Shaking hands business deal

The view from Donegal

Blogs
Image: Stockfresh

30 March 2017

Billy MacInnesOver the weekend, the local branch of Bank Of Ireland in Glenties held an Enterprise Town event in the gym of the local secondary school. There was a wide mix of local businesses exhibiting at the event, including restaurants, the local hotel, a window supplier, food and craft businesses, and three technology companies.

One of these is IT business Joestechhelp.com, run by local man Joe Brennan, that provides consultancy, Web services and equipment repair. Joe worked in IT roles in the north west of Ireland for more than 15 years before setting up his own business. Another exhibitor was website design company Wildatlanticwebsites.ie run by a couple, John and Cecilia Holden, who recently arrived in Glenties from the UK, buying a house a few miles outside the town and bringing their 10-year-old business with them (and their UK customer base). As their website states: “We have 20 years Web design experience and have been in IT since the days of the abacus.”

John has been programming for many years while Cecilia had a career in investment banking, achieving the role of global head of compliance technology, before moving into Web design. In my brief conversation with him, John readily acknowledged that, compared to the UK, broadband speeds in rural Donegal could be an issue, especially for a Web design company.

Lastly, there was Cerebreon Technologies which, despite the incongruousness of its location in Portnoo, is a very sophisticated data analytics and consultancy operation with customers in Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. The business is run by co-founders Kenneth Doherty, a former R&D manager for Aquamarine Power with a PhD in Applied Maths, and Gillian Doyle, formerly of Watch Portfolio Management in Belfast and the holder of a PhD in Nanophysics.

Given the nature of their business, you’d think broadband speeds could be a very serious issue but Gillian assured me that Cerebreon was located in a patch of Portnoo that had speeds of up to 50mb/s. It has since been upgraded to 100mb/s. Who knew there were such places?

Location, location, location
When I asked how the company was able to set up in Donegal, she said the transport links were good to Northern Ireland and Scotland (a short hop on the plane from Carrickfin Airport). As for investment, Gillian said it probably wasn’t as easy as if the business was located in Dublin because many investors wanted to be very close to the companies they were putting money into. Luckily, the main investor in Cerebreon was much more relaxed about where the company was located.

In addition to the company’s work on data analytics and consultancy, Cerebreon is building software for the UK insolvency sector which will account for most of its business in the future. Two of the five biggest insolvency firms in the UK are located in Derry and Belfast. Talking to Kenneth afterwards, he revealed Cerebreon has plans to increase staff numbers to 15 over the next three years and is in the process of recruiting a software developer and finding offices, either in Ardara, Glenties or Killybegs. A significant number of those 15 will be providing helpdesk and IT help functions which, he remarked, “can easily sit in Donegal”.

He said there was no compelling reason for a business like Cerebreon to move. While people might have to put in a few more kilometres in Donegal than anywhere else, it takes them a lot longer to travel a much shorter distance in Dublin. “Technically, in a lot of cases, a Dublin office is completely unnecessary,” he argued, “but people have a pre-defined recipe of how you have to do something. I think you should sit back and challenge that.”

His comments kick against the easy and lazy consensus that start-up and early stage IT businesses need to move to the likes of Dublin, Galway or Cork to succeed. It’s true there are huge differences between Donegal and those cities but some of the differences are benefits rather than disadvantages. In short, companies shouldn’t feel compelled to move from counties like Donegal to Dublin, Cork or Galway just because that’s what’s expected of them.

Especially as this approach could have potentially disastrous consequences for the country. Dublin already accounts for 49% of economic output in Ireland and 40% of the national population. The city’s spatial pattern has become so disproportionate that it now extends to 11 counties.

IT can play a role in reversing this process but the signs aren’t encouraging thus far. The IT industry can be very quick to use the word “innovative” to describe what it does and sometimes, it even lives up to the hype. But sadly, far too often, companies have to be based in the same three or four places in Ireland to generate the hype. Which, when you come to think of it, merely demonstrates it’s really not that innovative at all.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie