Technology services that are made to measure in changing market

FUTURE PROOF:John Andrew Electronic Services Ltd (gprsmodems.co.uk)

THE IRISH tech scene is fast expanding thanks to companies such as Google, Dell and IBM. But there are a number of smaller technology companies carving out a niche for themselves and continuing to grow despite the current economic climate. One such company is telemetry business John Andrew Electronic Services Ltd trading as gprsmodems.co.uk.

The company specialises in telemetry and M2M – which allow measurements to be made and information to be received about a business from a distance. Information can be exchanged between machines, vehicles or containers and centralised control centres.

“To put it simply, I have a house in Co Kerry and when I’m about to drive there I send a text which activates the heating system, so the place is warm when I arrive. That’s what M2M is all about – controlling things remotely,” the Cork-based businessman says.

Andrew started out selling mobile phones before you could buy them in shops. The telecommunications specialist dealt mainly with corporate clients, selling the first mobile phones to companies.

“I sold a phone to the managing director of Pfizer in Ringaskiddy in 1986. It cost £2,500 at the time and was a brick of a thing. These were the days when phones were analog and numbers all began with 088.”

Unlike now, when every man, woman and child has a mobile phone, in the 1980s they were virtually unheard of. Andrew had no shop but sourced the phones from Eircell and sold them to corporate clients.

“Then Eircell, who were the only company dealing with mobile phones at the time, wanted to start selling higher volumes of phones. This was difficult as they were so expensive so they started subsidising them in the hope of making money through calls. Phones were selling for way less than they cost to make and shops were popping up everywhere.”

Andrew didn’t go down the shop route as he preferred dealing with companies where there was repeat business rather than the end customer where the purchase was a once off.

“Then I lost one of my corporate clients, and with them I lost one-third of my turnover overnight. Business was becoming more difficult with so many shops everywhere. The mobile sales industry had become saturated.”

Andrew found he was no longer able to sell phones to corporate clients for thousands of pounds when they were selling in the shops for less than a hundred.

“I had to think of other business opportunities and reskill myself. I needed to diversify to prevent the business from going under so I began learning about data, automated telemetry and M2M,” he says.

Andrew now supplies telemetry equipment for flood risk management through remote control and monitoring, for vending machine control, for traffic light management control, for waste management data collection and for wind farm control and monitoring.

“When I first started out in telemetry I started programming gsm modems for vending machines. They would let the company know when supplies of a particular product were running low so the vending machine could be refilled.”

County councils, waste management companies and government departments are now among Andrew’s clients.

“People are now paying for bins by weight. When bins are collected they have an electronic tag . . . a reading is taken as the bin goes into the truck and again when it is being lifted out . . . through M2M the data is sent back to the control centre so a company knows how much to charge the customer.”

Similarly, Andrew’s telemetry equipment is used to monitor wind farms.

“A wind farm might have eight turbines. If one goes down during the day they’d lose thousands of euro. They don’t have anyone on site at the wind farm so they need to be able to monitor them and control them remotely.”

He has also branched out into the British market buying a co.ukdomain name, with nearly 50 per cent of his business now coming from the UK.

"It was the best thing to do as the population there is over 55 million. You have a bigger target audience when the population is bigger. In fact, a lot of people there think I'm a UK company because of the co.ukweb address I have for the business."

Having the site has also helped expand his business.

“Ireland is in dire straits business wise, everyone is struggling so you have to think about other markets and not be fully reliant on Irish business. That’s the beauty of the internet. I come into work in the morning and there are orders waiting for me from abroad that have been made overnight.”

Andrew is always looking ahead in order to future-proof his company.

“I’m retraining myself the whole time. I recently completed a multimedia diploma at UCC to learn more about graphics as they weren’t something that was important when I first started out in telecommunications in the early 1980s.”