Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Bill Coleman is considering Ireland as a location for the first foreign base of his latest venture, Cassatt, which provides a framework to automate the management of IT for large organisations. John Collinsreports.
Mr Coleman will be in Dublin to speak at the Create and Innovate conference in DCU later this month and will take the opportunity to meet IDA Ireland about the prospect of establishing a European headquarters.
Although Mr Coleman has not determined what role Cassatt's European operations will take on, he believes the talent base of experienced software engineers in Ireland makes it an attractive location.
"This is not the kind of software we can send to China or India because they don't yet have the years of experience with building high level architectures," explained Mr Coleman. "Ireland has been in this business since the early 1980s and you have the talent base to do it. You have really good people."
Cassatt has already established links with Ireland - local consultancy Orbism is one of its main partners in Europe and has used Cassatt technology in many of its client projects.
Cassatt currently has a couple of sales and services staff working on "early customer opportunities" in Europe, but Mr Coleman said he expects it to be a key market for the company.
Prior to Cassatt, Mr Coleman was founder, chairman and chief executive of BEA Systems, the fastest software firm to exceed $1 billion in revenues. He says the key to establishing a company of such scale is starting with a market opportunity not just a product opportunity and then creating a technology platform that ensures that end users are entrusting their success to your company.
"The platform has to threaten the current large incumbent companies," explains Mr Coleman. "If they adopt it too early it will hit their current revenues. That provides an opportunity for the new company to grow to $1 billion."
When BEA was founded in the mid-1990s, Mr Coleman said Europe lagged the US in adopting innovative new technologies, but that is no longer the case. He singles out insurance giant Axa and telco BT as two European companies that are leading the way in implementing innovative technology.
He also believes it is essential that capital is available to allow the start-up to scale quickly - venture capital initially and then access to the public markets.
Based on that view, Mr Coleman could repeat the success of BEA with Cassatt. He believes there has been a fundamental problem with IT in that it has been about managing computers rather than services or processes.
"We are trying to be the operating system of the network," explains Mr Coleman.
"Out software automates the operations of IT. You can then make IT a utility. By automating the data centre, it can be changed on the fly. You can allow the data centre to adapt to changes in the business and at the lowest possible cost."
Mr Coleman also believes the ingredients are in place for Ireland to build a vibrant technology sector with large local companies that can compete on the global stage.
"Israel has done it with a much smaller technology base," he says. "You have the people who have the capabilities, you have the research and university side - no other country in Europe is as ready to do it."
