customer service - Doh! To that end in 2003 we had to get more organised and more commercial, and that's where I became Managing Director and gave up my career as a software engineer. By the start of 2004 GO Loader was selling itself and we started to have more employees than Directors - which always a good sign in business!

At Snowflake we're always buzzing with new ideas which is why we don't take big dividends and we re-invest our profits to build and grow. In March 2004 we set down the path of building GO Publisher. Our second commercial product, GO Publisher can be thought of as GO Loader in reverse, but the most important thing is that it completes the data exchange picture. In 2005 we moved to our Eastgate House offices where we began providing GML training and continued to expand our customer base and staff. GO Loader continued to sell in the UK and we sold our first GO Publisher licence to run the EDINA DigiMap project (all credit due to the entire DigiMap team in particularly Chris Higgins and David Medyckyj-Scott).

From day one we had a vision to develop generic Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software, yes it meant more complexity, but in long term we believed it would provide us with the platform to move into new markets and countries. In 2006 it did, and we sold our first licence outside of the UK to Alterra in the Netherlands. That sale to Alterra then gave us the platform to grow, not just outside the UK but also into new markets. In 2007 more of the same, growth in staff and growth in customers, the difference was that most of our growth was outside the UK, picking up some real flagship customers such as Dutch Kadaster.

In late 2008 we set about redefining the commercial side of the business and developing our new market driven strategy. Despite Snowflake's success we're not afraid to look at the business and say we can do better, the problem we had wasn't a technical one it was more we weren't speaking the customer language, so we set out repositioning our messaging into four markets with domain experts dedicated to those markets. These days we no longer just talk about our product features, we understand our customers business and talk in their language, delivering a complete solution through a combination of our products, consultancy and services - seems obvious really but it takes a while to get your head around these things ... we're still learning!

Updated 12 Nov 2011 ...

So its been 2 years since I last added to this page and a lot has changed. 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, Dep, 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