Vancouver's Appnovation Technologies will have a foot in Maidenhead next month, despite the United Kingdom's double-dip recession.
The 2007-founded Railtown-based website development company is hiring its first U.K.-based employee and will open in shared office space in the heart of the so-called Silicon Corridor.
Company CEO Arnold Leung started exploring opportunities in the U.K. six months ago because of an increase in sales and customer leads. "For European operations, we need someone in that area," Leung said. "The time zone difference is pretty huge."
Leung said the company, with assistance from United Kingdom Trade and Investment, looked at locations in East London's Tech City, Birmingham and Reading and sought advice from local companies like Absolute Software and Elastic Path Software, which both have their European bases in Reading. After the initial hire, Leung said he plans to expand the office to five people. "We intend to invest about $250,000 into the area, mostly in salary. At the end of the day, we're a services company. We believe we can generate $1 million, $2 million revenue over the next two years, and it will grow from there."
Maidenhead, which is near London, includes a variety of tech and telecom companies.
"The U.K. is pretty aggressive in getting technology companies to be over in the area. While the economy there is not that great, we find that a lot of companies are upping their IT expenditures on the open source side of things," Leung said. "So it's a huge opportunity for us to be there."
Lower-cost open source software can make an impact in the U.K., where government agencies have been slow to adopt it but might now need to look for solutions out of budget-cutting necessity, said Leung, a Business in Vancouver Forty under 40 winner (BIV issue 1105; December 28, 2010 to January 3, 2011).
"When you cut expenditures you want lower cost solutions, and lower cost solutions a lot of times means open source."
