OPENET
Irish Examiner- 2nd January 2008

Openet is a provider of transactional intelligence solutions for the world's largest and most innovative service providers. The company was ranked 14th in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in Ireland based on average percentage revenue growth over five years. With the average growth rate at 49%, Openet grew 589% during this period. The company has also been named a finalist in the European Business Awards 2008 with nine other companies competing for the Business Innovation of the Year award given "to the organisation that can best demonstrate a proven ability to create, grow and develop innovations or processes that substantially improve the commercial performance or prospects of the company". Openet’s Fusionworks Platform is the bedrock of the company's suite of solutions allowing telecommunications service providers to manage the burgeoning number of voice, email, internet, picture and video transactions that are crossing their networks. The company has offices in the US, Britain, and Singapore, and its clients include British Telecom, Orange, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

"We are cautiously optimistic for 2008," says MD Niall Norton. "We have had challenging times due to the dollar exchange rate recently, as around 50% of our business is US based. That said, business is performing very, very well and we would predict that the growth experienced over the past years will continue. What Openet does is strategic infrastructure supply and in a  world where operators are quickly moving their networks to high speed IT based systems, we are ideally placed to capitalise on that. IT spend in applications related software is slowing down, but it is quite the reverse for us. We have a blue sky in front and are really only now beginning to tap our potential. Inside a five year window, we are very focused on growing the company to at least a €100m per annum company and would expect to get involved in acquiring one or two other companies over that period as well. As technology changes the world, Openet is increasingly relevant to a wider audience of communication service providers so we would definitely see the company branching out beyond traditional Telco."

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