Sabeo outlines post-funding plans

Trade

Sabeo Technologies, the Dublin-based enterprise IT service provider, has finalised a €350,000 funding initiative and has moved to new premises.

The funding was led by Brian Long, who is CEO and co-founder of Parthus Technologies, and the brother of Sabeo co-founder John Long. He will receive an undisclosed stake in Sabeo following his investment. ‘The investor brings more than just money,’ Sabeo’s managing director Ned McQuaid pointed out. ‘He brings contacts, advice and profile: Brian is well respected worldwide, he can help to spot opportunities for us and from his time abroad he has sight of changes in the IT market. The choice of the person was very important in that regard.’

Sabeo now occupies the former Network Appliance building in Rathfarnham. In addition to providing office space for its staff, the new location will house a technical support centre from which Sabeo will provide services such as frontline support for Legato products and telephone support for operating systems such as Tru64. A lab facility is also being built, which will have the capability to mirror customer sites.

The company plans to offer managed services to customers, having waited until the market was ready to accept the concept. The move is a tip of the hat to Sabeo’s origins two years ago, when a number of senior employees with the then ailing Trinity Technology Group left to set up the new business.

Then, the provision of remote managed services was not widely accepted and many companies—Trinity among them—built large expensive data centres in advance of demand. Now the time is right for providing these services, albeit at a more modest level, according to Sabeo’s managing director Ned McQuaid.

‘Obviously we were very familiar with it two years ago, we knew there was an opportunity, but it was a distraction. We avoided it early [in the company’s history] as we wanted to get the name recognised. Instead of the “build it and they will come” approach, we’ve developed the capability as the demand from customers has come. We’re finding out what people want and adapting that into our services.’

In tandem with this, Sabeo has earmarked professional services and enterprise backup as growth areas. Some of the funding will be used to invest in keeping its current services staff fully trained and accredited. Investment of €100,000 was also needed to get the company’s lab facility up and running.

Sabeo had a 15 month financial year, from its incorporation in September 2000 through to December 2001. Its revenues for the period were €6.2m, of which 20 per cent came from professional services. For the first six months of this year, the company turned over €3m—a 20 per cent increase year on year. Professional services has also increased as a percentage of turnover and now accounts for 25 per cent of business.

‘We’d be happy to grow that to 30 per cent by the end of next year, but if we can manage to increase the number of people in professional services then we would see exponential growth,’ added McQuaid. ‘We want to double our professional services people, if the market allows.’ Some of the investment will be put to use in a recruitment drive that the company hopes will double the number of employees by 2004.

Read More: Deals done