Paul Kenny, CEO of Dubai-based e-tailer, cobone.com; and Colm Piercy, founder and chief executive, Digiweb, were named as 2012 winners of the Emerging and Industry categories at the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year awards ceremony held in Dublin last Thursday night.
Kenny and Piercy were amongst 24 finalists from across the island of Ireland that made it to the competitive final stages of the 2012 Programme.
Having successfully secured seed funding from Jabbar Internet Group, Paul Kenny established Cobone.com in 2010, offering online, daily deal ‘coupons’ to consumers within the United Arab Emirates.
The business has since grown rapidly to become the leading daily deal website in the Emirates, breaking all e-commerce records in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and today, Cobone.com has 120 employees comprising 26 nationalities, and six regional offices based in three countries that include the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Digiweb was established by former college lecturer, Colm Piercy, in 1997 and in the 15 years since, the firm has gone on to become the largest, wholly Irish-owned independent telecoms companies, offering a full service portfolio to its residential and business customers.
A number of strategic acquisitions, including the purchase of TalkTalk, Smart Telecom, Internet Ireland and Novara, have resulted in the recent, successful repatriation of 40 previously outsourced jobs to Dublin and Dundalk, and in recent years, Piercy has also established Dataplex, which is developing a number of state-of- the-art wholesale data centre facilities in Dublin, UK and Malta. Today, Digiweb employs almost 150 people between its Dublin, Dundalk and London centres.
The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year programme is supported by The Irish Times, RTE, Newstalk, Enterprise Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland and Intertrade Ireland.
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