Expat pair prove ahead of their time

The four workers in Dataway's Irish office on Baggot Street in Dublin are just finishing their day's work as their company's amiable, goatee'd cofounder and chief technology officer, Simon Lewis, arrives at a renovated brick warehouse in San Francisco and begins his.

Mr Lewis and business partner Mr Eoghan O'Neill, two Dublin expatriates who left the Republic in the flood of emigration in the late 1970s, now call San Francisco home. They base themselves and the 14 other employees of their successful firm in an area known for the feisty technology start-ups that have colonised the slightly seedy network of streets south of the city's broad Market Street.

The working hours dovetail nicely, Mr Lewis says, enabling Dataway to keep an around-the-clock eye on the sensitive networks and security installations they do for clients that include entertainment companies, hospitals, some big financial firms and a healthy sprinkling of technology giants.

The two run a $5 million (€4.7 million) company - aiming for $10 million in the next two years - that has never had to advertise or raise venture capital, and are in the enviable position of trying to find a way of managing what could be explosive growth. These days, everyone seems to need what Dataway does: computer networks, particularly VPNs (virtual private networks), which are private networks built for corporate communications and constructed inside public networks like the Internet), and custom-designed firewalls, the protective ring around company networks that keeps outsiders out and company information and sensitive details in.

"We're kind of a mix between a consultancy and a large service organisation," says Mr Lewis.

But what they do is hard to explain and, even if essential, is hardly the sexiest of jobs - routers, switches and cables lack a certain tech frisson. All of which is rather unfair, given that the company does some pretty interesting work, like installing a firewall for a company in Berlin last week which did not require a trip to Germany - it was all done over the Internet. And unusually, one of the small, humming sets of servers in their offices belongs to a Lebanese Internet service provider.

But despite having had an office in Dublin for well over a year, Dataway's founders admit business has been slow to build in Europe so far, although they are kept busy looking after the European arms of US corporate clients. As a consequence, says Mr Lewis, they are subsidising the Dublin office, having knowingly gone into the market in advance of demand.

"The Irish business has been slow to take off directly in Ireland because we're selling services which aren't yet in demand," Mr Lewis says.

Ireland and the rest of Europe have not quite "got the Net" yet, he notes. "But they'll get it eventually, and when they do, they'll need our services."

Mr Lewis believes he and Mr O'Neill have a quality missing from many networking companies - maturity and experience. Being thirtysomething in a sector full of young workers straight from college has held the two founders in good stead because they have both slowly amassed the expertise and working knowledge of systems that even the best training can not produce.

Mr Lewis also has an expansive vision of the Internet and its possibilities and is a firm believer that companies will not just incorporate the Net but will in future, base their whole operations around it.

His outlook can border on the philosophical: "This is our network," he says, meaning that the Internet belongs to nobody and everybody, and certainly not merely the corporate world. "This is interconnecting the human race."

Dataway stumbled into existence six years ago when the two business partners, old school friends in Sandymount, finally decided to throw in their Silicon Valley computer company jobs and become their own bosses.

"In typical Irish fashion we cemented the business relationship over a pint in a pub and shook hands and agreed we weren't going to work for other people any more," says Mr Lewis.

Mr O'Neill, who had been working for computer maker Silicon Graphics, brought a broad knowledge of computer systems to the venture, while Mr Lewis, who was with Farallon Computing, had networks expertise.

The pair were based in a garage until they were on the verge of signing a major contract and needed a real office in which to hold their first meeting with a customer.

From then on, work arrived steadily although it often took forms they had not expected. For two years or so they found themselves designing websites because they understood what was then the complex process of creating Web pages, which had to be coded by hand, without the use of tool shortcuts.

"We were doing this stuff because no one else was," says Mr Lewis. Once design studios slid into Web design, Dataway moved back to its core business of networks and security. The design stint kept income flowing into the company at a crucial time, he says, which enabled them to grow the firm without having to borrow or seek venture capital.

That is a model the two have stuck with - Mr Lewis says they continue to plough profits back into Dataway, own their large rooms of computer equipment outright and have not had to cede management direction.

Thus, they could take the decision to open an Irish office, a development which keeps Mr Lewis travelling to Dublin about five or six times a year. He is slightly doubtful about the Republic's ability to become a digitally-focussed economy, although he would like to be proved wrong.

First, he says, "Ireland's Internet infrastructure is very, very weak compared to what I've seen in Europe."

He is also concerned at Irish companies cautious uptake of the Internet. "A large portion of Irish business has no conception of what the Internet is and can be," he says, launching into a detailed discussion of most Irish Internet service provider's slow connections, the opportunities presented by the recent Cablelink sell-off, and the ways in which companies can run all their operations on a Net-based network.

He would like to see "more smaller, hungrier businesses" in the Republic, the home-grown technology start-ups which signal an energetic and creative entrepreneurial climate. In general, European companies tend to be more conservative than their US counterparts, which can seem almost chaotic, he ventures.

"In the US, in some ways, that chaos can be a very good breeding ground for creativity, for dynamism within a company. For that reason, I think business is easier to do here than it is in Europe," he notes.

But, says Mr Lewis, Europe is rapidly catching up - which is why Dataway is confident it should have its Dublin office. "When it comes to doing the more interesting stuff on the Net, they [European companies] are going to need companies like us," he says. "We're not a flavour-of-the-month kind of company. We're going to be there in the long run."