RAISING IONA

IONA Technologies has a problem most companies would die for. The Dublin based firm controls almost 60 per cent of the world market for the particular type of software it makes, but that market is tripling in size every year. So, just to tread water and maintain its market share, Iona has to increase by the same ratio every 12 months.

It's a dilemma that leaves Iona's managing director, a soft spoken Dubliner named" Chris Horn, with many options. Chielamong them is to take the company public and he admits having held talks with several US merchant banks on how this might happen. But he insists that no decision has beef made, and that there is enough private money available not to make it inevitable.

This was not the career path that the young Chris Horn planned for himself at Newpark Comprehensive school on Dublin's southside. After school he did an engineering degree in Trinity College, Dublin, gradually got into computers, and then did a doctorate.

He became a functionary in Brussels, working for the European Commission, and found himself administering a project called ESPRIT, which was related to computer programs linking different pieces of software.

"Based on that experience, I saw there was an opportunity to get involved in ESPRIT in Dublin. So after a year I jumped over the fence again, and came back to Trinity as a staff member," he says.

In 1991, when he was 34, Mr Horn and two others in TCD's computer science department founded Iona.

The product they designed was based around a new concept - that engineers would in future use different components from different computer programs to build software. To do that, they needed to have an electronic chassis to join two or more different programs.

Such a chassis is called Object Request, Broker Middleware, and Iona makes the most popular one. In its first year, with the company being run out of a bare office in TCD, Iona took in about £200,000.

But the worldwide community of software engineers noted that the product made by Mr Horn and his colleagues worked. In 1993, Iona's revenues hit $1 million.

Now the company was gathering a head of steam. It had 15 employees and had to move out of Trinity and into a new office nearby. In 1994, the firm was at $2.3 million. By 1995, revenues reached $8.3 million.

Iona has not released its figures for 1996 yet, but given its market share, and the pace of growth, $20 million would seem a conservative guess. At the mention of such a figure, Mr Horn allows himself a smile: "I can only say that the market is buoyant, and, we're doing very well.

So well, in fact, that within the last 18 months Iona Technologies has opened new offices in Boston and, unusually, Perth, Australia.

"Perth is on the same time zone as most of the Asian countries with which we do business - Singapore, Hong Kong - where Sydney is that much further east. Also, in terms of time, we can get Boston, Dublin and Perth on the telephone simultaneously, round about lunchtime in Ireland, which is useful for management," says Mr Horn.

In 1997, the company is likely to open an office on the west coast of the US, and may also establish a base in Singapore, Malaysia, or elsewhere in south east Asia. Iona's software has been bought by Hong Kong Telecom, which intends to use it in the construction of a major new project on the colony.

The success has generated the possibility of taking the company on the stock market. So far, Iona has grown by using the profits from the day to day operations, through a" Forbairt grant, and by selling a minority stake to Sun Microsystems.

"Where we are today is - we're always looking for opportunities to grow the company faster. Public offerings are one route, private placements, venture capital are other routes. I've an open mind," he says.

Meanwhile, the list of prestigious clients continues to grow Telefonica, Hong Kong Telecom, British Telecom, Bell South, Northern Telecom, Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens Nixdorf, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, Fidelity, Hewlett Packard.

In the lobby of Iona's building is a model Boeing 777 jet the aircraft manufacturer's engineers in Seattle use Iona's leading product, Orbix, to integrate their work.

But the latest twist in the market comes courtesy of another giant Seattle based company, Microsoft. Alone among the world's major software producers, it refuses to accept the international Object Management Group's standard for the software.

"They're not following this standard at all but promoting a different standard of their own. They're trying to dominate the industry generally. What we've done now is to bridge the gap between what Microsoft is doing and what the OMG, the rest, is doing. Our chassis, if you like, can successfully integrate between the two," says Mr Horn.

Confident that no matter what the future throws up, Iona's 240 employees can triumph: "We have a great staff. Irish staff are, world class, and they can be very successful in the mainstream computer market in the world. It's the talent of the staff that has a lot to do with our success.

The software designers come from electronic backgrounds, he adds, but Iona has cast a wide net for talent: "One of our best sales guys used to sell furniture, another used to be a baggage handler for Aer Aran. When we interview, it's not just the resume, it's character we're looking for."

He has no plans to move the company to the west coast of the US: "Dublin's a great place to do business from in this industry. The main thing is electronic connections worldwide, which we have. It's a reasonable base for international air travel - although it's a pity we don't have a direct flight to California."