Northdoor expands Irish market presence

17 October 2006

Newswire Ireland

By Che Golden

Technology services provider Northdoor, which has established its Irish arm as a limited company, has said it plans to quadruple its revenues in Ireland over the next two years. As part of its local growth strategy, it is replicating its more successful business units from the UK and will be competing heavily with local companies on IBM skill sets, legacy system transformation projects and consultancy. It will also be recruiting resellers up and down the country to extend its geographical reach, has plans to open an office in Northern Ireland and has not dismissed the option of an Irish acquisition.

Northdoor, which was established in the UK in 1999, entered the local market last year in response to key clients who had moved their centres of operation to Ireland. While director Andrew Chalklin claimed the company has always been steady, 2005 was a turning point - not only did Northdoor launch into Ireland, but it also acquired a company called Platinum Blue, which had AS400 capabilities.

In its first 12 months in Ireland the company has achieved revenues of EUR 2 million and to boost these figures will be importing its more successful UK business units, explained commercial director, Stephen O'Reilly. Hyperion is obviously a strong performer but to date none of the Irish revenues have been in the IBM market. Northdoor is a partnerworld advanced member and its skills set includes the IBM iSeries (formerly AS/400), pSeries, (RS/6000), xSeries (Netfinity) and eServer technology. O'Reilly also has high hopes for the consultancy business where the company will draw on its UK staff but will only charge Irish rates, an indication that Northdoor is willing to take a hit on some projects in order to grow quickly. O'Reilly predicted the company's nine Irish staff would double by next year and hopes resellers will extend the company's reach into other sectors beside its traditional stronghold of financial services.

In July the company launched a fixed-price, guaranteed legacy application moderniSation service to organisations in Ireland and the UK. The service combines Northdoor's consultants with Metex's automated transformation tool to deliver transformed applications in .NET and Java at what the company claims is only a quarter of the cost of an in-house manual redevelopment. The service is designed for companies who want to migrate applications from legacy languages such as Gupta/Centura, Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, RPG, Delphi and PowerBuilder.

'There is a huge opportunity for Northdoor locally because of the way the Irish market works,' said Andrew Chalklin. 'There is a rich SMB market here where there is a lot of buying and selling done purely on a price basis. I don't think that SMBs have found a company willing to be a long term partner yet and that is our pitch - we are here for the long haul and not to simply sell them the latest thing.'

For further information please contact us