START-UP NATION:MOST SOFTWARE companies like to trumpet the "deep domain knowledge" they have of the sector into which they are selling, whether that's financial services, pharmaceuticals or telecoms.

But not many software executives volunteer to put their lives at risk every day as part of their market research. Robin Blandford, the 28-year-old founder of Decisions , admits there is nothing he likes better than when his beeper goes off alerting himself and other members of Howth Coastguard to a potential incident.

Blandford, a software engineer who has volunteered with Howth Coastguard for almost a decade, has combined the two interests to create Decisions , which has developed an online management tool for search and rescue and other emergency response teams.

He developed the first version of the software in his spare time and shared it with some local rescue teams. So positive was the reaction that Blandford packed in his job as a technology analyst with Thomson Reuters to devote himself to his new company.

Originally called Decisions 4 Heroes, hence the D4H, the company provides its software as a cloud-based service. Currently it has two main modules. The first is about crew and equipment management and is used as the team prepares to respond to an incident. Teams can also log what training members have received and see what areas may need to be addressed. The second allows a team to log incidents they respond to and then analyse the information for patterns.

To date the company has been funded through a series of grants and investment from Enterprise Ireland and last year it won a €100,000 investment from the Arthur Guinness Fund, which supports social entrepreneurs.

Given his technical background – Blandford has a first class degree in digital media engineering from DCU – he laboured on the product for the first year and a half on his own. “Lots of start-ups can be isolated in the early days,” says Blandford. “It was definitely a benefit that when the pager went off – which it does at least once a week – I was getting to immerse myself in search and rescue.”

The location of Decisions office in Howth also meant Blandford was regularly the first of the team to respond to the call-out. While his mix of technical and business skills meant he developed the product and the business a long way on his own, he advises anyone without technical skills founding a company to find a technical co-founder.

The company now employs six and has signed up big name customers, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and other homeland security agencies in the United States, Wellington Ambulance service in New Zealand, the Irish Navy and Coastguard and a number of rescue teams in Iceland.

Not that it’s all been plain sailing; Blandford had to tweak the business model along the way.

“When we started off, all the media coverage about everything cool and sexy online was about consumer products, so everything we did was like a consumer service,” remembers Blandford. “But this is an enterprise product that is on a customer platform.”

Most cloud services are billed monthly and the customer buys and pays for it online with a credit card. Decisions set up an online payment facility but waited months before anyone used it. Search and rescue teams don’t have credit cards as standard and 95 per cent of customers pay by cheque.

The plan for the next year is to focus on business development in North America, Australia and New Zealand, where the company is currently recruiting sales agents. “The small mountain rescue and coastguard teams are not really our customers,” explains Blandford. “They are great champions of the product and we love them using it but our customers are the big teams with big budgets.”

A new module is also being developed which will focus on incident response. Blandford hopes to incorporate innovations from the consumer space so that teams will be able to view real time information on any connected device they may have. While it will support an offline capability – given that mobile networks are not always available in the areas search and rescue teams operate in – Blandford doesn’t see this as being an issue for his customers.

“Once a team is big enough, or more correctly once an asset is expensive enough, such as a helicopter, the cost of satellite communications is not an issue,” says Blandford.