Chief executive with steely resolve

Pricing has been key to marketing for Tara O'Sullivan of SteelTrace, who has had jobs at Esat, Ebeon and Baltimore Technologies, writes Karlin Lillington

Full of energy, chatter and good cheer, the chief executive officer of Dublin software start-up SteelTrace is not exactly your typical chief executive.

To begin with, she's a woman - and thus joins that (unfortunately) exclusive club of female executives within the Irish technology sector. But that's about as exclusively isolated as she gets - in very Californian tech-industry style, she also shares a large, open-plan office on Dublin's quays with her mostly-male employees, without so much as an excluding cubicle in sight. But even more intriguing is Ms Tara O'Sullivan's history - both family and corporate.

The O'Sullivans seem to have a thing about computers. Forget Trintech's Maguire brothers - the new set of tech siblings to watch may well prove to be Ms O'Sullivan and her brother Seán, who runs wireless technology start-up Rococo Software. Both worked together previously for what is proving to be the main training ground for Irish entrepreneurs, Iona Technologies. And their father, Pat, set up the former Digital Computer's Dublin operations many years ago.

"Yeah, it was pretty hard to avoid computers in our house," says Ms O'Sullivan, although she insists, with a little family leg-pulling, that Seán was the truly geeky one. As a child, she only got the computing bug when Seán showed her how to write a computer program that got the machine to print out "Hi, Tara" over and over.

Then there's the corporate trajectory. In 10 years, Ms O'Sullivan has run the marketing departments of a list of the best-known information and communication tech companies in the State, including two of those that rode highest then fell from grace - now-struggling Baltimore Technologies and the ill-fated Eircom acquisition, Ebeon.

Although she began her career marketing pensions for Irish Life following a degree in business and economics at Trinity and a Master's in marketing from the Smurfit School of Business at UCD, "I was really, really interested in software," she says.

At the time, "there were only about seven marketing jobs in all of Ireland but I knew I wanted something international and very, very fast moving".

That turned out to be the young Iona Technologies, whose software was being sold by software engineers to software engineers. "I went in to do a few things and, after two weeks, I was permanent," she recalls.

Iona shaped her understanding of and approach to the tech market. She describes its approach to marketing its products as "amazing". Iona went into an area dominated by firms that sold products to big organisations and, with a much lower-priced product, created a new market of medium-sized firms.

Pricing has thus been key to her approach to marketing through later jobs at Esat, Ebeon and Baltimore Technologies, she says.

She was headhunted from Baltimore to join SteelTrace as chief executive last November. SteelTrace's main product is available to individuals for about €2,000, and to groups for €5,000. "We want this used everywhere," she says.

SteelTrace is the intellectual-property core of Ebeon, the dotcom that once famously offered its staff new BMWs if they could recruit badly-needed boom-time employees. Ebeon was one of the first companies to falter in the downturn, after Eircom pulled its financial plug. SteelTrace was set up by seven ex-Ebeon employees in February 2001.

Most people probably could not say what Ebeon did. SteelTrace may well face a similar problem in defining its product, a suite of software tools called Catalyze. Ms O'Sullivan describes Catalyze as software that helps people develop software and systems.

It allows people to define, or "capture", the business requirements the software is intended to address. For example, people buy a commercial software product and must merge it with their existing systems, data and business procedures. Catalyze aims to define and smooth that process. "What people are doing is mapping what they have to do with what they want to do," she says.

If that sounds vague, vagueness may be the suite's strength. Consider this: the software, she says, can be used to define and structure any process, not just software and system design. It can be used to help organise business processes, for example, and she was recently told that one man was using it to help construct a film screenplay.

Defining processes is a major challenge for companies at the moment, many of which for business and even legal reasons are moving towards more automated software processes. But defining those processes is extremely difficult, leaving plenty of opportunity for a company like SteelTrace, Ms O'Sullivan hopes.

She thinks a strength of the company is that it is not a straightforward start-up; its software already has a history.

SteelTrace chief technology officer Mr Fergal McGovern developed Catalyze from software he developed at Ebeon. SteelTrace emerged from Ebeon's ashes when an Ebeon partner, computer solutions company Netdecisions in Britain, thought the core Ebeon software idea was worth reviving.

Netdecisions is now SteelTrace's major investor, having given it €1.8 million in start-up funding and a commitment to see it to profitability, which Ms O'Sullivan says is "probably next year". The firm has already grown from seven to 20 employees.

But the relationship with Netdecisions is central to SteelTrace in other ways, she says. Because Netdecisions has placed Catalyze with many of its clients, Ms O'Sullivan says the software program has benefited from a massive, real world beta trial, with constant direct feedback to the small start-up. This has allowed the firm to refine the software quickly in response to actual customer needs.

Ms O'Sullivan also says Netdecisions supports it as a separate company - it is a standalone Irish firm not a British subsidiary.

Ms O'Sullivan shrugs off suggestions that an association with both Ebeon and Baltimore might be negative for her in the market. "I've learned more from the likes of Ebeon and Baltimore, although to watch something build up and be brilliant at Iona - that was great, too," she says. "But it's definitely when things go wrong that you learn the most."

She likes the US for its indifference to the fact that she's a woman and the chief executive. "There, you are who you are - you're only as good as your last meeting," she says. In other countries, people often speak first to Mr McGovern, assuming he is chief executive, she says.

The assumption amuses her and she often asserts her own role by making the introductions herself.

Already SteelTrace has formed a useful relationship with much larger Invensys, a British data manager that also has a US branch. That relationship is helping them get a foothold into America, she says.

But the US is still wincing in the downturn and may well prove even more of a challenge than usual for a small Irish company.