There was a very good margin in the sale of plug-compatible hardware for Digital Equipment systems in 1987. That was when I started my first computer-related job at CMI, which supplied compatible equipment to DEC and IBM installations. Take Data Products’ line printers, for example. We used to buy them for about £3,000 each and sell them for £6,000 to £8,000. DEC sold exactly the same printers for £18,000. By 1990, however, our margin was starting to disappear. We did not know it at the time, but DEC was under severe pressure and needed to compete for every scrap of business.
The rise of Unix and open systems was one of the reasons why DEC had begun to stall. Sysnet specialised in these technologies. I first became aware of the company by reading the computer press. Then I was headhunted by Mark Sheils, their sales manager. I was considering an offer to join Sysnet when CMI was closed down by its Northern Ireland parent. The decision was made for me.
As a Unix supplier Sysnet embraced TCP/IP and built up a good deal of knowledge in this networking space. It was in Sysnet that I got my first internet connection. Initially, it was on a Mips Computer Systems’ workstation and an X Windows terminal. At the time many believed that this combination would become the standard configuration on desktops. Sysnet also saw a role for PCs in this environment and sold a TCP/IP product for PCs from FTP Software – the market leader at the time.
I remember that the email client on the workstation was very rudimentary. The editor was called the VI Editor; it was fondly known as the Vile Editor because it was so difficult to use. It required three or four control codes to embolden or underline a word. When I got my first PC, it was a quantum leap to be given a much more professional email client called Eudora.
The World Wide Web arrived later. The Mosaic browser was released in 1993 and followed almost immediately by Yahoo. There was no question what you should set as your home page – Yahoo. I haven’t always been good at recognizing breakthrough technologies (see the Google story below) but I knew immediately that everything in computing and networking had just changed profoundly.
I spent three years in Sysnet before setting up my own company, Entropy, in the corridor of an office in Rathgar. I looked after selling and outsourced technical support to BakerRyan. Robert Baker and Michael Ryan were my former colleagues from Sysnet. The first product I stocked was NetManage’s TCP/IP for Windows, which was a breakthrough product as the alternatives only worked on DOS. NetManage had an effective monopoly for a couple of years, which was great for Entropy.
Shortly after Entropy opened in 1993 I encountered IEunet, Ireland’s first internet service provider, and two Irish pioneers of the internet – Cormac Callanan and Mike Nowlan – who were interested in the NetManage product. On the first occasion I went to see them on the Trinity College campus, they suggested I call to another campus company upstairs and introduced me to the founders of Iona – Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Annrai O’Toole. IEunet became an Entropy customer and Iona bought NetManage and the Hummingbird X Windows emulator for PCs.
As soon as Entropy could afford it, I hired Con Grimes – a veteran from the early days of Bank of Ireland’s computer centre in Cabinteely. Colman Morrissey was the third member of the team. He went on to found the successful IT security company Espion. John Ryan joined Entropy in 1994 as a business development manager for our first IT security initiative. John had trained as an engineer in UCC and, after a stint in Canada, worked in business development for Expert Edge. John went on to become Entropy’s sales manager and, when the company grew to over 50 people, became more of a COO and a significant shareholder.
When I started Entropy, Digital Equipment, IBM, and HP each had their own proprietary networking protocols. PCs, which were spreading at an astronomical rate, used other protocols. I recognised that there was business opportunity in the connectivity challenge.
At Entropy we decided to back both of the movements that aimed to network computers from different manufacturers – the OSI model and the competing TCP/IP.
I had became aware of NetManage before I started Entropy and I knew they had no representative in Ireland. I made contact with their European general manager and made a pitch to be their reseller. He was reluctant to give the job to a start-up, particularly one with only one employee! Eventually he said that if I went to the Network Show in Atlanta that year, it would demonstrate enough commitment to clinch the distribution rights for Ireland. I had only enough money for a cheap motel in uptown Atlanta. It had a carpet I wouldn’t touch with my bare feet and three locks on the door. I actually checked out and moved into another hotel which was only marginally better.
WRQ Reflection was the second product we stocked. It was designed for connecting PCs to DEC and IBM minicomputers. This was not really going down the open systems route, but I figured that the market for it would be bigger in the short term – we had bills to pay! Again I had a very big job persuading WRQ to partner with a one-man band, but eventually I convinced them to do so. This turned out to be a very successful partnership for both parties.
On the OSI side we represented Isocor, a company with very talented people and a range of software, including products based on the OSI messaging standard X.400. We saw that X.400 could become the messaging standard across multiple computer platforms but, as we all know now, it did not take off.
In or around 1994, I approached the ESB through their planning manager and arranged to talk to them about bringing together their separate IBM, DEC, Unix and PC systems with TCP/IP. I went by myself (I think there were only about five people in Entropy at this stage) and found eight senior IT managers at the meeting. These included the heads of the ESB’s DEC and IBM computing platforms, a couple of people from PC networking and Terry Nulty, who managed their Unix systems. I thought I made a great presentation and a compelling case to standardise on TCP/IP. When the planning manager summed up the meeting, however, he said that TCP/IP would never make it out of their Unix network! Three years later it was ubiquitous in the ESB. Sadly Entropy only supplied it for a few of the DEC VAXs and on a few PCs.
Entropy may have been the first company in Ireland to offer scheduled TCP/IP training courses. To get us off the ground we bought courseware from Integralis, an early UK innovator in TCP/IP and internet security. Over the years we built on the course as new developments to TCP/IP emerged, establishing our expertise in TCP/IP and later in IT security.
Our approach was always to spot an international trend and then move into that space. Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player put it well: ‘Some people skate to the puck, I skate to where the puck is going to be.’
Expanding from networking into internet security was not a major jump for Entropy. In 1993 we estimated that the market for PC-to-host connectivity was about half a million punts per annum. We actually got our sales up to one million a year in the third year. But we knew we were close to our sales ceiling and needed to add another product category to our portfolio.
We got the whole team together in the Nuremore Hotel one weekend in late 1995 to brainstorm potential strategies. We generated many ideas, researched three or four and eventually picked firewalls. Because Irish businesses were just using the internet for email and browsing, a firewall was the only security product that most of them required – apart from anti-virus software, which had already gone mainstream and was not really an option for Entropy.
Desk research on firewall products led us to focus on two suppliers that the international computer press considered as the technical leaders. These were Borderware, a Canadian company, and Check Point Software Technologies from Israel. We picked Check Point because they had better partnering and marketing programmes. This proved to be a very good decision. We had learned the value of good partnering from the WRQ relationship. On the day that Check Point representatives came to Dublin they visited three companies that had expressed an interest in becoming their Irish partner. The others – Cara Computers and Priority Data – were much bigger than us, but Check Point chose Entropy.
Our first Windows-based firewall installation was at Musgraves. It took about a week instead of a few hours.
We got into security bit by bit, as each new challenge presented itself, we plugged the gap with suitable products. A good rating by Gartner was always a big plus in our evaluations. We adopted RSA’s two factor tokens for authentication. We picked Content Technologies for content screening and Websense for web content screening. Trend Micro became our choice for enterprise anti-virus products and Entrust for public key infrastructure technology.
After about 18 months we became more strategic about offering complete IT security. The strategy was to build a suite of ‘best of breed’ products that we could integrate for our customers. By now Entropy’s customers were predominantly Ireland’s largest companies and the early data centres. We wanted to provide them with a long term IT security service.
In AIB, for example, we initially installed a simple firewall on Windows. As their access control point had to handle more traffic and attacks became more sophisticated, we moved them to a Nokia platform with a hardened operating system. Later on we added automatic failover and a dual skin configuration.
After firewalls, malware and content screening for email was the next capability that most companies required. They wanted to screen messages for profanities and content inconsistent with their security policies. Later on there was a also a demand for web content screening to block access to inappropriate websites and to control timewasting by employees.
Frank Quinn from ComputerScope magazine circulated a proposal for an ‘Irish Internet Developers Association’ in December 1996 and a meeting followed on 13 January in the Westbury Hotel. I recollect that 50-100 people turned up. A committee of volunteers was formed and somehow I got co-opted onto it. Frank told me some years later that my biggest contribution was a suggestion that we should invite end users to join, not just suppliers, because the internet was a democracy. This caused a little bit of discussion but no major objections, and we were each tasked with inviting some of our customers. This was how the Irish Internet Association (IIA) began.
An early IIA board meeting set up various subcommittees – one technical, another for training and a third to lobby the government. I was asked to lead the technical subcommittee. We did some public relations around security and technical issues and we ran free seminars on areas of interest to the members.
I remember one day in late 1998 Denise Cox arrived to an IIA board meeting and told us about a new company called Google whose search engine worked amazingly well. I didn’t think the world needed another search engine company. Yahoo wasn’t fantastic but it did the job fine. This was not one of my better calls!
Up to 2000 Entropy probably held over 70% of the internet security market, excluding mainstream anti-virus software. We did not encounter serious competition before 2001 and, due to the growth of the internet, demand kept increasing rapidly. John Ryan and I sold Entropy to Calyx in March 2006. John went on to create IT services company Zinopy and I co-founded Real World Retail with John Hogan in 2013, supplying cloud-based data analytics for retailers.
Last edit: April 2016
© Conall Lavery 2016