ORIGINA, A Dublin-based business technology provider, is to invest €1.1 million in developing a cloud computing service, creating 10 new jobs. Part of the funding will be put towards collaborative research with universities to design the service.
The company also plans to seek up to €2 million in additional external funding over the next 12 months to support further infrastructure investments and a move into other markets, including the UK. The service is due to be launched later this year in Ireland, followed by the UK early in 2011.
Origina will provide what is known in the industry as “infrastructure as a service”. With this model, organisations hand over the hardware running their critical applications to a third-party provider which stores and operates the equipment in a secure data centre, carrying out all maintenance. Client access their applications over the internet on a pay-per-use basis.
Tomás O’Leary, Origina’s founder and managing director, said this type of cloud computing model was becoming more widely understood. “The benefits of the cloud are the ability to have better use of IT resources and a cost model based on utilisation,” he said.
The service is aimed at customers with high-end enterprise applications such as inter-bank payments, credit card transactions or payroll systems. “We’ve now built a set of services that we believe address some of the issues in the market. Infrastructure is traditionally complex, costly, difficult to manage and it’s been a dark art. It needs to be as simple and straightforward to use as possible,” said Mr O’Leary.
Origina plans to recruit experienced technologists and PhD graduates to work on its cloud service. The company has 40 employees and contractors. This will rise to 50 over the next 12 months following the investment.
It is also funding several collaborative research projects with universities such as UCD’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, which is providing research, modelling and test procedures to optimise performance of the cloud system.
Of the total €1.1 million, around 20 per cent has been earmarked for equipment and infrastructure, 40 per cent will be on RD and 30 per cent set aside for staff costs. The remaining 10 per cent will be allocated to marketing when the cloud service is launched.
The investment is predominantly from Origina’s own resources. Enterprise Ireland, though not an investor, is providing strategic advice to Origina about expanding internationally.
“The opportunity is quite significant. The market size we’ve currently identified is around €80 to €100 million within Ireland. In the UK, that same market is worth €1.5 to €2 billion,” said Mr O’Leary.
Origina was founded in 1998 as Unitech and specialised in reselling high-end enterprise IT systems from manufacturers such as IBM. Realising that offered limited scope for growth, four years ago Origina set up an innovation team, removing a small number of staff from the day-to-day business to focus on new areas where the firm could provide services and increase revenue.
“We were middlemen and that restricted our business other than the ability to provide a service to customers,” said Mr O’Leary. “We’ve now built unique offerings that are independent of the technology products.”
