Ireland’s computer industry is 50 years old this year, if you take as the starting date 1958 when the Irish Sugar Company installed a BTM1201 (British Tabulating System) at its Thurles factory.
Ireland’s most famous software company, Iona Technologies, formed in 1991, delivered the first complete implementation of a new middleware standard, Corba, beating Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and other major IT vendors to the punch. Iona began to clock up major customers and attract big investment and in February 1997 had a $140 million initial public offering on Nasdaq. However in the past decade Iona’s fortunes have started to slip; it is currently valued at $120 million and has static revenues. The question today is can an Irish software company achieve longterm, sustained success in the manner of a Kerry Group or a Cement Roadstone?
The Irish Computer Society (ICS) recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Irish computing sector by recognising individuals for outstanding contributions to computing in Ireland, including John Byrne, emeritus professor of computer science at Trinity College Dublin. Since this department was established in 1969, it has been birthplace of several of Ireland’s most successful IT firms, including Iona, Havok (which Intel acquired for $110 million last year) and Machine Vision Technology (purchased by Hewlett Packard for $100 million).
Other individuals recognised by the ICS include Joe McCarthy, computer consultant and one-man protest against electronic voting machines, Ann Riordan, former country manager of Microsoft Ireland, and Joe Cunningham, former chief technology officer with Aldiscon, who helped to kick-start the SMS revolution in the early 1990s. Aldiscon was acquired by Logica in 1997, and Cunningham has helped build up other telecoms software firms including Aepona, Accuris, Apion and Altion. His latest venture is Ammeon, which transmits rich media across mobile networks.
The Irish IT industry is highly fragmented. The fortunes of small, innovative start-ups are sometimes mistakenly conflated with those of low-tech branch plants of hardware and software multinationals. The relative lack of attention paid to the indigenous software development sector is one of the paradoxes of Ireland’s IT industry.
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