What happens to Frog UK?

I’ve already had quite a few people ask what this means for the UK.

I understand the nervousness, I have seen many businesses, some in our field, move abroad and damage their UK operations.  We have taken a number of measures to ensure that this doesn’t happen.

Primarily, we have invested heavily into a Joint Venture business in Malaysia that is wholly responsible for the roll out of Frog to these schools.  We are not managing this from the UK.  This will not affect our day to day operations.

Kate Heal, our Operations Director, has taken a leading role in that Joint Venture, and I’m confident that she will do a fantastic job over in sunny Malaysia.

With Kate having moved on, I am currently looking for someone to help me at Frog Towers.  Do you believe that you could be the person to help us push Frog to the next level?

To try to put this into perspective, there are two separate parts to the Frog business, one is a “software house”, and the other an “education service provider”.

From the “software house” point of view we are investing in two areas immediately:

1. Additional staff to accelerate the day to day development of Frog, patch releases, “wish list” development
2. Major new developments.  On the one hand you can expect big things in mobile and tablet technology, and more focus on education specific applications.  On the other hand, expect a number of big surprises.

 

From the “education service provider” point of view:

1. Five more people have already joined our support desk, and we’re still looking for more.  Are you interested?
2. As most of you know, we recently introduced a coaching team, focussed on building up the services available to schools, with a focus on culture change rather than technology.
3. There have been significant improvements in the support process, particularly around how often we are able to update the software.  Due to the sheer number of schools that Frog now work with, we have found it increasingly difficult to upgrade all the servers out there (hundreds of them), so while we may fix issues or add new features quickly, we weren’t as responsive as we’d like to be about getting the updates onto servers.  This caused some of you much frustration.  We now have a new process in place that allows this to be done in hours, rather than weeks, or even months.  I believe this will make a significant difference to our current customers.  Thank you for bearing with us while we worked through this issue.

 

We’ve had an international team for a couple of years now and are already in more than 10 countries, ranging from Europe, to the Far East, and the Americas.  But our software development is carried out in the UK.  We get these international opportunities because of what we’re doing in the UK.

As we get bigger it is undeniably harder to keep everyone happy, but this opportunity gives us the resources to consolidate our position in England – to up our game here both from a day to day point of view and from a product development point of view.  We aim to dominate the learning platform market in England, and we intend to do that by simply doing a better job than everyone else.

Again, thank you to everyone that has trusted us over the years to help with the education of their children.  We’re at Bett on stand M50, please drop by and have a chat.

Gareth