Seamus Conlon

While I was a student at Queens University in Belfast during the early seventies the university introduced a full degree in computer science for the first time. I had started studying for a joint degree in Pure Maths and Computer Science but the introduction of this new course meant that I was able to give up maths, which I had never really liked. I graduated in 1976 and went to work in the university’s Computer Centre as part of a small team who were developing a more interactive oriented operating system for an ICL mainframe.

In 1979 I joined a small computer company as a programmer/analyst developing debtors, creditors and a payroll system for Irish Pride, a meat processing factory in Walkinstown.  When my employer went bankrupt in 1981 I continued as IT manager at Irish Pride for a further year. I then joined the Dun Laoghaire-based office of the American company MicroPro as an assembly language and localisation specialist. MicroPro developed the leading word processing product WordStar and our team was localising this and other products for the Japanese market.

Between 1984 and 1987 I rejoined Queens University as the head of their User Support and Projects division within the Computer Centre.  I guess after living in the peaceful surrounds of Dublin it was quite difficult to settle back into the more turbulent life of Northern Ireland. We moved back to Dublin when I was offered a job as Systems Manager in EuroKom.

EuroKom’s John Conroy demonstrates the company’s conferencing service for European researchers.
(Photograph source: Irish Computer November 1985.)

EuroKom was a campus company in UCD and our original conferencing service was started in 1983 to provide online communications for the European Commission’s research programme ESPRIT. The service was well received by that community and by 1990 was supporting over 2,000 registered users all around Europe.  We had an office in Brussels which was mainly for marketing, training and local support for our mostly mainland Europe customers. EuroKom was mostly funded by the Commission. We did charge for the service, but the high cost of the VAX/VMS computer systems and maintaining the service on a 24/7 basis far exceeded the reluctant revenue stream that our customers were obliged, though not always willing, to pay.

We found a second source of income after Microsoft set up a localisation unit in Sandyford in 1988. The company needed some way for their localisation partners around Europe to exchange documents and files with them. We developed an integrated system of scripts and direct communications links that allowed these service providers to transfer data from their PCs to EuroKom’s servers. Microsoft was then able to download the files from our VMS system. That arrangement lasted for several years and was very lucrative for us.

We worked constantly to improve the conferencing system. In 1996 when we had developed a menu-driven front end to replace the command line interface John Conroy, EuroKom’s managing director, had the idea that my ten year old son Damien should operate the system at a big European research conference in Brussels – just to show how easy the new interface was to use. This tactic turned out to be quite a talking point among our customers and certainly produced the desired result.  That idea was typical of John; he was very inventive, especially when it came to doing regular things in new ways. He kept coming up with new schemes for managing staff and tracking projects. John was certainly a visionary at a micro level – a man of ideas, mostly practical but sometimes challenging to implement.

The European Commission was a keen supporter of OSI standards and as one of their key service providers we were persuaded to spend considerable time, manpower and money working with the newly devised X.400 protocol. People were using these standards in their research programmes and we had to support them. The Internet was growing rapidly at that time but was more commercially focused and therefore not encouraged within the EU research community, However, we soon found that an increasing number of researchers were starting to use the Internet in preference to EuroKom and so began the slow demise of our conferencing service.

In 1993 EuroKom won the contract to provide a European-wide animal tracking system for the Agricultural Directorate of the European Commission. The ANIMO (ANImal MOvements) system would record and regulate the import and exports of animals between Member States and with non EU countries. We designed, developed and hosted the system on our VAX/VMS servers. We also developed a PC application which enabled veterinary offices throughout Europe to access the service and provide end users with information in their local languages. ANIMO was hugely important for EuroKom both in terms of a replacement revenue stream and as a valuable reference for our ability to develop and provide a more commercial offering than our online services for researchers.

Our interest in IT communications security evolved organically. We were aware of the growth of anti-virus and anti-spam products for PCs and wanted to protect our own online services in the same ways. In particular, a virus incident during the distribution of the ANIMO PC application focused our attention on the growing need to become involved in this new technology. Though we didn’t consciously investigate if there was a market for secure communications in general – and e-mail management in particular – experiences such as the ANIMO incident led us in that direction.

Our outsourced services really began to develop in 1996 when EuroKom won a contract with the Local Government Computer Services Board to provide a managed e-mail service to all the local authorities. The PMDF mail product on our VAX/VMS system was ideal for providing the flexible service that could integrate the disparate mail systems being used by the County Councils. The service was a huge success within the Local Government community and we gradually signed up other commercial customers, including Glanbia, VHI and Bewleys. We also added more capabilities to the service, including hardware and software firewalls, content filtering and encrypted messaging. In 2002, we launched CryptAll as a hosted encryption service, using software from a local company that we subsequently invested in. Security auditing and consulting followed a couple of years later.

We did not have our own development arm, but we had some clever people on our technical staff who made things work. Tom Burke, for example, got heavily involved in securing the server against viruses and spam. He used two Macintoshes as front-end protection for the VMS systems. In general, we kept expanding the service by following hot topics and choosing best of breed products.

In those years there was no shortage of news stories about virus infections in all types of organisations and we were able to leverage this adverse publicity to promote our anti-virus or firewall services. Incidents that involved inappropriate content could also help with sales. In one case three employees in a local authority were found to have such inappropriate images on their desktop screens during working hours. We supplied the MimeSweeper email scanning product to that council and assisted it to resolve the problem.

In 1998 UCD began to divest itself of many of the non-academic companies that had developed over the previous number of years.  John Conroy, Tom Wade and myself deemed this to be an excellent opportunity to acquire the company and after many months of negotiation we eventually took control of EuroKom and moved off campus to an office in Stillorgan. We also had to relocate our servers and eventually hosted them in the Eircom data hosting facility in Citywest.

Unfortunately, after a long illness John Conroy died in December 2000 and I became managing director of EuroKom.

One of the things I realised was that we should become more heavily involved in our customers’ IT operations by adding more features to our services. In particular, we had built up good relationships with individual city and county councils and could supplement the secure e-mail service with Internet access, web hosting and domain administration. We also resold and supported security appliances and software applications on customer premises.

By the second half of the 2000s people were much more conscious of security issues than they had been in the 1990s. We focused on selling a range of security products and services to our loyal customer base. In fact we were often asked to supply such products because our clients had been unable to find other sources that could provide the same level and quality of support that they had become used to from EuroKom. During this period we develop close relationships with some major manufacturers of security products, such as McAfee, Symantec and Checkpoint.

I left the managed services business in 2009 when Topsec Technology acquired EuroKom. Though mostly retired now and trying to lower my golf handicap I still dabble in various IT projects and am currently involved in a new startup business that will offer mobile phone-based ordering from takeaways and restaurants.

Last edit: May 2016

© Seamus Conlon 2016