START-UP NATION: Frontdesk Anywhere:A RANDOM conversation with a hotel owner in the spectacular Yosemite Valley in the US sparked the creative juices that led to Joe Kiernan launching his first tech start-up – a company that is becoming a global enterprise.

Having graduated in computer science from Trinity, Kiernan (35) worked as a software engineer and technical consultant for a few years, flitting between Ireland and the US and witnessing the collapse of the dotcom bubble first-hand.

After hearing about the archaic systems being used by small and medium-sized hotels, the Leitrim native and his partner Thomas Lyle came up with a business idea that has brought them into 30 countries with a rapidly expanding global reach.

“We were speaking to a potential client and they owned a hotel in Yosemite but the owner lived in San Francisco. He had a hard time checking availability at the hotel. Basically, if there wasn’t someone at the front desk to answer the phone, he didn’t know what was going on,” says Kiernan.

“There were all sorts of data access issues which meant they couldn’t sell rooms because they didn’t know how many rooms they had booked. They were relying on a single desktop computer for everything.”

When they dug a little deeper, Kiernan and Lyle scovered that when developing software for hotels, nobody had considered small and medium enterprises.

Larger hotels were using systems that cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars, with expensive servers requiring continuous maintenance and one-off payments that are not feasible for anybody other than the largest chains.

Smaller hotels made do with a system that had failed to take on board the potential offered by cloud computing and mobile technology.

“Using a single desktop computer, if someone turned it off or accidentally unplugged it, it could take days for them to get back all the information they had lost. Really, what we’re doing is taking an old established industry and pulling it into modern times,” says Kiernan.

“They were slow to adapt. They liked doing things the way they had been doing them, but the way technology has moved on, there is a sea change in the industry and they see this as the way forward. We just happened to be there from day one and so we are leading the industry in this.”

It was in 2008 that Kiernan co-founded frontdeskanywhere. com in San Francisco and began building systems that would allow hotel managers, owners and staff keep tabs on everything from which rooms had been cleaned to who had checked in or out using a smartphone or any other device that can log onto the internet.

The system works equally well for apartment complexes and large residential care homes.

In these days of austerity in which the hotel industry has been among the worst hit, it might not seem like an area with great potential for growth. But Kiernan is finding the opposite to be true for his business.

“The hospitality industry has been hit hard and so a lot of businesses are coming to us to lower their costs. We’re also finding that a lot of people are liquidating their assets, which are in turn being bought up by larger single entities,” says Kiernan.

“So one group might buy 30 properties with 20 different monitoring systems and they want our system to make all the information accessible in one place.

“Using us, they don’t have to buy servers, there’s no hardware, no capital expenditure costs whatsoever and they don’t have to worry about maintenance. It’s just a monthly subscription fee and they’re up and running in a matter of hours rather than weeks or months.”

There are roughly 350 hotels and residential properties using Frontdeskanywhere.comin the US and the enterprise has entered 30 countries.

It plans to expand into Europe in the coming months, with Ireland the likely hub of the operation.

“We currently employ a couple of dozen people here and we’d be looking at something similar in our European office, which is likely to be in Ireland,” says Kiernan.

It’s good news for engineers, who, Kiernan says, are in short supply.

“We’ve had to become more creative about how we go about finding engineers. We have a staff here and we’re happy with who we have, but when we want to find new engineers, we’re finding there is a lot of competition for the best talent.

“So we’re looking to Ireland to provide us with the talent that we need. It’s good news for engineers because they are in demand right now and they are needed in Silicon Valley.”