DIGITAL MINES: STARTING A NEW business in a recession may sound like a recipe for sleepless nights but if the business in question has the potential to save cash-strapped companies money, then the founder of Digital Mines, Ed Byrne, may well be on to something.

Byrne’s company is a year-old cloud computing service provider which has just raised €750,000 from investors to propel it to the next stage.

The company’s target market are SMEs (small and medium enterprises) with between one and 50 servers that would like to save on IT costs. Most companies with their own servers are only using them during the eight-hour working day but are effectively paying for them for 24 hours.

Byrne’s company offers pay-as-you go server access which can be scaled up or down to suit a company’s needs. For example, a company with seasonal highs to its business may need more server capacity at Christmas but not want to pay for it year round. Byrne says his company’s application works equally well for traditional sectors and for software and internet companies for which IT infrastructure is a significant cost.

Digital Mines’ target market is the general business user rather than the software development community (where most of the cloud computing focus currently is) and while it has competitors in the United States, it has the Irish and European markets pretty much to itself. This is partly because dealing with business users is time consuming as they need a lot more hand holding than IT professionals who already have their heads in the cloud so to speak.

Byrne says companies can save between 25 and 75 per cent on IT costs by switching to the cloud. “Cloud computing is the future for IT, but SMEs in particular struggle to take advantage of it because they don’t have the technical expertise in-house to do so.

“Our service simplifies the whole process and we will work with companies to assess their needs and come up with the best solution for them,” he says.