About
I was born in Dublin, Ireland.
A qualified Primary School Teacher, I studied in Trinity College Dublin, where I received a Bachelor in Education Honours Degree.
After a brief period teaching in Newcastle in west Dublin, I was seconded into the NCTE (National Centre for Technology in Education) where I was based initially at the Intel Facility in Leixlip, Ireland, working on the scoilnet.ie project and then in Marlboro Street, Dublin at the Department of Education and Science. At Marlboro Street I was based with the communications Unit and worked on the www.education.ie website.
In my spare time, I established a small web design business called IWD Ltd. (Irish Web Designs 
) in 1999. After a year trading, it had achieved a turn over of just over £50,000 (punts) doing web hosting and basic web design.
I established Hosting365 at the end of 2001. The last few months of 2001 saw me frantically putting in place contracts with Inflow (now Data Electronics) and purchasing servers from Encom (thanks George ) and setting up an office in Bray, Co. Wicklow.
After the first years trading, we moved in to new offices in Kilcarbery Business Park in West Dublin and expanded the team and data centre presences.
By 2004, we were the largest hosting provider in Ireland, the first Irish host to join RIPE and INEX and were doubling in size year on year.
By the end of 2005, we had started outgrowing the outsourced datacentre model (and our Kilcarbery offices) and acquired our 25,000 square foot Data centre facility / head quarters.
Since moving in, the business has really thrived, and the new facilities allowed us to start winning more and more enterprise customers.
At the beginning of 2008, hosting365 was the largest hosting provider in Ireland, the only one with our own Data Centre, the only ICANN accredited domain registrar in Ireland and providing 24/7 direct support. We had won the IEDR Annual prize for the last two years and, with approaching 40% of the market, were by far the largest single player in Ireland, and the market leader for domains and shared hosting.
Despite the rampant growth and success in shared hosting, the real development in the business was our evolution towards the provision of higher end managed services and managed internet infrastructure. From the time we acquired our own datacentre in 2005, to May 2008, that side of the business accounted for over 60% of our revenues and most of the revenue growth. The company was developing a ’split-personality’ as we struggled to maintain focus and funding on two utterley diverse ends of the market, catering to consumers and small business (in the tens of the thousands) and to very large websites, applications, corporates and government on the other.
In May of 2008, we sold the shared hosting division to Namesco, the fourth largest such provider in the UK, and part of a much larger pan European group of providers. This raised sufficient capital to allow expansion of the business, investment in our new cloud platform and a razor sharp focus on the higher end services.
In 2007 we came 7th in the Deloitte Fast 50 and 126th in the EMEA Version of the same. We also shortlisted in the Fast 50 in 2008 and 2009, as the business continued growing from strength to strength.
I’m extremely proud of the hosting365 business, the team that (some now left to auspicious roles in other companies) have helped me build the business, and the huge base of loyal customers and partners that have watched us grow, sometimes suffering the growing pains with us, but sticking with us through it all.
In 2009, we made the decision to raise significant equity investment for the first time, to fund an aggressive expansion into the UK on the back of our innovative cloud infrastructure platform. Those moves took a turn with an unsolicited offer from none less that the largest privately held IT company on the planet! Extensive diligence concluded on the 12th March 2010 with the complete sale of Hosting365 to Sungard. (see http://www.sungard.com/ ). They are an amazing team of highly talented people, and I have every certainty that 365 will continue to grow, thrive and innovate under their new ownership.
As for me, I am involved in http://www.dediserve.com/ and have a few more projects in the pipeline…
