I had worked for Digital Equipment in the 1980s and one of DEC’s major strengths as a manufacturer was its networking capabilities. At the time distributed networks of computer were considered pretty novel. For the employees of DEC it meant that we had access to email and chat rooms which were used extensively.
In 1990 I set up a business with Robert Booth, selling Digital hardware and later consultancy services. However in the very early days we spent our time talking to IT managers and hoping they would source equipment through us.
Our initial success was largely built upon a piece of good luck. We had met a young IT manager in a computer manual printing company called Printech and persuaded him to join us as a pre-sales consultant. Eoin was terrific at his job and knew all of the clever things that a hot IT manager should be doing. The IT managers of Ireland starting listening to him and started ordering from Trinity Group.
Eoin Meehan was, and is, a pretty visionary sort of guy. He introduced us to a piece message switching shareware called PMDF which was recommended at the time by Digital Equipment Computer Users’ Society (Decus).
Out of this arose the idea of providing an internet message switching platform to an unsuspecting Irish corporate world. By 1994 there were two email standards. Many corporate users had standardised on X.400-based messaging. But there was also internet email available from service providers like Ireland On-Line, which was led by Barry Flanagan and Colm Grealy.
‘The internet’, at this stage, meant character-based terminals accessing chat rooms and geeky special interest groups.
As a result of my time in Digital I had no doubt that corporate email was the next big thing. We set up a bank of modems in front of a small Vax in our office in Donnybrook and Eoin Meehan worked closely with Eirtrade to set up X.400 links. Then we merrily sold subscriptions to our TEAM 400 email service.
This service, which began in October 1994, allowed X.400 users to communicate with the larger world of internet email users. More importantly, it could be promoted as a cheap way for small suppliers to link into EDI purchasing systems that depended on X.400 standards. Coincidentally, it allowed early web users to submit orders which could be forwarded as faxed messages. I believe that this was how the first Tesco online grocery orders were transmitted a few years later.
Team 400 also provided closed e-mail services for insurance brokers on behalf of the Assurelink consortium. We met Tom Rourke after he was appointed Assurelink’s network director in 1996. From memory Tom was seconded initially from broker services in Irish Life. Assurelink was trying to piece together a cross-industry set of technologies to make insurance broking more efficient. Although this took a long time to get going, it became by far the largest of the closed groups that we supported.
We had about 100 corporate email customers, when we discovered the World Wide Web. I sat down one weekend and made a list of the areas which I thought would be transformed by the web.
On that list were newspapers, gambling, travel and property sales. We set about implementing joint ventures with various players in these spaces: a property site with the Irish Auctioneers & Valuers Institute (IAVI), a lottery site with the Rehab Group and Independent.ie with Independent Newspapers.
Each of these little ventures operated on a shoe string as they had the most meagre incomes. The IAVI site was more financially successful than most, but never really became a central portal for property. The big estate agents, who were always a little wary of the IAVI site, ultimately set up on their own as MyHome.ie.
Independent.ie was a success almost in spite of itself. Garret Doyle and Gavin O’Reilly, who were the Young Turks in the Indo at the time, were huge supporters of it and worked tirelessly to get it off the ground. There was a great deal of apathy and subtle resistance but fortunately the Irish Times’s Ireland.Com site was apparently a huge success. This goaded the Indo into supporting our fledgling site, I think, in spite of the lack of enthusiasm that CEO Dr Tony O’Reilly exhibited toward all things internet.
We ran the Independent.ie web site on a tiny DEC Vax which we hosted remotely in New Jersey which was, at the time, the cheapest place on the planet to buy bandwidth. I am quietly pleased with the fact that this last site is still Ireland’s busiest web site. It was subsumed back into the Indo in 2001.
As most of these businesses struggled we stayed afloat by providing web site development consultancy.
In late 1996 there were very few people actively engaged in web development. We had met The Solutions Group – Brian Bardin, Mark Russell, Norman Crowley and Pat Crawford – through Assurelink. They were doing a lot of work at the time with IFG Group, which had developed the Lawlink online service for the legal profession. In fact, they were located in the IFG offices in Fitzwilliam Square.
They were struggling to achieve sales and, as we had a strong corporate sales force, coming together seemed a logical progression for both of us. In the end we sat down at Christmas 1996 and formulated a plan to bring the best of the two companies together. We did this by creating a new company which ultimately became known as Trinity Commerce.
This ecommerce solutions business was always a separate operation whose products were cross-sold by the main Trinity Group. Trinity Group was thus notionally the customer of the new business. In the early days it was the only customer, but in a fairly short space of time we became very busy delivering internet-based commerce.
In the meantime our original Trinity Group business in consultancy and DEC hardware had boomed and employed about 70 staff. We soon had around 35 more in web software development.
Norman Crowley and I would have considered ourselves to be the ‘visionaries’ in the mix at the time, but we had two innovations which made us unusual. From the beginning we worked with Eamonn Mulvihill who was, and is, a very talented graphic designer. This meant that our web sites had a professional look and feel at a time when most sites tended to look pretty primitive. Eamonn had come from the very exacting world of magazine and print design in Smurfit publishing.
In addition, on the core technology front, we had Eoin Meehan and two amazingly talented young brothers Brian and Chris O’Byrne. Both had learnt to code as young children when their Dad had bought them a ZX Spectrum. They were prodigiously talented and fast coders, who were able to do the work of a team of ten and at times had to do so.
As an example we once built and launched a book selling site in just three weeks. It had a database of four million books and included a complete payment system. This seems quite normal by today’s standards, but every element of that site had to be hard coded and the results were almost always fast and bug free.
We were now moving toward 1998 and the dot com boom was beginning to warm up in the United States. On the local stage both Eircom and Esat Telecom were both looking for an ‘internet story’ that might enhance their appeal to shareholders. By a happy coincidence they both became interested in acquiring Trinity Commerce.
Eircom ultimately purchased a majority of the company just prior to its flotation and changed the name to Ebeon. Under Bill Donoghue’s management this business expanded to the USA the UK and mainland Europe and was heading for flotation. Sadly Eircom folded Ebeon a couple of years later after the dot com crash.
When Trinity Commerce was sold to Eircom, Trinity Group was sold to the management. The email business became something of an unloved child. It was profitable, but fell firmly into the category of a ‘lifestyle’ business. In those heady days prior to the dot com crash no-one was interested in taking it on full time.
In the meantime Tom Wade, who was close to Eoin Meehan through Decus, had a similar but more specialised business called EuroKom. After consultation with our customers we agreed to transfer the operation to EuroKom, who paid us a royalty for, I think, three years and took over the operation. This went very smoothly and EuroKom stuck assiduously to its side of the bargain. This was at core a gentlemen’s agreement which we had no way of policing or enforcing. As it happens doing gentlemen’s agreements with gentlemen works fine.
Since leaving Trinity Technology I have been involved in a series of technology businesses. I co-founded Prodigy Limited with Craig Bewley which now provides Microsoft Certification solutions in the UK and Ireland. Craig became the sole shareholder in 2007. For several years I ran a gaming animation business based in Manchester called Redvision.
Recently I have become the E Business development director for the Government of the Isle of Man. This involves me leading a team to replicate on a smaller scale the work of Enterprise Ireland and the IDA, growing the population of the Isle of Man and expanding its economy.
Last edit: June 2016
© Jonathan Mills 2016