A recent forum posting on one of the UK recruitment forums recently gave rise to a lively debate around the issue of how software  and service (for Front Office Recruitment Software in this instance, but it applies equally to may other types) should be valued.

The main thrust of the argument surrounded the idea that one guy wanted to buy some recruitment software for his own use and resented the fact that most vendors had solutions based around some sort of monthly fee.

The argument got quite heated with lots of the vendors jumping it (feet first) to argue their case, falling back finally to the argument ‘But our product XXX is only a fraction of the (‘£3,£6 £10, £30K…’) fees you charge your clients, so what’s the problem?’  

That’s upset some people and I can completely understand why as sometimes the same charge ‘..but you only have to stick a server in telehouse…’ is leveled back which not only betrays a lack of understanding about what the costs of servicing a business really are (and that applies just as much to the enourmous amount of hard work, rejections, missed opportunity and expenditure that goes into finding and placing good candidates as it does deliverying SaaS software), but much more importantly it’s absolutely  wrong in the assumptions it makes around how services such as these compete.

The point is that actually neither software development (particularly if it’s a hosted solution), nor service provided by a recruitment consultant is generally provided on a cost-plus basis.. but rather is a function of the value provided or opportunity offered by taking the service.

Most recruitment businesses  set their pricing around the value their service is to their clients, taking advantage of the skills, resources, access to candidates they have to charge a margin that is attractive to their clients.

Recruitment is of course a competitive business and as a consequence, the majority of people working in the industry have to work extremely hard to earn their keep…. We see first hand just how hard our clients work..   A few do exceptionally well and make a lot of money because they are able to offer better value (in the widest sense) to their customers.. who they would argue (and customers being objective would probably agree) are happy to pay their fees for the value created by the opportunity.

At the other end of the scale, the CV pushers (I’d like to think we don’t have many represented among our customers!), resented by many, offer little value add (and create unwarranted downward pressure on margins that make life difficult for the people who do add value)..  yet for some of the market, the trade off of a low, or fixed cost fee offers them value too (perhaps because they are in a commoditized market or require lightly skilled individuals).. They are still pricing opportunity, although their pricing may be marginal..

It’s not really any different from a software vendor's perspective..

If the vendor has any substance (and like the CV pushers in recruitment, there are many '2 developers in a bedroom' outfits), then they will be investing heavily in product development in order to continue to compete (add value and opportunity) in a highly competitive market (any of the main vendors are spending considerably more than 300K developing/ maintaining their products by the way!).

They need to do this on an ongoing basis. It’s a competitive market with many things that change outside of their control..  new technologies, feature competition, capacity to scale etc (our capital investment in product development/ infrastructure has never dropped year to year).

For most, having a recurring revenue stream is a way of building a stable business where they can plan for the future, without having to charge much bigger up-front fees that would otherwise be required.. For many recruitment companies, this is also attractive as it moves cap-ex to opex and allows them to variablise the cost of providing the service to their users.

But whether they sell the product for an upfront fee and then charge support, or whether it is rolled into a monthly service charge, their business model are still principally priced on the value and opportunity that is offered by buying their product and services vs. the competition.

For some prospective customers, there won't be value (perceived or real) from a given set of features or supporting services for the point they are in their business.. that's absolutely fine, there is nothing wrong with that and you should be free to choose a low/ no cost (or single fee, no ongoing support) solution if it meets the needs of the business.

On the other hand for many (maybe the majority) of recruiters, their front office system is a valuable tool that adds value to their business.. They need that tool to work reliably and they need support when something goes wrong.. whatever that is (very few people today would argue that a recruitment company investing in internal IT resource adds much value). 

For many, a particular strategy that they have to add value for their clients (and are able to price for the opportunity) relies on a set of features/ service level from their supplier which they recognize as a key factor in the success of that strategy and as a consequence are willing to pay for.

Moreover, for many, the ability to have input into the future direction a product takes (we try to pay serious attention to this aspect of what we do.. many of the features that come into each release are 100% client driven), allows them to be dynamic in a way a 1-time purchased solution wouldn't.

So, either way that's absolutely fine...

No one solution is good for everyone (despite what many Vendors sales people will tell you ;-) ) and you should make you buying decision based on the value that the solution offers.. both now (and as importantly), for the future (look at their history, do they have a track record of innovation, regular new features, consistent service)....

As an observation of our side of the industry as a whole, I think this is one perspective that many vendors don't take (which is why you get the 'but its only XXX of a placement fee' arguments).. Not only irritating, but a strategic mistake because if you approach it from the 'How can we innovate to drive up value for our users, so they perceive the relative cost to be lower?' then everyone wins... we get a better (more valuable) product.. our customers get the opportunity that offers.

The one thing no one wants it to be committed to a product/ service that you are paying for on an ongoing basis where the drive to continue to add value (which in real terms means drive down relative cost and increase opportunity) has stopped..  

(we are working hard on the next version of evolve as I write ;-) ).

Have a good weekend..

Hardly a day seems to go by at the moment without a new story relating to online systems security, with password based vulnerabilities featuring heavily in the mix.

Online recruitment software providers seem to be particularly vulnerable with news in the past few days that Elance, the big IT job board in the US has suffered a major breach, resulting in the details for 000's of users being compromised http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/elance_contacts_hack/ This follows on from several other notable hacks including Monster and Jobsite in recent times.

Elance have issued a statement that 'Password security and complexity requirements have been improved'.. which rather begs the question why weren't complex passwords mandatory in the first place?

The answer of course (as is so often the case with datasecurity) is convenience... the average online user today is faced with having to remember dozens of passwords (I totted up myself how many I use on a regular basis just this week and it was in excess of 20.. I don't think that's exceptional).. which most of us would struggle with were all of the providers to insist on strong, complex passwords that varied from site to site...  From an online recruitment system provider's perspective (JobBoards in particular),  they understandably see anything that adds complexity as a barrier to use and in a competitive market, barriers are the last thing they need..

Ultimately though, this is the weakness with username/ password based approaches... you can implement them well.. but the tradeoff is hassle and complexity for the users.. who then find other ways to 'manage' the complexity (usually involving post-it notes and monitors in my experience!).

Right from the outset with evolve, we understood this fundamental problem and designed our systems from the ground up to use a 2-factor system (something you have - a hardware USB key with a unique digital ID and something only you know - a password you set).. the beauty of this approach is that because the key is essentially un-copyable and is protected by a system that locks it out if you get the password wrong on 3 consecutive attempts, you can then afford to have an easy to remember password which in turn then gives you full access to all of the online services you are subscribed to (evolve, OutlookSync, Ensure, Data Exports, Flow etc) in one go.

With evolve V5, we've also included the option for Session Single Sign-on, which basically means that in a given day you can signon just once for all services, rather than once for each..

And because the system operates at a protocol rather than application layer (it makes use of an extension to the SSL protocol to verify your identity using digital certificates), it’s inherently much more secure than even the very best username/ password system is ever likely to be!

Having said all of this of course, I wouldn't want to ever suggest that we are relaxed about security because of this.. Securing online systems effectively requires multi-layered approach and there are many other protections in place to make sure we have every vector covered.. 

At the same time, certainly in so far as our users are concerned, the 2-factor signon system we have is both convenient and secure... jobboards take note (we have very reasonable consulting rates ;-) )

Security around recruitment databases seems to be a hot-topic right now.. perhaps as much as anything else because the economic downturn has unfortunately led to increased redundancies within recruitment the industry, which is I guess often associate with consultants starting up on their own with data 'acquired' at their former employer's expense.

An article on recruiter earlier in the year talked about this specifically:

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/recession-blamed-for-rise-in-recruitment-data...

Obviously the starting point for protecting your own data is to make sure that the contracts of employment you issue are as water tight as they can be..probably specifically detailing conditions around ownership of data in most cases. Obviously that's one for your lawyers, though from what I've seen (a couple of our clients have successfully pursued former employees for this through the courts) it’s not worth skimping on.

In terms of practical steps you can take with you data though, there are a few things I'd suggest you should review and implement both from the perspective of access and then should the worst happen, being able to limit the damage/ pursue the offender.

The first thing to get out of the way is the contradiction that comes because on the one hand you need to make the data accessible (recruiters need it do their job after all!), but on the other means that there are opportunities for people to steal it...

The truth is that there is no complete solution to this.. recruiters need to see the data to do their job.. (yes you could significantly restrict this.. but in practical terms how is this achieved? -years ago we did have a client who appointed a 'Database Guardian'. Their entire role was to act as the intermediary between the recruiters and the database, receiving requests from the consultants, doing the search and sending them the results one at a time... not recommended... they went bust a long time ago ;-) )

So one way or another, the consultants need to have access.

That said, there are still some things you can do to make sure that the type and level of access they have is appropriate.
In evolve, this means reviewing the many 'user access and permissions' options available to you under Global Admin - turning off all of the things that the recruiter doesn't need to be able to access and restricting their ability to do certain things.

Examples of this include the 'Export to Excel' function, enabling the enhanced security options for Candidate accounts (implements workflow check process to restrict access to candidate account details) and scope of Dashboard views (there are actually lots of other useful options in there that aren't directly to do with security, but cover things like making sure a particular process workflow is stuck to.. one for another article probably.. do ask the support guys about it though).

Next on the list is looking at how your consultants are accessing the data.

One of the great things about the 2-factor authentication system we use for evolve (the hardware key 'etoken' that each consultant has) is that you can guarantee that firstly there is only 1 person able to access each account at any one time (so a consultant can't 'share' their username and password with a mate for instance) and the second is that because they are personalised with a digital certificate that is unique to that individual, you can be certain that activity on the system was actually them (both of these facts were material in recent court cases I talked about above).

This is one of the key security benefits evolve offers vs. other online recruitment software solutions..someday the other providers will wake up to just how inherently vulnerable username+password based systems are.. until then, we'll continue to see things like the Monster hack of a year or so ago
: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6956349.stm

evolve version 4 included the ability to switch on login tracking for consultants (Global Admin>Users and Permissions>View Logins) which shows when they logged in to the system each time.

The final technique to consider then database seeding.

This approach seeks to minimise risk that the data will be wholesale copied (with the best will in the world, even if you lock access right down you can't be looking over a consultant's shoulder 8 hours per day.. they could just write stuff down..), while offering you some prospect of catching someone who has managed to copy data.

To be effective, you will need to have a sufficient number of false records and make them all sufficiently plausible (full contact info, variety of email hosts).

The real power of this technique though comes about because you then need to make widely known to the consultants that the database is seeded in this way.

This at the very least will probably prevent the data being mass mailed if it is taken.. more usually in my experience it puts the would-be thief off completely..

The other option of course is not to tell them and then make good after the event.. I know of at least 1 data supplier in the industry who used this to great effect a number of years ago.. my advice though would always be that prevention is much better than retribution (less time and you don't make the lawyers rich !)

A while ago, I wrote about some of the problems people can encounter with 'all-in bundles' in services offices that include a broadband connection (summary: most good, some bad, check you contract before signing to make sure you have options!)..  today though Ofcom have released a copy of their report into UK broadband providers which includes some interesting results.

You can read the Ofcom broadband speed summary  or view the full Ofcom Broadband speed report

If you can't be bothered to wade through all of that, the summary is that for almost all of the surveyed providers... actual throughput was around 50% of the headline figure (so an '8Mbit connection' was actually pushing through 4Mbits)... which for those on the inside of the industry is not new news (the physical limitations of the technology means this will invariably be the case)...

From the service consumer's point of view though, what they are being sold, doesn't match with what they are getting and while evolve customer's don't have anything to worry about from our system's point of view (evolve will support dozens and dozens of users from a typical ADSL connection), the increasing use of online video sites and the balooning average email size is more demanding. With the use of video (online interviews, CVs etc) set to rise, the throughput speed you can attain might just become a more important factor for many.

Interestingly, the one service provider who stood out head and shoulders above the rest was Virgin Media (now owners of NTL/ Telewest), who were also the only provider to have invested in their own dedicated network (everyone else pretty much piggy-backs on BT's cloud).. with Virgin topping out at between 8 and 8.7Mbits on a 10Mbit line, if you have the option they might just be a goood bet.

There is no doubt that this has been a tough year for many of the 50 or so (yes there really are that many..!) front office recruitment software providers out there today..

We've already seen the demise of one or two (RSS Eclipse was most notable, they got 'phoneixed' and fire-sale'd for a few grand allegedly).. with such an oversubscribed market (most of whom are really small 'a couple of guys in a garden shed' operations), further consolidation is inevitable.

The trouble is that with the majority of those providers offering a traditional up-front investment, LAN based license solution.. the pain that many of those businesses are in (they gotta kill-what-they-eat each month to survive) is severe to say the least (in the last month alone, we've seen 3 of the better known providers lose their Sales Managers).. as they say, it ain't gonna be pretty and there are going to be more casualties... 

If you're worried about you current provider, you might want to get a credit check.. Experian have a good service for this).. likewise, if you are thinking of moving, do make sure that they are going to be around for the long term! (by all means check us out too ;-) you'll see we've got a good rating, strong balance sheet and no 'history'..)

Actually, the precarious position that some of the recruitment software providers are in is really only half of the story..

What makes it worse for the LAN guys (and their customers) is that long before shedding sales staff, the have been quitting investment in product development (2 years ago, finding good developers with experience in our industry was challenging.. in the last 6 months, I've seen CVs from developers ex many of our competitors), which means that even when things do improve, their customers are going to find themselves way behind the curve..

For the established SaaS providers like evolve though, life is a much better :-)

The thing is that although it takes a while to build a customer base up (we've been doing this since 2001), the benefit of a stable income stream, coupled with a diverse customer base (200+ customers in 40 sectors), for whom the monthly fee is a really small part of their overall op-ex has really come good.

So as they say..trading conditions might remain 'challenging', actually, but we are in great shape and having made significant investments last year to support future grown and with a strong balance sheet and cash in the bank, to be honest we are pretty happy right now.

In fact, although we'd planned for a quite year, it's been anything but..   Our strong position and commitment to our continuous development program has meant that there's been no let up in the investment we make in developing and supporting our product.

Behind the scenes, the dev team been working had for the past few months on evolve V5.. which is going to be huge news for our customers.

There's going to be an official announcement on it in the next few days, so for now I can't say too much... there are some great new things though, including new tools for search and selection, particular emphasis on recruitment though social networks and some awesome new features for the CV pool that are going to really help all those recruiters who have seen such a huge increase in the number of candidate CVs through to their inbox...

..there's also a new look and feel, lots of new modules and options, an upgrade to document managent and one really big new item that absolutely rocks .... you'll have to wait a few more days to find out what it is though ;-)

Talking to a customer earlier this week, they were telling me how one of their consultants had recently posted a vacancy up to the job boards for a position that would usually attract 30-40 applicants, only to come in on after the weekend to find just under 700 (yup that's two zeros) waiting there for her!

That shows just how much this has changed from a candidate driven market to one (in some sectors at least) where vacancies are gold and just managing the candidate applications are the challenge...

Of course one of the unique benefits of evolve is the candidate CV pool technology and the fact that you don't have to create a candidate record in order to process the CV (you simply just drop it onto the index folder and whether its a DOC, PDF, RTF, TXT or HTML file its almost instantly converted and indexed onto the database for all your recruiter to access).. Now that I think about it, I should really do a piece on that…

But back to the theme though… talking about this big upswing in candidate numbers brought up another subject; the client asked me about our system and whether we were going to be able to cope with an ongoing 40% increase in volume.. for them in particular, we currently index around 400,000 CVs (we have around 10 million CVs in total across all of our clients).. and they were predicting that by the year end, this could be as high as 750K… did we have the storage and search capacity for this they wondered…?

The answer of course was yes… when we originally planned  evolve back in 2000, the architecture was designed to allow both scale-out and scale-up, so whether just that client, or ever client increased in the number of candidates, we’ll be able to search them just as efficiently.. Today we have over 70 quad-core blade’s running the evolve platform in one huge cluster…..we could easily scale up to 150, 200 or 500 if that was what was required… that's the great thing about multitenant systems!!

A great system architecture is only half the story though... we spent over £250,000 last year upgrading our storage system to include a new enterprise-class NetApp SAN (16TB of super-high-availability, hi-performance fibrechannel disk arrays).. so as far as space (and disk IO performance) goes, that’s a check too :-)

The thing is though that we are able to spend that money because we are lucky to be established and stable enough to have that sort of cash to hand and serious enough about SaaS delivery to know that you need to invest at this sort of level in order to guarantee your (read..your customer’s) future growth and stability..

In these more challenging times though, there are lots of providers who haven’t made those sorts of decisions.. having put things off, or ‘fudging’ a technology solution to try to get by (you can buy a few TB of storage for a few £10s of thousands if all you need is the space.. don’t expect it to be reliable, secure, fast or scalable though!)….we know this is going on because we keep winning new clients from them who are fed up with performance, reliability or scalability problems they experience..

In particular I guess,  you gotta ask yourself how some of the entry-level guys who offer ‘free’ systems users are really able to deliver it…given that to do the job properly means that those users have a real-world cost to support (even just in infrastructure) that is not measured in pennies or cents of you do it properly…

....the answer is of course that they don’t… rather they get by using low-end kit (servers no better than you could have running in the corner of your office), renting equipment and space from low cost hosting companies (whereas we are an ISP in our own right and don’t rely on any 1 single provider for any aspect of our network or datacenters) and cramming as many customers onto each single server (no bespoke computing clusters here) as they can before renting another…

So I guess that really what I’m saying is that like so many things in life, you get what you pay for.. you just need to make sure that when the times get tough as they are now, the provider you use has a plan and the resources to support the changing needs and growth of your business, backed with the investment to make it happen…. after all, the stuff behind the scenes you probably never get to see in practice.. it’s easy for them to cut costs on their delivery platform for a short term gain, that you won’t get to know about until its too late!

One of the things we've struggled with over the years is the problem of how to keep users up to date with the latest features and options in evolve as they come online.

Actually, we realised a while ago that one of the things that is unique to SaaS is that the frequent development/ release cylcle (which is a great thing because it means we can innovate rapidly to bring continous improvements to the product without having to worry about upgrades and incompatibilities to an installed base) actually presents a challenge when it comes to training our users.

For instance, since V4 was released back in November 2007, we've actually had almost 30 releases and well over 1000 improvements and updates to the core product.

This has included many small features as well as some much larger enhancements.. The thing is that when we talk to users, we frequently find that although they might have seeen the release notes (we send out to company managers just before each release), without someting to put it into context, they often don't get to see the benefit and just go on using the system as before.. a real missed opportunity to get more productivity out of the system.

That's why we've launched the Evolve Academy.. A really simple, bite-sized and cost effective way for you or your recruiters to participate in a continuous training program that will keep them completely up to date as evolve continues to develop.

I've enclosed a full copy of Nick's press release below. If you've got any questions, do drop the support and training team and email - support@evolvedb.co.uk or call 01252 333344.

evolve™ academy launched

23rd April 2009

FCP Internet today launched their evolve academy, an online campus style training and professional services capability for users of their popular on-demand front office recruitment software service.

This new way of updating and helping users comes at a time when businesses are striving to get more out of the investments they have made in technology. FCP are offering this service to their users completely free of charge.

Nick John, MD of FCP said “evolve is a constantly changing and improving product. We release around four new versions every year and have done so since its first introduction in 2001. We realised recently after talking to users that they can fall out of step with the feature improvements and after all, most of these are designed to improve efficiency and make more money for our users businesses. So, this is part of our contribution to helping users in tough times”.

All training for evolve™ is now delivered online directly to users desktops, recognising that recruiters are busy people who find it hard to devote large amounts of time to dedicated face to face training sessions in a classroom format. evolve academy takes small bite sized elements of the product and delivers them to users in a way that fits their working environment and working practices - little and often, rather than all at once.

“This is just one of a number of measures that FCP have taken to provide recruiters with an effective, business benefiting front office service in these challenging economic conditions” continued John. “As well as free access to evolve™ academy, we are also offering a free data migration service (subject to terms) for users transferring from other systems and we are launching yet another upgraded product with a host of new features (Version5) in around four weeks time. Given the financial sense that on-demand, Software as a Service delivery makes, we believe that these additional measures will continue to attract new users to evolve™. It’s no longer good enough to have the sexiest product; you need the whole package to make the most sense for the business. The right features, a service that’s always available, support when you need it and hand holding and advice right through the lifecycle. That’s what you get when you sign up for evolve™”.

evolve™ is the leading Software as a Service (SaaS) delivered recruitment front office solution from FCP Internet Limited.

Nick John – 01252 333344
nick.john@fcpl.com
www.evolvedb.co.uk

Service offices make a lot of sense for a start up recruitment business.. at evolve, we have quite a few  lients who have grown way beyond start-up (100-200 consultants now) who are still in service office space, simply because it offers the same kind of benefits that software-as-a-service evolve does in terms of on-demand scalability and variablised cost.

One thing that comes up fairly frequently though is the quality (or lack of) of the service associated with the bundled broadband service that many serviced office providers offer as part of their 'all inclusive' packages.

On the face of it, these all in one deals often look good, often promising several MB of connectivity as part of the package.

And to be fair, many of the service offerings do work pretty well. At evolve, We have lots of customers working out of service offices (including both high-street names and independents) who use the bundled broadband service and get on fine with no problems.

At the same time, we do see quite a few who don't which is obviously a concern for us as this impacts on their experience with evolve.

Common complaints associated with Service Office bundled Internet connectivity are :

• Lack of reliability.
• General slowness or slowness are particular times of the day or week.
• Restrictions on the use of certain protocols or applications.
• Routing issues (can't get to some locations on the internet).

Frequently attempts to then resolve this with the service office provider are then met either with a lack of commitment (often it is a service they in turn outsorce and getting to speak to the right people is difficult), or with a response that is something along the lines of:

'that is just our basic service which is shared and therefore has no SLA..but guess what we can sell you you own dedicated connection for just £LARGE SUM per month! (oh, and our terms don't allow you to get you own independant ADSL line in either)..have a nice day'

Ouch!

So a couple of things to make sure you do about if you are about to sign into a contract for some service office space

No.1  is to make sure you ask them for a written commitment in terms of a service level guarantee for the connection they will be providing.

This should include bandwith (throughput for both upload and download), a commitment to  uptime/ reliability and a list of any protocols/ services that might be blocked. Ask them if they can provide you with some stats (which they should be able to get from their equiptment) to back this up. Ask them what time-to-fix commitment they have in place and how their services are managed (is it inhouse, outsourced or perhaps done centrally).

As far as uptime is concerned, remember that evolve offers a 99.999% service level guarantee to our customers (that's no more that 25 secs downtime per month.. in practice we have delivered 100% for a very long time now).. so if they are offering anything less than 99.9% (about 45 mins per month), I'd look elsewhere.

It is also worth trying to negotiate the right to put in your own ADSL or Leased line, should their service not be up-to-scratch.. you will find that many providers simply won't entertain this (from a practical perspective it might be difficult for them to accomodate), but it is worth asking as we have several customers who have successfully negotiated it in.

As a fall back to this, negotiate up-front for any cost associated with their provision of dedicated connectivty at any point in the future. The starting point for your negotiation should be the cost of independently providing ADSL.

If you are already in a contract of course, your options might be more limited. In the first instance, do take a look at the detail of your contract. You may well find that ther are committed to offering a

service level that is not being met, or that there is some other clause that will allow you to bring pressure to bear.

When it comes to fault-finding/ making a case there are also a few things you can do that will help.

1. Log the times when the service is poor, or unavailable. If they know exactly when something occured, they may be able to cross-reference it with an activity on the network.

2. Use a tool like PingPlotter www.pingplotter.com to record network performance against a well-known, reliable host (bbc.co.uk is a good bet for this). PingPlotter will measure the connection's latency (how long traffic takes to be routed between your computer and the destination) and provide a graph that you can use to demonstrate performance problems. As a guideline, a typical ADSL connection will run at around 20-30 milliseconds to ping the bbc from a point on the UK network. At 75+ms the connection is noticiably 'laggy' - slow to respond, from tab to tab in evolve for example

3. It's also worth taking a look at just what you are doing on your own network. Is the service actually up (even if it was working well) to supporting all you are asking of it.

evolve itself requires very little bandwith to use (we have dozens of companies who use 2Mb ADSL to support 25+ recruitment consultants), but obviously your milelage will vary according to the other things that you are doing.. particular culprits are video (youtube for instance), audio (iTunes or Internet Radio), file sharing and email (a 1Mb email will take around 30 seconds to send via a 256mb upstream connection, which can consume much of the available connectivity while it goes).

Way back when...

If you have never used it, The 'Wayback' machine over at archive.org is an amazing resource. It can provide you with a snap shot of just how a given website has looked going back through the years. Just type in a URL and it will show you how a site was 'way back when' (try putting in Google to see how that looked in '98).

I was just browsing it earlier to see if I could work out when the last time we significantly updated the FCP/ evolve website was.. thinking that maybe it was 2005 or so...  I was wrong :-(

Yup, 2003 was the last year we seriously changed the look and feel of our website.. terrible I know.. but then in truth we've been so busy building FCP and our evolve™ customer base..well..you know how it is..

The good news is that despite that, we've enjoyed fantastic growth and a loyal customer base all over the world, for which we are grateful.

It really is my pleasure though though to finally be able to take the wraps off this, our brand new site - which we hope you will find informative and useful!

It has certainly been a great deal of work, for which I have to just thank some of the people who have contributed - including Kat, Vince and Lucie at School Digital who pulled out the stops to do all of the design, layout and CSS work for us at short notice.

One thing I promise is that in these Web 2.0 days, we will be making much more active use of the new site - in particular the blogging section here will, I hope come to be a regular way in which we get to talk about the things that are relevant to our customer, users and colleagues; so do check back regularly (or make use of the RSS feed) to see what's new.

As ever, any feedback, positive or negative is welcomed, so do get in touch. Other than that, hope you enjoy the site.

Ben

Ben Stoneham, CTO, FCP