Barry Murphy

I left UCC in 1973 with a masters degree in electrical engineering and two job offers. The first was from the ESB to join their wholesale sales team and the other was from Irish Life to join their rapidly expanding IT division. I had done a lot of programming during my masters and had taken to it like a duck to water. I recognised that IT was in its infancy in Ireland but would develop rapidly. I choose Irish Life and never looked back.

Irish Life was a great place to start your IT career. They placed a lot of emphasis on training but had a strange approach to recruitment at the time with a number of psychological questions thrown in during my interview. The one that stumped me was “Who did I like best, my mother or my father?” I said I liked them both equally and stuck to it even though the interviewer tried hard to make me choose.

Irish Life was recruiting a number of people as trainee programmers and earmarked an intensive training period to get us started. In their wisdom they decided to get us to start while the vast majority of the company was out on strike. On that first morning I noticed a number of people my own age were strolling up and down the canal opposite the Irish Life offices on Mespil Road while a large group of workers, carrying placards, paraded in front of the building. The strollers eventually cottoned on that we were all in the same boat, had a quick confab and decided there was nothing for it but to pass the picket. We waited until the picket was at the far end and scuttled across and in the front door quickly. We paid a small price subsequently but nothing like the “Coventry” imposed on those non-union members who passed the picket from the outset. The aftermath of a strike can be a bitter time.

Irish Life had an IBM mainframe, a System/370, and programmed mainly in Assembler and a reporting language called RPG. We quickly learned both languages and I remember thinking that Assembler must have been designed by a committee. I reckoned anyone who was good at doing unseen Latin translations (Latin was a common subject in the Leaving Cert back then) would have loved the Assembler language. I was good at the Latin and eventually came to appreciate the intricacies and subtleties of Assembler.

Programmers of later generations have no concept of the processes involved in writing and testing a program in those days. You had to write your code on special coding sheets (separate sheets for Assembler and RPG), have those sheets punched onto cards by the card punch department and then submit the card deck for compilation to the data processing room. If you were lucky you might get the compilation results back within 24 hours but it could also take a few days. The emphasis on testing was rigorous. You were measured by the number of compilations it took to first get a clean compile and then to test it, using your own test data that you had to design with as much consideration as you gave to the coding. Desk checking was an art form I came to appreciate quickly and I applied it everywhere I went subsequently. I am afraid that desk checking is now a forgotten science. The large amount of memory available today and instantaneous compilations from your own desk made it redundant a long time ago.

I spent three happy years in Irish Life progressing from programmer to systems analyst. Andre Marchand was the head of IT at that time and was ably assisted by Harry Elliot, Brendan Tolan, Bob Hamilton, Martin O’Malley, Terry O’Brien, Jack Morrissey, Mick Barrett and Barbara Halpin, amongst others. There must have been at least 60 people in the IT department when I left. It was a great training ground and many companies in Ireland benefitted subsequently from Irish Life’s investment in IT people.

In 1975 I was asked to join Applied Management Systems (AMS) – a small company headed up by Matt Crotty and Mike Butler. They were specialising in small computer platforms emerging from IBM, DEC, ICL and others. Despite the dire warnings from Andre and others about the future of these “toys” I took the plunge and joined AMS. There were just seven people in AMS at that time: Matt, Mike, Peter Walton, Tony Devlin, Tim Ryan (another of the strollers on the canal bank), Pat Chambers and Brendan O’Donoghue. However, it grew quickly thereafter, helped by a good influx by Irish Lifers Tony Foran, Tony Dunne, Tony McGuire and Martin Doherty.

AMS initially focused on the IBM and DEC platforms and I was introduced to the IBM System/32. This was a glorified programmable calculating machine. It posed many challenges for programming, not least being the fact that just 14k of memory was available. Many programs exceeded this and had to either be overlaid in memory (constantly swopping code in and out) or redesigned to break the code into smaller programs. My recollection is that compilations could take a long time.

AMS lists its wares in 1981.
(Source: Irish Computer)

I remember being in Carlingford one day and wrote a reasonable sized program. I had to wait until the company closed at 17.30 before I could compile the program. I submitted the compilation around 18.00, travelled into Dundalk, had my dinner and returned just after 21.00 to find the program had still not completed compiling. It was after midnight when I eventually got into my car to travel back to Dublin. This was not untypical experience in the mid-1970s.

In 1978 IBM introduced the System/34 to the Irish market. This was a major improvement on the single-user System/32 – a multi-user, multi-tasking machine that ran on 64K of memory. The System/34 was primarily programmed in the RPG II language. It became a run-away success for IBM and AMS was well positioned to benefit. It was an interesting experience to partner with a large company such as IBM during this period. They were an aggressive sales company and expected their partner companies to be the same. The MD of IBM Ireland was Tony Furlong but the key IBM people we dealt with were Albert Tee, William Burgess, David Leech, Aidan Keogh, Aidan Farrell and Martin Fullam. We had many a good night celebrating notable successes. The few losses were quickly put behind us after some painful post-mortems.

There were relatively few software companies in existence in the late 1970s, probably a dozen or so and only a few employed more than 20 people. AMS, like most of the other companies, started out as a service company but gradually moved into software product development.

This transformation took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The catalyst was the arrival in Ireland of a large number of US multinational companies. Their parent companies generally had mainframe systems back in the US but the scale of the Irish operation could not justify such an expensive solution. Instead these companies had to resort to using mid-range computers from IBM (initially the S/34 but subsequently the S/36, S/38, and AS/400), DEC (with its VAX machines) or ICL. Nearly all were experiencing these platforms for the first time within their corporations. They had to turn to local software suppliers in Ireland to provide them with the accounting (multi-currency), payroll and distribution solutions they required. AMS was one of the software companies who made the most of the opportunity.

AMS quickly realised there was a large degree of commonality in the requests from companies for the type of systems they required and began to package its accounting and payroll solutions. Packaging then meant developing a system with all the common features required for that application but heavily parameterised to allow variable inputs to be defined by the customer. Packages meant that applications could be sold off the shelf and at a lower price. AMS quickly expanded its range of offerings and most bespoke solutions we were asked to develop became a packaged solution. In time we had offerings for distributors, vehicle management, plant maintenance, stud farms and many others.

However, the most important development was the launch of the Insight Financial Modelling system around 1980. It was a true R&D project developed from an idea that was loosely based on an inverted bill of materials processor. It took financial data and linked it upwards, using a general ledger nomenclature, to eventually produce a budgeted profit/loss summary. It was so successful that AMS soon changed its name to Insight and moved the team who developed it into a separate R&D company called Vector, headed up by Tony McGuire (who later acquired System Dynamics in the 1990s). Separating product development from day to day operations such as selling, installing and support was an important factor in AMS’s success.

Pictured l-r when Insight signed an order for a new IBM system in the early 1980s: Roddy Comyn (Insight), Barry Murphy (Insight), Martin Fullam (IBM) and Norman Walker (IBM).
(Photo courtesy of Barry Murphy. Photographer unknown.)

The early 1980s also saw the first tentative steps into export markets. Interestingly the multinationals were a key contributor in assisting Irish companies, like AMS, in the export of software. Many of the multinationals based in Ireland opened up more plants or sales offices in other countries and again used mid-range systems. They had software systems in their Irish operation on the same platform, so they asked their Irish suppliers, such as AMS, to install their software in these overseas offices. The hardware manufacturers, such as IBM, DEC and ICL were also instrumental in pushing the Irish software companies to export. Internationally they were looking for software solutions to help sell their mid-range computers and in many cases found Irish companies had the best and sometimes only packaged solutions. This piggyback strategy was very evident throughout the 1980s.

By 1985 Insight had a large office in the UK and its solutions were deployed in many European countries, in the US and even in such exotic locations as Japan and Mexico. Insight acquired many customers but a couple stand out. In 1983 we signed our first million pound contract with General Motors to install our software in six countries across Europe. This was quickly followed by a contract with Braun, which was similar but more global in scale. Foreign travel was a great incentive to offer people when interviewing them but it was interesting to see how quickly this “perk” depreciated in value after they had undertaken their first four or five overseas assignments.

In 1982 I became the managing director of Insight Ireland and stayed until 1990, two years after it was acquired by Hoskyns (who were then quickly acquired by Cap Gemini). Insight was a magical place to work. It was full of young, bright and vibrant people who worked hard but knew how to party as well. The social scene was hectic and trips to the UK to play the UK office in football were memorable. Great friendships were made and at least five marriages emerged from the ranks. I made many friends in Insight and still meet many of them regularly. People such as Tim Ryan, Tony Foran, Brendan Comerford, Joe Gorman, John Hudson, Roddy Comyn and many more were instrumental in making Insight a success. When acquired Insight had almost 200 people across all its operating companies.

Other companies who came to prominence and succeeded in this first wave were Kindle, Mentec and GC McKeown. Some companies who prospered for a while but ultimately failed were RTS, COPS and Intelligence Ireland.

Irish software companies had to fight hard to fund their growth. It was generally via cash flow. Bank overdrafts if they could be obtained were modest and personal guarantees were mandatory. Software was very much regarded by the financial institutions as a “Cinderella” industry, very small and populated by nerdy types with little business background. Software had little visibility nationally in Ireland then. Most people, including the Government, believed the software industry was dominated by the US companies who were beginning to set up in Ireland, Microsoft being the prime example.

The reality was that a large number of small companies we cropping up across Ireland, most of them with less than ten people, who would go on to cement Ireland’s reputation as a software hot-spot and major exporter by the mid-1990s. I estimate that at least ten companies were started by ex-Insight people over the course of its existence.

After leaving Insight I went on to become National Software Director, based in IDA, and eventually onto a number of start-up companies before I ended up in Oracle following the acquisition of Netsure Telecom (where I was the CEO). I retired from Oracle in 2010 but continue to mentor some software start-ups.

© Barry Murphy 2017