ONE OF three co-founders of Iona Technologies has been appointed a non-executive director at online financial trading firm Delta Index.
Dr Seán Baker will oversee the company’s technology division and developments of its online trading applications. Last summer, Delta announced it was investing €3 million in its XDeal technology platform to enable expansion overseas with support for multiple currencies, languages and products.
In 1991, Dr Baker co-founded Iona with Dr Chris Horn and Annraí O’Toole to commercialise research they had carried out while in Trinity Colleges computer science department. He held a number of senior positions at the company, including chief technology officer, chief scientist and vice-president of applied research.
The company was sold to Progress Software last year for just over €100 million.
Dr Baker was introduced to Delta by its non-executive chairman, Dermot O’Donoghue, a former head of treasury at AIB.
“I really warmed to the people,” says Dr Baker. “We talked about how to organise their engineering and develop the product. We disagreed on some issues, but we had a great debate.”
He says his role is to ensure that development of the XDeal platform now remains ahead of the company’s business plan as it enters the German and UK markets.
On Dr Baker’s advice, Delta has hired two senior software engineers who formerly worked in Iona’s professional services division.
“You don’t need to hire a huge number – if you hire a small number of really good engineers, it’s better hiring a big team,” he says.
Delta supplements its IT and development resources in Dublin by outsourcing work to India. It is also making use of open source projects to reduce the amount of development that needs to be done from scratch.
Dr Baker plans to divide his time between investing in and advising technology start-ups and doing voluntary work in the sector.
Although he declined to name the other private sector companies with which he is working, Dr Baker is a board member of the National Digital Research Centre, a member of the Advisory Science Council, CIO Ireland, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing’s advisory board and the Irish Software Association executive.
He also chairs a research and development advisory committee for ICT Ireland.
Despite the wider recession, Dr Baker says the Irish software industry is “very strong” primarily because it has attracted professional business managers to complement the strong technical capabilities it has. He says the one area of difficulty is availability of funds to support new ventures.
“Enterprise Ireland provides very appropriate supports for the sector,” he adds, “but internationally we are now seeing venture capitalists backing deals that the banks would have three years ago, and looking for VC rates of return.”
