Mr Reliable bucks bleak trend

THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:Maurice Mortell, chief executive, Data Electronics

AT THE start of the week it seemed that the only voices emanating from the media were the ones discussing financial meltdown, until a quietly spoken businessman from Bray interrupted the doomsday discussions. Not for the first time, Maurice Mortell was at odds with the prevailing mood, making the news as the chief executive of Data Electronics, an Irish company that has just been acquired by British firm TelecityGroup for €100 million.

A decade before, in the depths of the dotcom crash, Mortell was barely in his job when his company hit the headlines for buying up a spanking new data centre facility from a US company that had briefly set up shop in Ireland.

The ability to emerge from the wreckage of that particular bubble, and to record four years of compound growth in the current recession, tells you all you need to know about a chief executive who routinely bucks economic trends.

Mortell is an unremittingly modest man and puts success down to being in the right place at the right time. But even he admits it’s not just about riding a wave. “You have to get on the surfboard and then you have to stay on it,” he said. “We’ve been pretty good at that.” He neglects to mention the company has been honing its surfboard for the guts of 35 years, keeping ahead of trends in a notoriously fast-changing sector.

Data Electronics was one of the first IT companies in Ireland to provide tech support on a national basis. Then it morphed into an early exponent of managed services before anchoring its skills in two Dublin data centres. Today it hosts and manages infrastructure and data for clients like Sisk, William Hill and the Dublin Airport Authority.

If you pressed him to explain how to pull off the trick of staying ahead of the curve, the former rugby player would tell you that it’s got a lot to do with being a team player – and luck. He also emphasises a customer-centric focus and delivering what you promise, a rather radical idea in the over-hyped world of IT.

You might not be inclined to believe it’s that simple, but a team of core managers has been with his company for over a decade, which suggests that the people part of the business has been fundamental to its success.

“With the things that I’m not good at I rely on other people,” he says with disarming honesty. Like what? “Like a lot of the technology. People around me understand the elements that are important and tell me what we should be doing. I like to give people the chance to grow and make their own decisions.”

For IT outsiders, the big mystery is grasping precisely what Data Electronics does. There is a vague understanding that data centres have an important role as repositories of information, a sort of Ikea for nerds, but people struggle to make it add up to a €100 million evaluation.

Mortell explains succinctly: “There is going to be a massive change in terms of how people are going to access content and IT services in the future. The data centre will be at the core of that future.”

For the uninitiated, he is talking about “cloud”, the IT buzzword of the day. Though Mortell has always been careful to distance his company from the hype cycles that propel his industry, he is in no doubt that cloud computing is the real deal, pointing out that it is effectively what his company was doing long before someone in Silicon Valley coined the phrase.

Simply put, it will turn technology into a commodity. Racks of hardware hosted in data centres will deliver information and services over high-speed networks, accessed from work and home using multiple devices. The theory is that companies can say goodbye to expensive IT departments and consumers can stop scratching their heads when a mobile phone or laptop doesn’t do what it’s supposed to.

Mortell had been on a steady journey to get to the point where Telecity saw Data Electronics as an asset worth having. Having graduated with a degree in business studies from the College of Commerce, Rathmines, he was all set to qualify as a chartered accountant before ditching the final exams for a job at Data Electronics. At that time it was run by the company founder, Liam Kehoe, a former Aer Lingus communications engineer who had been building the business since the 1970s.

The company thrived in the 1990s as an IT maintenance firm, offering customers 24/7 support from service offices around the country. But as finance manager, Mortell could see the core business was gradually becoming commoditised, with customers only interested in the cheapest price.

“We started to manage the decline of that side of the business as the hosting side began to come up. It would move us to something new, a different proposition where we could bring our clients with us and add value,” says Mortell.

These were the nascent days of data centres, still small and called communication rooms, but Data Electronics had seen the opportunity. A centralised, hosted service would allow it to maximise its investments with repeatable services built on economies of scale. The customer was happy because they got a proven delivery model that they didn’t have to manage.

State-of-the-art technology is key for a highly automated business – the number of employees has only risen from 20 people to 55 since the 1990s. It requires regular reinvestment and upskilling, which Data Electronics has been able to self-finance with the help of bank loans.

Capital initially came from a group of private investors over 10 years ago, and one more who came on board with a modest investment in 2007. These are the main beneficiaries of the sale, according to Mortell, who would only say that the acquisition had made him “richer”.

Mortell took over as chief executive in 2001. Ten years on he is now country manager for Telecity in Ireland, taking overall responsibility for three data centres (Telecity already had one site in Dublin). He relishes the challenge.

The exit was inevitable for investors and the right thing for the business, according to Mortell. Multinational companies are starting to make huge investments in data centres around the globe, threatening the role of smaller players like Data Electronics. “There is a lot of activity and there will be a massive amount of consolidation. There was a danger that we could potentially have been squeezed out over time,” he says.

The irony is that a man whose business thrives on change still lives in the town where he grew up and went to school. It suddenly starts to make sense. There is something solid and utterly reliable about Mortell, qualities that must stand him in good stead when he’s persuading customers to hand over their critical data. The one thing businesses want from a data centre is someone they can rely on.

ON THE RECORD

Name: Maurice Mortell

Position: Chief executive, Data Electronics

Age:44

Lives:Bray, Co. Wicklow

Family:Married with three children

Hobbies:Cooking, golf and hanging out with the family. He played rugby for Bective Rangers, Donnybrook, 10 years as a senior player and two as captain.

Why he is in the news: Date Electronics was just bought by TelecityGroup for €100 million.

Something you might expect: He works too hard, typically 10-12 hour days.

Something that might surprise:He's not a techy and the only reason he has a Facebook account is to keep an eye on what his son is up to online. "I'm not a gadget nut, I like to switch off."