Re-inventor of software company works hard at keeping fit

For a hardworking general manager of a computer company, Martin Delaney is surprisingly uncompromising when it comes to creating his own space for physical exercise. He plays golf, windsurfs and cycles on road and mountain bikes. He also attends aerobics sessions three times a week.

"That is a priority by the way. I will not miss that. I will walk out of a meeting. If you do not make it [aerobics] a top priority, it will not happen."

He says the advent of the digital age has cut down on the conflict of working and being at home. He can work for an hour-and-a-half on e-mails after arriving home from the gym. Keeping fit and cutting down on that conflict are the secrets of how he keeps a gruelling schedule which makes him a familiar figure at Dublin Airport. "You cannot do this job unless you are absolutely fit," he says simply.

Mr Delaney's work pace is intense because of what the company, Amdahl DMR Ireland, is trying to achieve as a semi-autonomous unit. By the end of 1999 it plans to have increased the number of employees from 270 to 350.

"We just are trying to do so many things right now that we have scheduled ourselves to a point where there is not much latitude for unplanned, unexpected events. The problem is you can only change that a month or two in advance."

Amdahl Ireland has been in Dublin for 20 years. It is a subsidiary of the California-based Amdahl Corporation, which had a $1.7 billion (£1.15 billion) turnover last year and is, in turn, wholly owned by the Japanese Fujitsu corporation.

Amdahl Ireland lost 650 of its 700 manufacturing employees in the early 1990s after a slump in the mainframe computer business, the corporation's only revenue earner at the time.

"Our volume productions were severely impacted by a market move to distributed computing," Mr Delaney says.

At the time, the demise of the mainframe business became a self-fulfilling prophecy, prompting large customers to switch to alternatives as word got around.

But Amdahl Ireland has successfully re-invented itself, much like the parent company which has turned around to a point where two-thirds of its turnover now comes from software and service operations. Mr Delaney remembers that the initial proposal for the future of Swords made to head office met with scepticism. "They were highly consumed with their own problems," he says.

He and other management figures offered the parent company and their customers a range of services for application development and system management software tools. In return Swords has received a total reinvestment of up to $7 million. "There was a period of a year, a year-and-a-half where we were living with the ambiguity of laying people off in one business and recruiting people in the technology centre area."

He explains that the Amdahl transition has continued. It is no longer a technology centre providing the service and recovering the cost, but a commercial enterprise in its own right with a value-added turnover of $20 million last year, actively seeking clients in Ireland and generally outside the Amdahl fold. "The profit and loss management is much more my responsibility now. I think this is a very healthy phenomenon, the ultimate security these days in a successful commercial transition," he says.

The Swords facility is now called Amdahl DMR Ireland following the purchase by the parent company of the Canadian provider of information technology services, DMR Consulting. "Ireland has now become a component of the DMR side of the business," Mr Delaney says. He believes it is a strategy for other multinational subsidiary managers to follow. Becoming an independent contributor to a parent company, to make it dependent on the subsidiary is a strategy which would help protect Ireland from the vagaries of the international computer marketplace.

He gives the example of Seagate, which ceased operations in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, earlier this year. It too dependent on its parent company, he says. Efforts to counter that are sporadic, he says, and a national awareness should be created.

"I do not think the multinational subsidiary management has taken on a sufficient commitment to reduce the deficiencies or increase the value added. There has not been a nationwide endeavour to do this, a nationwide recognition to do this."

He believes that the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Ms Harney, and the IDA should create a forum for such awareness creation. "Maybe what we need is a study group to recommend back to Mary Harney how to increase awareness and get multinational general managers in this area."

Originally from Carlingford, Co Louth, he comes from a family of five whose father delivered bread for McCann's Bakery in Dundalk.

He went to St Michael's College in Omeath before joining engineering firm SPS in Shannon, Co Clare, in 1969. He moved to Braun in Carlow after four years, working as a manufacturing engineer, until 1979. His first management job at the age of 28 was with Computer Automation in Dublin where, he says, "something happened to me". "I felt tremendously incompetent. That led to a very uncomfortable couple of years, a combination of an anxiety and self doubt."

Having already qualified as an industrial engineer, he did a masters in organisational development - "to make sure I understood about management", and recognised that fitness was "a fundamental enabler as well".

Management for him was "the elimination of anything that reduces an individual's effectiveness".

"The employee wants to do the best job, they want to grow their career and they want to grow their technical competency."

He joined Amdahl in 1984, spending three years in California as director of strategic planning. "My wife still calls it the holiday. It might have been a holiday for her, but it was not for me," he says.

But he made contacts and gained an understanding of corporate US culture, a valuable experience which enabled him to get through the storm waiting for him back in Swords.