What could a high-technology company with its headquarters in Tralee, Co Kerry, offer the US Central Intelligence Agency? The answer is high-quality images and the company providing them is Stockbyte. It is one of a cluster of businesses that have come together under the Kerrysoft umbrella, a concept conceived by Shannon Development and the Institute of Technology, Tralee (ITT) in conjunction with Kerry-based technology companies.
Kerrysoft's mission is to support the information technology revolution in Kerry and to show the world that IT innovation in the county is flourishing.
In a former incarnation, Stockbyte managing director Jerry Kennelly was a freelance newspaper photographer, working also with the family-run newspaper, Kerry's Eye.
In 1982, he began to see the possibilities for digital photographic images and four years ago Stockbyte was formed as a dot.com company, offering images on CD or the Internet which are now being used throughout the world.
The company offers some 16,000 images on its CDs, but the images can also be downloaded for a once-off payment via the Internet.
The images cover just about any subject you can think of and are used by organisations such as Saatchi & Saatchi, Kodak, Yellow Pages, Newsweek, the Washington Post, American Express and, as already mentioned, the CIA.
Allowing for client confidentiality, surely it was fair to ask what the CIA wanted the images for.
"I don't know," said Mr Kennelly, "They don't tell me. I never deal with a person, just a number. They pay on time, though."
If, for instance, you are preparing a brochure or an advertising campaign in some part of the world and you need a particular image, the chances are Stockbyte will have it.
Toll-free numbers are available in the US for customers whose queries are answered by the Stockbyte call centre in Tralee, staffed 18 hours a day by people speaking in three languages.
An urgent request from San Francisco at 6 p.m. local time for one of the 100 Stockbyte CD packages will be routed through Tralee and the CD will be with the customer at 10 a.m. the next day.
The CDs contain anything from 100 to 300 high-resolution images and are a compilation of the company's on-location photography around the world.
Today a team of Stockbyte photographers will leave for Miami, Florida, for a month-long shoot in America which will result in 1,000 business and lifestyle images. They will form part of the company's fourth international catalogue which will be distributed worldwide next February and will also be available on the Internet and CD.
With 35 employees, Stockbyte has become the fifth largest player in the world in the highly specialised non-royalty market. Once the CD or Internet image is purchased, it becomes the property of the owner.
So far, Stockbyte has 500,000 licensed image owners globally. One of the main competitors in the field is a company owned by Bill Gates of Microsoft. By the end of next year, the Tralee company expects to be able to offer 40,000 images covering business, lifestyles, sport and medicine. The company is 70 per cent owned by Mr Kennelly and 30 per cent by the Dublin-based company, Act Venture Capital.
What Stockbyte has achieved is possible for other Kerry-based companies, too. Companies such as the Kerry Group in the food sector and Fexco, in financial services, have blazed a trail showing that information technology enables companies from Dingle to Killarney to operate in a world market.
Kerrysoft, like Shannonsoft, its counterpart in the Limerick/Shannon region, aims to exploit all that is good in modern-day Kerry.
At the end of January, the initial phase of Shannon Development's £6 million Kerry Technology Park will open on a 50-acre site in Tralee and next September, ITT's business and computing wing will move to a new campus on a 62-acre site adjoining it.
The move, says Dr Henry Lyons, head of development at ITT, will be a seamless one, involving close co-operation with Shannon Development and will give a forceful presence to emergent technology industries in the county.
ITT already runs a BSc course in software development and has added to it a BSc in computing.
The institute has also developed "out centres" such as Killarney Technology Innovation and video conferencing links with Cahirciveen. There are now 2,500 full-time and 1,000 part-time students at ITT.
When the new technology park opens it will play host initially to a core group of 10 Tralee-based companies, including Stockbyte; Microcellular Systems; the Internet publishing company, Guru Books; Pulse learning, which is developing e-learning solutions for the corporate market globally; and Assess Ireland and Aspen Workflow, both software companies.
By the end of next year, there will be 250 employed in the park and the figure is expected to rise to 1,000 by 2007.
The transformation in information technology offers enormous possibilities, says Marie Lynch, projects executive with Shannon Development, and the signs are that graduates in the sector who had left for experience abroad, are returning to Kerry.
The address for Kerrysoft is www.kerrysoft.com