London Support HQ to Serve as ‘Beachhead’ for 3Forge Expansion

New York-based analytics platform vendor 3Forge has opened a London office that will serve as the headquarters for its client support operations worldwide, and will be a template for future expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.

Located in Canary Wharf, the office’s primary purpose is to provide support for a growing base of local clients, and US-based or global clients with a presence in London. 3Forge currently provides support from its New York base, but a London location provides overlap with both Asia and the US and allows the vendor to mirror its clients’ “follow-the-sun” workflows.

“We have seen a significant uptick in the number of people building dashboards [using our technology] coming from locations outside the US, with London and Europe accounting for most of those,” says 3Forge founder and CTO Robert Cooke (pictured). “We chose London because most of our clients have a presence in that area … and we want to be as close to clients as possible, so we can offer the best support possible.”

Initially, the office is staffed by two client-facing engineers—new hires John Soulis and Kim Akius. Cooke says the vendor is “definitely looking to expand” and plans to double that by the end of the summer, and will hire developers and business development staff in the future.

Soulis was previously a C++ engineer and quantitative strategist and trader at Mathisys Technologies/Mathisys Advisors. Before that, he was a C++ engineer and data analyst at NGSQ International. Akius was previously a solution engineer at Tableau Software (now part of Salesforce). Before that, he was a scientific researcher in experimental quantum technology and a visiting researcher in the same subject at University College London.

“The best way of acquiring new clients is by providing the best service to existing clients,” Cooke says. “And it means that over the next few months, we can transfer some of the workload to London, and I can focus more on business development opportunities, on expanding and improving the product, and growing the company.”

3Forge also plans to set up a location in Asia in the near- to medium-term, but has not yet decided on a location or specific timeframe.

“We will look at how the business evolves in London, then look to replicate that in a third location. We’ll start with support functions, and grow from there,” Cooke says. “Once we have this support in London, our support people will be able to build close relationships with our customers. And when we repeat that in Asia, we also hope our support desk can build relationships with clients in the region.”