On my way to visit Zoo Digital (LON:ZOO), a leading supplier of efficient workflow software for the creative media industry, I was reminded of a long ago National Express journey I endured as a penniless student travelling from Nottingham to Leeds via Sheffield, home to the head office of ZOO; as you left Sheffield and headed for the M1, you were taken on a meandering tour of post-industrial Britain, along the Meadowhall Road which now leads to the Mecca of the shopping aficionado in Yorkshire – Meadowhall – or Meadow ‘Hell’, if you are not of the shopping persuasion.   Sheffield, as most of us know, was the ‘home’ of Stainless Steel in Britain.

By the early 1990’s, which is when I took those depressing trips back, there was very little left of the manufacturing sites; essentially, they were now empty brick shells, bordered by elevated mortar piles preventing  illegal squatting by the local ‘traveller’ community.

Beginnings

This is where the ZOO Digital story really starts, with a predecessor company founding and morphing itself in Sheffield; there were strong financial incentives available at the time from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) through a variety of grants to re-energise the city with new forms of employment.  Dr Stuart Green, current Chief Executive of ZOO Digital, an AIM listed company, takes up the story:

“ZOO has its origins in a small software company that I co-founded in Sheffield in 1989 with three others; I had completed my doctoral research at the University of Bristol and we had discussed a number of suitable locations to site our new software business, having agreed that we wanted to be based outside London in a location that provided good value services, high quality of life and easily available software skills, whilst having a ‘centralish’ location within the UK.  Sheffield won out and we are still here today”.

ZOO Digital now has two main geographic locations in El Segundo, California and Sheffield.

The business

ZOO Digital provides software and related services that support the authoring, re-purposing and distribution of creative media.  ZOO claims that its products form an integrated suite of web-based and desktop applications for audio / visual content and printed materials, adapting these media for different languages, formats and delivery mechanisms.

There are currently six core software products available:

1)     Translation management system (TMS) – which…

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