Virtual bricks and mortar

CASE STUDY:We continue to look at how AspiraCon Ltd is progressing from a start-up idea to a fully-fledged business. This month the company addresses its IT needs - both hardware and software

ONE OF the key elements that turns an empty room into a software business is the IT equipment, so the first challenge AspiraCon faced was their information technology (IT).

"Although software is our business, when you look at four bare walls you begin to appreciate the value of a large IT department you took for granted in a multinational company" says Colum Horgan, director of operations and co-founder of AspiraCon.

The first daunting task involved the purchase of the complete business network and desktop hardware for the company.

"We focused on one manufacturer for our hardware to make sure all the equipment talked to each other and to get a competitive lease agreement to better manage our cashflow," says Horgan.

A big concern for all companies is to secure their network from malicious attack.

"One of our first IT decisions was on anti-virus software. We were very careful to ensure that we had full protection without impacting the productivity of the users" he says.

For AspiraCon, as a start-up, scalability was essential.

"We knew that all the decisions you make need to work as well for five staff as for 50. A major help in this regard is virtualisation. This is where you can create multiple 'virtual' operating systems on one physical computer. This allowed us to test our product in multiple environments while minimising our investment in hardware," he says.

However, many of the software packages you need to run a business are not as flexible for a start-up, says Horgan. A major help is the emergence of hosted enterprise solutions, he says. This is where the supplier hosts the application on their servers and you access the software through the web.

"We are seeing more business applications we need available on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis. This suited us very well as we could minimise the investment in hardware and time to install and learn a large business application, while still having all the benefits of the software," he says.

As a software developer, a major choice was the vendor for their operating system. "We quickly settled on Microsoft as our supplier and as a Microsoft development partner we have gained significant benefit from their partner programme. Such partnership programmes are a very good support structure as the company becomes established," says Horgan.

With customers and development partners in the US and Asia, it was also very important that the IT infrastructure supported people in working together.

"We make extensive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology," says Horgan.

"We were very keen to find a telecoms provider that allowed us a normal geographic landline number and one we could move with us. With Blueface, we could answer a call to our Cork office landline as easily from a laptop in Bangalore as from our normal phone in the office. This is the type of flexibility that is vital for a start-up," he says.