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When Irish eyes are smiling

Northern Ireland has become an increasingly optimistic place for IT companies, channel firms included

Northern Ireland is a wonderful place, to be sure. To Belfast itself and the city of (London) Derry, you can add the Giant's Causeway, the mountains of Mourne, Carrickfergus Castle, the windswept coastline of north Donegal, and so much more.

It might harbour just 1.7 million souls in 13,843 square kilometres of (mostly) green turf, but increasingly it can be seen as a focal point, a crossroads of culture, or a border country open for business between the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain itself.

Nick Bradley, partner and IT technical manager of small Banbridge, County Down IT support provider and consultancy EOS IT Solutions, says business is looking up in Northern Ireland.

"Since about last May we have noticed a gradual increase in sales, and in our customer base. Things are on the up - but not perhaps as fast as in the rest of the UK," Bradley confirms. "Customers had been holding off spending on servers mostly, but it is starting to come through now."

EOS - which has five staff and focuses on local SMBs, with some consumers and some enterprise work thrown in - sprang from Eagle Overseas in 2011, a local logistics company founded in 1982 that now comprises a range of firms including EOS IT Solutions and its sister EOS Unified Solutions - lately Best Exporter in the Banbridge and District Business Awards.

Bradley notes that in general Northern Ireland follows the same trends as the UK - although perhaps with less pressure on infrastructure and pricing.

In fact, in the recession, residents of Eire came across the border in large numbers to take advantage of the lower prices of various goods and services in Northern Ireland, and this buoyed the local economy to a degree.

As elsewhere, the advances in telecommunications, especially fibre broadband, have made it easier and cheaper to work and do business anywhere.

Customers have become more interested in security, however, particularly in the wake of Edward Snowden's global surveillance revelations, Bradley noted. For example, they're "definitely interested" in cloud hosting and services, but more are insisting that servers be located in the UK or Ireland "and nowhere else".

He is also seeing continued interest in traditional on-premise server deployments - as cloud is not proving cost-effective for small organisations.

"Datacentre servers are top performers, maybe five times the price of an office server. Cloud can be a hammer cracking a nut," he explains.

Patrick McAliskey, managing director of Belfast-headquartered managed services provider Novosco, says it increased its overall turnover in 2013 across its Eire limited company and its headquarters in Northern Ireland by 50 per cent to £23m. "We are boxing well above our weight," he enthuses.

Novosco has 65 staff in Belfast, 25 spread across Dublin, and an office in Birmingham handling business split equally between public sector and private sector - with more of the latter on the mainland.

"Payment terms in Ireland can be a bit longer than is normally accepted in Great Britain," says McAliskey. "But that said, it wouldn't give you any case for concern or reason not to be doing the business. Of course in the recession, it was pretty boom and bust on a big scale."

Financial-sector trauma at the likes of Irish firms Anglo-Irish and Irish Life meant both losses and gains - particularly the latter as restructures and acquisitions were made that put companies back on a firmer footing. Novosco, for instance, now works with Canada Life, which bought Irish Life.

"Northern Ireland is a very small place, there are just 1.7 million people, so there are only a few potential enterprise customers. There are only about 1,500 organisations in Northern Ireland that have more than 50 PCs," says McAliskey. "It's a small market, but it's a great market in which to build up your business."

Are the IT skills hard to find? McAliskey says the skills shortage exists as it does in the UK, but the quality of education is there and it has found staff just as willing to locate in Ulster as to move abroad.

Colin Reid, chief executive of Belfast mobility ISV TotalMobile, indicated that memories of the Troubles are fading. And while a certain amount of Catholic versus Protestant, and republican versus unionist, feeling might remain for some time to come, Belfast is almost unrecognisable as the city that was torn apart by sectarian strife for so many decades.

"Things are going well, I agree," Reid says. "We're a small software business, and we're selling a lot into healthcare and I am certainly seeing greater opportunities to make the healthcare sector much more efficient - having mobile gadgets and software that enables them to work anywhere."

Connectivity has much improved in the past few years - and even if it is lost, TotalMobile's apps have offline availability so the employee on the go can continue to operate, he adds.

For that matter, he feels there is little real difference between doing business in mainland UK, and doing business in Northern Ireland.

"We're a microcosm [of the UK generally], and business is going great; we have grown significantly - although 90 per cent of our business is outside Ireland. Partners include Capita and Civica," says Reid.

The trick, he says, is to either think small or target a niche if you want to become a really large company. This means, he adds, that channel partnership is especially important, so you can reach the right markets.

Last month saw Northern Ireland first minister Peter Robinson host 120 Silicon Valley executives in a bid to attract further foreign investment. Global vendors including Seagate and Fujitsu already have bases in Northern Ireland.

"Belfast is now ranked first after London for attracting foreign direct investment in the UK. Operating costs in Northern Ireland are on average 20 to 30 per cent cheaper than in the rest of the UK and western Europe, due to our transport links, telecommunications infrastructure and the skill base of our people," Robinson says.

"West Coast companies such as Cybersource, Visa, Vello Systems and WANdisco have already brought much-needed jobs and investment."

Bradley, McAliskey and Reid all agree that to continue growing as a business in Northern Ireland means looking beyond Ulster - to the Republic, to mainland UK, and even further afield (and an IT firm needs to be "multilingual" in euros, pounds, and US dollars).

However, all agree too that the lifestyle, landscape and comparatively relaxed pace of life in the North make it an unbeatable base.
"The only thing we really miss is big concert venues," says EOS IT's Bradley. "But I wouldn't want to live anywhere else."

FIVE FACTS YOU PROBABLY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT NORTHERN IRELAND
■ The fifth-century monk we call St Patrick wasn't Irish but Romano-British; he was taken to Ireland as a slave, where he spent six years before escaping. He later returned as a missionary.
■ The first stone of Belfast City Hall was laid in 1898 on land purchased for £30,000. The £500,000 building was designed by Alfred Brumwell Thomas and first opened in 1906.
■ The Ulster Cycle tales assert that one Conchobar mac Nessa was king over the land near Navan Fort, Armagh, around the time of Jesus. Nessa's nephew was said to be the mythological Irish hero Cú Chulainn - "the Hound of Culann", a kind of frenzied Hercules and fantastic cattle thief.
■ Sir James Martin (1893-1981) invented the aircraft ejection seat in 1945 after his business partner, test pilot Captain Valentine Baker, was killed in a crash. Martin was born in Crossgar, County Down.
■ DeLorean cars (as seen in 80s flick Back to the Future) were made at Dunmurry in Northern Ireland. Only 6,000 were ever made. Our features editor once saw one on Oxford Street, London.