Enterprise Ireland – Best Connected -

In common with most people coming from a Software background, I’ve often been guilty of focussing on ‘the latest technology’ to the detriment of some of the real opportunites in the market. With both Irish and key exports market ageing (and set to grey further in coming years), one of these real opportunities is in the 50+ market.

Which explains my interest in the Business of Ageing Conference (full programme), being held in the Royal Hosptial Kilmainham, Dublin on the 3rd March. Some quotes from the  conference organizers;

• Wealth and revenues in Europe of persons over 65 is over €3tr
• Wealth and revenues of the baby boomer population in the US is over $2tr
• The declared revenues of the over 65’s in Ireland is €6.6bn
• People age 50 and older control more than 50% of the total U.S. discretionary income
• The discretionary spending power of Australians aged 45+ is predicted to be $218 billion in 2009, 31% more than adults under 45.
• 50-plus households in the UK spend around £250 billion annually, which equates to over 40% of national household spending.
• In Canada the over 50’s control three-quarters of all the personal wealth in the country; buy 30% of all food consumed in the home; have more than $7 billion in retirement savings; are 97% debt-free, and dine out frequently.
• The United States Census Bureau showed that while 40% of the United States population was 50 or older, this group held 75% of the nation’s financial assets and did 55% of all consumer spending

Got your interest? More details and registration for the conference are on the website:  www.businessofageing.com

While we’re at it, here are some Enterprise Ireland clients already looking at this market, in the  IT for Health sector.

Enterprise Ireland is currently seeking new Business Partners to help us create start-up companies.  We want to hear from successful business people to partner with us to transform State funded research projects into profitable commercial ventures. Our Business Partners Programme is fast tracking the creation of new companies by giving you access to our portfolio of potential start-ups. It will be your job to lead them to the marketplace. We would like to hear from you if you have ;

• a strong commercial track record
• excellent business credentials
• capacity to invest
• ability to identify commercial opportunity
•  vision to transform new technologies into solid businesses

Watch out for the adverts in the national press and click here to check out the details on our website.

Microsoft BizSparkCamp with Enterprise Ireland and TechLudd

Where and When?

• Monday, March 8^th – 9am to 7pm (including PitchSlam & Networking)
• Radisson SAS Royal Hotel, Golden Lane in Dublin’s city centre.

Registration Details

• Visit the TechLudd site to sign-up!

Event Overview

As part of the local BizSpark programme, Microsoft Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and TechLudd are delighted to announce BizSparkCamp 2010 featuring Innovate! PitchSlam – an event designed to help accelerate Irish Startups’ businesses and provide the opportunity to be identified as one of the world’s most promising technology start-ups. This day-long conference will run on Monday, March 8^th (doors open 9am) in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin’s city centre. Entrance is free of charge.

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HBAN are dedicated to promoting Angel investment and supporting the early stage entrepreneurial community in Ireland. They work to create an eco-systems that promotes and supports early stage investment market. They are also actively working to increase the number of Angel investors who are interested in investing in early stage companies.

HBAN also acts as a voice to Government, stakeholders, business and the media to promote the interests and needs of the Angel and early stage investment community.

HBAN have recently launched a new LinkedIn Group to support their work in matching Angels to Entrepreneurs. Take a look at the HBAN LinkedIn Group here.

As I have mentioned previously Enterprise Ireland is running a programme to transition ten on-premise software companies into a SaaS business model.   At the start of the programme we thought the biggest issue to be tackled would be the technology of delivering a SaaS solution.   And by we I include the CEO’s of the ten companies.   While the technology element is obviously a key issue, what has emerged from the programme is that the biggest challenge facing the companies is the development of a new business model.  The type of questions the CEOs are now asking themselves are: What is the new business message?   What is the new marketing pitch?   What is the marketing vehicle?   What is the revenue model?

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Meet and engage with Innovate!100 finalists in Dublin March 8th

Produced by Guidewire Group, the Innovate!2010 Pitch Slam in Dublin will feature 10 to 15 Innovate!100 finalists selected from the local region who will give rapid-fire pitches about their startup.

Each startup will receive invaluable feedback from a panel of expert judges, and everyone in the audience will get a chance to select their favorite Pitch Slam presenter. Sign up today to meet and mingle with entrepreneurs, investors, press and other members of the innovation ecosystem at this special networking event!

The Innovate!2010 Program is being supported by a prestigious group of market-leading companies like Best Buy, HP, Motorola, O2 Litmus, RIM, SAP, Sun, SWIFT and Verizon, dozens of early-stage investors, and marquee media partners. Learn more about sponsorship and partnership opportunities, or how to serve as a Pitch Slam judge.

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The Forum on Public Procurement is an independent not for profit body which represents around 1,000 individuals and organisations affected by public procurement.

“Its principal objective is to promote best practice and offer support to both buyers and sellers operating in the public procurement market in Ireland. FPP offers an independent objective voice in the area of public procurement” – Forum on Public Procurement website

This year, the Forum’s annual conference takes place on the 25th of February in the Westbury Hotel, Dublin. It is to be chaired by David McWilliams and themed ‘Promoting Recovery through Public Procurement’.

Enterprise Ireland’s Stephen Hughes will address the conference at 14.40 on the theme of ‘developing suppliers internationally to supply locally’. This address will focus on Enterprise Ireland’s Public Procurement priorities as regards developing our clients foot print in the public sector.

Many of Enterprise Ireland’s client companies have been extremtly successful as regards exporting goods and services to public sectors around the world but have however had few business dealings with the Irish public sector. This address intends to highlight the role Enterprise Ireland will play as regards bridging the gap between our client companies and the public sector both in Ireland and Internationally.

For registration details and information regarding the other speakers at the conference.

Click Here

As you are aware – or you should be aware if you have been reading this blog – we are currently running a programme aimed at transitioning ten of our clients from an on-premise to a SaaS business model.   The company workshops, very ably run by Saaspoint, have been highly interesting and very educational.   The most recent workshop that I attended covered PR in the cloud environment.

Many people perceive public relations as something less than respectable – as clever guys trying to convince the public that what’s wrong is right.  Some see public relations professionals as manipulators of the public mind, rather than conveyors of truth.   From what I gleaned over the last week PR professionals are coming back into their own.   The rules of the game, however, have changed radically over the last ten years.   If you are informing Joe Public about a web based product or service then naturally you have to use the web to do it.   Using the printed word just won’t hack it.

Media coverage in the web is new and offers great possibilities to Irish software companies.   If done correctly, media coverage, can generate direct enquires and web hits.   More importantly by using tools such a Google Analytics you can get a reasonably direct correlation between your PR effort and new traffic to your web site.

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Enterprise Ireland continues to assist client companies seeking commercial funding. As part of these efforts , over 100 venture capital investors from around the world met in November, with 31 leading Irish cleantech and software companies at the Enterprise Ireland International Investor Forum in London.  This is a key event in the annual calendar for some of the most exciting and innovative companies emerging in Ireland to showcase their businesses and present new and attractive investment opportunities to investors from the UK, mainland Europe and Japan.

This is the second year of the event, which has seen the numbers participating increase significantly.  At the day-long event the Irish companies make their ‘pitch’ to the investors, and will then take part in over 280 one-to-one meetings with individual investors to explore specific investment opportunities.  This is a real opportunity for the Irish companies to showcase the depth and quality of technology being commercialised from Ireland to established and respected global venture capitalists and other investors.  It is also an opportunity to broaden the international profile of both the Irish cleantech and software sectors.

Opening the event, Feargal Ó Móráin, Director of Innovation, Commercialisation and Investment at Enterprise Ireland said:

“This Forum is a very significant event in terms of forging links between Irish companies and the global investment community.  This is a key objective for Enterprise Ireland and we see it as critical to securing continued growth finance for innovative and ambitious Irish companies. The availability of equity finance is a fundamental requirement for the setting-up, growth and development of new knowledge intensive businesses and we see the international investment community as being a critical part of the funding ecosystem.  Enterprise Ireland has put significant effort into developing these links and networks across the international investment community and attracting this calibre of international investor to the Forum is an example of what can be achieved.”

The 31 companies participating in the Forum represent some of the best of Ireland’s cleantech and software innovators.  These sectors are expanding rapidly in Ireland and are generating new technology-based companies that can excel in world markets.  The types of businesses being showcased include new-generation bio-fuels, inventive solar solutions and technologies to harness ocean energy and deliver electricity to the on-shore grid.  There are also software technologies for energy monitoring and control, and a novel approach to manage household and industrial waste. Each of the companies participating at the event has demonstrated a focussed and committed approach to research and development.

A full list of the companies participating is available here (pdf)

The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, Ireland are delighted to bring the WCO IT Conference & Exhibition to Dublin, Ireland from the 28-30th of April 2010.

“This will be the first time the conference has been held in Europe since 2002 and the meeting’s well-established reputation for relevant content, enhanced business opportunities and outstanding high-level networking will continue to be well-served through the conference theme, ‘Fusing Data to Transform Business Processes’ and the outstanding destination” 
Official website of the 2010 WCO IT Conference and Exhibition

Last years conference in Morocco attracted an attendence of 500 delegates from the following areas:

• Customs Authorities
• IT Sector
• Broader Business Community
• Governmental and Trade Organizations
• Lending Institutions
• Representatives from Other Border Regulatory Agencies
• Others Involved in the International Trade Arena

Registration details and forms for this conference can be found below: 

Click here

InterTrade Ireland’s highly successful Go2Tender Workshop series is running towards conclusion. There are now just two final two day workshops left, one in Cork on the 22nd and 23rd of February and another in Galway with dates TBC. The combined cost of running the programme plus work place consultancy is €105.

“The Programme consists of two days of workshops with 1/2 day mentoring for every participant company. Eligible participant companies can also apply for up to a further three days of mentoring from an experienced consultant to assist with actual tender development, scoping markets and tailored advice and guidance. Companies will also be able to avail of:
• A tender help line
• A tender alert service
• Assistance with consortia building” – InterTrade Ireland

To date the 234 companies who participated in the Workshop have won a combined €17/18 million worth of public sector contracts. There are a small number of places left on each event.

For more information and application details for the Workshops click below.
Click Here

Enterprise Ireland’s Tech Club is running an event on Social Networking for your business in Eastpoint on the 16th February. If you’re interested in attending, contact your Development Advisor, or get in touch with us here.

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On Thursday 28th January Microsoft Ireland held – in their words – “an informal, celebratory evening marking the commercial launch of Windows Azure”.

Last week a number of EI Clients had the opportunity to visit Microsoft in Sandyford and hear from Cormac Keogh what exactly is Azure and more importantly what it can do for SMEs who are interested in utilising the Cloud to undertake business.At a high level, Windows Azure is simple to understand: it’s a platform for running Windows applications and storing the associated data in the Cloud. It has three core components: Compute, Storage and Fabric. As with any Cloud, Azure runs on a large number of machines, all located in Microsoft data centres and accessible via the internet. The Irish interest is that the latest of these Data Centres is based in Dublin. A common Windows Azure fabric knits this plethora of processing power into a unified whole and Windows Azure compute and storage services are built on top of this fabric.

On Windows Azure, an application typically has multiple instances (i.e. each occurrence of an object where objects are: hard disks, memory, processor, etc.). Each instance runs a copy of all or part of the application’s code and each of these instances runs in its own virtual machine (VM). These VMs run 64-bit Windows Server 2008, and they’re provided by a hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.

Azure lets a developer create applications using either Web role instances and/or Worker role instances. A Web role instance accepts incoming HTTP (or HTTPS) requests. A Worker role instance, by contrast, does not accept requests directly from the outside world as it does not have any incoming network connections. Instead, it typically gets its input via a queue in Windows Azure storage. The messages in this queue might come from a Web role instance, an on-premises application, or something else. Wherever its input comes from, a Worker role instance can send output to another queue or to outgoing network connections. Unlike a Web role instance, which is created to handle incoming HTTP requests, a Worker role instance carries out its work as a batch job.

Both Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service, however, the data store is not Microsoft SQL Server, and therefore it is not a relational system, and its query language is not SQL. According to Microsoft it provides simple, more scalable kind of storage and does so in three formats:

• Blobs: These allow the storage of binary large objects; provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure applications, and offers a form of tables with a simple query language. Blobs can be up to 50 Gigabytes each
• Tables: A single table can be quite large, utilising terabytes of data, and Azure storage can partition it across many servers if necessary to improve performance.
• Queues: These have a quite different purpose. The primary role of a queue is to provide a way for Web role instances to communicate with Worker role instances. For example, a user might submit a request to perform a task via a Web page implemented by a Windows Azure Web role. The Web role instance that receives this request can write a message into a queue describing the work to be done. A Worker role instance that’s waiting on this queue then read the message and carries out the task it specifies. Any results can be returned via another queue or handled in some other way.

As the names suggest, Compute provides computation environment with Web Role and Worker Role while Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue) for large scale needs.

The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called the Fabric Controller. This pools individual systems into a network that automatically manages resources, load balancing, geo-replication and application lifecycle without requiring the hosted apps to explicitly deal with those requirements.

With Azure, as against some of the competition, you can pick your data centre. This, in theory should reduce bandwidth costs. Which brings us to real question – how much does it cost?

There are two basic types of offers to choose from when purchasing a Windows Azure platform subscription. The first type requires no commitment – you pay only for what you use. The second type of offer is a commitment offer that provides a significantly discounted level of service in return for a six month commitment to pay a monthly base fee. Any usage in excess of this amount is charged at a standard consumption rate. In essence, therefore, it’s similar to purchasing a mobile phone. However, its not quite straight forward. There are charges for: compute instances, storage, data transfer in and out, access control transactions, service bus connections, etc, etc. The easiest way to get a handle on the Total Cost of Operation is to use Microsoft’s own calculator, which can be found at – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/tco/ . Interestingly, the only way to pay for Azure at the moment is by credit card. So who in your company is going to blow their credit limit?

The bottom line is that its getting very ‘Cloudy’ out there and there is no easy way to compare the offerings. While there were 100 providers this time last year, by October ‘09 Cloud Computing Journal listed 150 providers.

Like most new technologies you will just have to suck it and see. Microsoft is allowing you to trial Azure for free; however, this offer is only to the end of January. IBM is also offering a free trial and this can be accessed at www.ibm.com/cloud/developer.

Initial findings from the latest Enterprise Ireland Survey of Researchers indicate an increase of 17% in the number that would like to see their research commercialised since the survey was conducted in 2008.   Now, 78% of State-funded technology and science researchers want to see their research commercialised.
The respondents also said that they want more opportunities to interact with companies, face-to-face to speed up the process of getting their technologies into the marketplace.