Business technology provider Datapac has appointed Edel Creely as managing director. She replaces David Laird, who held the role since the company was founded in 1982.

Datapac was initially established in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford and is now one of the State's largest indigenous IT suppliers with 220 staff at offices in Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Wexford.

It had a turnover €54.9 million and a pre-tax profit of €1.3 million in 2006 according to accounts recently filed with the Companies Office. Datapac also had cash in the bank of €6.6 million at the end of 2006.

Turnover is understood to have grown to €65 million in 2007. Ms Creely said her primary task is to "keep driving Datapac forward and have a vision for the business".

Datapac has relationships with a number of big name international technology brands including Microsoft, HP, VMWare, Citrix, 3Com, IBM and Cisco, Ms Creely said, and it was expanding the number of Microsoft products it was offering. The decision to take on its Navision resource planning product two years ago had been extremely successful, she added.

It was also seeing strong growth in demand for virtualisation products from VMWare and it was also expanding its relationship with networking giant Cisco, she said.

Datapac primarily provides services and solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises but it also has contracts with a number of large organisations including the Health Services Executive, which it won in partnership with HP.

Customers are currently investing heavily in enterprise resource planning products like Dynamics NAV and associated technologies such as business intelligence, as well as the back end infrastructure necessary to support those systems, she said.

"It's a constant issue for businesses to try and get more information out of the systems they already have."

Ms Creely, who qualified as an engineer, has been employed by Datapac since 1993 and was commercial director of its systems division before taking up her current role at the beginning of the year.