Would you believe, they put a Man on the Moon?

REM’s Automatic for the People was the soundtrack to the summer I finished college back in 1993. Studying Computer Science at night meant that by that time I already had 5 years work experience with Ireland’s leading Life Insurer, Irish Life, much of it in the latest client/server technologies. My buddy Dave Shanahan & I started to consider how we might make our fortunes in the wider world, leading to a short-lived consideration of taking an IT contract in the Middle East where the lure of tax-free income was one way of accelerating saving in early 90s Ireland. 

In the summer of 1994, we headed off to Boston & New England on reference site visits with two work colleagues, with a big decision to make. The big decision was driven by an interesting meeting Dave had in the spring of 1994 with Michael Kelly, then a 32-year old Dutch-based software executive, originally from Raheny in Dublin.

Michael was one of the first Computer Applications graduates from NIHE (now Dublin City University) in the early 1980s. He had joined Irish insurer FBD as a computer programmer where he worked on insurance software sold by the Sydney-headquartered software company Paxus. FBD also re-sold the software in Ireland to Abbey Life (later merged with Canada Life), and Michael was part of that team. He joined Paxus in the UK, managing their Life/MVS development team and becoming the Regional Director of Paxus in the Benelux region where he grew a customer base on the AS/400 based Life/400 Life insurance package. Nationale Nederlanden (NN), then the insurance arm of ING Bank was a particularly successful client for Michael and as they set up insurance operations in several European and Asia Pacific countries which came under Michael’s remit. In early 1993, Paxus merged with Continuum, a US Insurance software powerhouse. When this transaction closed, Kelly and another senior Paxus UK executive Mike Oxley moved quickly to form a consulting services company “The Managed Solutions Company” or MSC, which within a short period of time was the largest supplier of Paxus Life/400 implementation consultants in Europe, no doubt causing some indigestion to Continuum. Michael’s vision was a wider one: he had seen the massive windfall that had been delivered by the Paxus Life software suite and saw an opportunity to deliver a modern customer-centric, component-based client/server offering to the insurance market. It was clear that the fees earned through consulting were the fuel for his bigger vision. In 1993 he started discussions with Forbairt (now Enterprise Ireland) about how they might support a Life software start-up in Dublin and engaged Diarmuid Gahan from Sheehan & Company as a financial consultant to advise on fund raising from Sheehan investors and others in Ireland.  

During the breakaway from Paxus, Michael had secured Stephen Hathaway, the lead designer of Life/400 and Richard Harley a senior Life/400 implementation consultant to bootstrap the design and business architecture of the new system. The plan was that the other MSC consultants in the field would eventually be trained in and implement the new product giving them an extension to their careers. They knew Life/400 inside-out but had little or no experience of the client/server technologies which had taken off after the launch of Windows 3.0 in 1990. This was the key knowledge gap which Michael was seeking to close when he met Dave for that fateful chat in mid-1994. The following week Dave told me excitedly about the plans to develop a leading, new technology Life package and was keen for me to also meet with Michael. I was quite nervous about the idea of leaving the warm ‘home’ environment of Irish Life but met Michael for an initial conversation in his mews house off Baggot Street, impressed by his confidence, experience and charisma and spent most of the time, as he reminded me afterwards, explaining to him why I shouldn’t join his start-up and what I felt my weaknesses would be in that environment. The crunch point was that he had no customer for the new system and lacked the overall funding required. He felt he was on the edge of signing Hibernian Life (now Aviva Ireland), who were a Paxus Life/MVS user and the general agreement was that if they signed we’d be more likely to jump ship and embark on the journey.

So in August 1994, sitting in the residents lounge of the Perryville Inn in Reheboth, MA we mapped out the pros & cons of joining Michael on the journey to build a product company and decided that we had nothing to lose, that the experience would do us good – but that ultimately the go/no-go decision should rest on the Hibernian’s decision. In my mind there was no better way to take this risk than with a trusted friend, it would be much better than going it alone at some future date – and deep down I suspected I’d never make that jump otherwise. We returned from the trip and some weeks later at the end of September (with the promise of an imminent signature from Hibernian (which never came!)) we received our offer letters to join the new software development company (working name Oasis Corporation) and submitted our resignations in time for a January 1995 kick-off.

We (Dave & I) spent the October Bank Holiday weekend in Michael’s serviced offices on Pembroke Road doing some early planning and writing a high-level description of the ‘Marketecture’ or technology choices that would underpin the new software. Unsurprisingly our thinking was that we would build on our learning gained in assessing and selecting technologies for Irish Life’s planned downsizing from the IBM mainframe: namely Windows front-end, portable backend to support multiple server operating systems, relational database independence though likely Oracle initially. In these pre-Web-era days, there had been a distinct shift away from comfort with two-tier applications where client workstations directly connected to the database server, so we would need to pick a middleware solution that would allow us to concentrate user requests and support high numbers of concurrent users in a scalable fashion. We would take some time in early 1995 to develop proof of concepts as these were far from mature concepts and I remember a mix of excitement and high anxiety as I worked my final weeks of notice in Irish Life.

3rd January 1995 was our first day in the “office”. I say “office” as we worked out of Dave’s front room in Clontarf for a month while Stephen & Richard occupied two desks in our accountant’s office. By the end of the month we had some proof of concept code-generators allowing an n-tier communication between a Visual Basic front-end and a C++ backend. This coupled with the application guys’ early object models (using the Fusion OO methodology) was enough to give us a coherent story to bring to potential customers and investors alike. MSC rented an office and we moved into the attic of 32 Upper Mount Street, a building then owned by the entrepreneur Jay Murray whose telecoms start-up Aldiscon had recently graduated from there. Those early months were a blur with many meetings with insurers across UK & Ireland, assessments from Enterprise Ireland and other potential VCs and investors, a ‘royal’ visit from INGs Dutch R&D unit and a constant, focussed outbound awareness campaign from Michael across these markets. Stephen Hathaway parted company with the venture by April 1995 with Michael buying him out, while the project motored on.

On the back of Michael’s non-stop calls and letters, we soon found ourselves in a fortuitous conversation with Britannia Life in Glasgow. They were owned by the Britannia Building Society (now part of the Cooperative Bank). Britannia Life wanted to replace their Paxus Life/MVS system, and was in fact originally a sister company of Ireland’s Hibernian Insurance who it had become clear were not going to proceed with the ‘certain’ deal to buy our new Life package. The Britannia Group had been working on a project called Integrated Customer Interface (ICI) and the first module of the new Life system that Michael and Stephen had intended to build was a multi-channel Customer Management component (Involved Party). Insurance distribution was changing in the early ‘90’s from single channel broker based to multi-channel (brokers, telephone, branch office, etc) and the older core Life systems, including Paxus Life, were more policy centric rather than customer centric. The CIO of Britannia Life spotted the opportunity to make the Customer Management module of our new Life system also work for the parent company, Britannia Building Society. The Building Society’s Group IS function was very interested in object-oriented (OO) technology and the story we had to tell, leading to an intensive engagement in Leek, Staffordshire in the summer of 1995. They already had significant spend underway on OO R&D and the objective was to collaborate with their teams to see if we could find a way forward together to co-develop a modern client/server technology architecture. The Life company was hopeful that if we won hearts and mind in Leek, that they would get the funding to proceed with the first component, the multi-channel Customer Management system (later becoming CRM) and then move forward as a partner on the remaining components of our new Life package in Glasgow.

The summer engagement was a roller-coaster ride spending five days a week in Leek and travelling up and down through the rolling hills and landscape to get there. It was exciting as it was clear that we were dealing with kindred spirits who were warming up to the idea of doing something with us (particularly encouraging due to the lack of immediate customers for our planned software development). By autumn 1995 there was a deal in place where Britannia would co-sponsor the development of our initial Oasis Technical Architecture or “the TA” as it became known. By December a two-tier prototype of the CRM frontend for use in all of Britannia’s channels was developed and a second contract was agreed to develop our first business application “Oasis CIS” (Customer Information System) on the TA for delivery by summer 1996. Britannia had 3000 staff across 200+ branches so this would also prove a massive test of the n-tier TA.

No one would invest in a brand-new company to develop the Life software, as Michael originally intended under his business plan, branded ‘OASIS Corporation’ so he continued to bootstrap the software development and ongoing promotion of the new system within MSC. Forbairt agreed to grant some funding for equity in MSC and as the product team started to grow some grant funding from Forbairt (Enterprise Ireland) eventually materialised in early 1998. The staff numbers grew slowly but steadily as 1995 progressed with new arrivals from Irish Life with Teresa Farrell working closely with Richard & Dave on the Life product from early 1995, John Kelly joining mid-year and Jonathan Boylan in September. Jonathan was a classmate of mine in the Irish Life joiners of 1988 and had been a star in some significant OO developments in Irish Life. In Stephen’s absence he brought clarity of direction to how the applications would come together and quickly threw out some (read all!) of my early code, fashioning more elegant replacements. We were joined by a number of ex-Paxus consultants, who had been part of the MSC consulting team, including Bryan Kelly, Stephen and Debbie O’Flaherty who would cut their teeth on the new technology and completed the hiring of Conor Mooney from Fujitsu ICL and Dave Solan from Hoskyns as the cornerstones of the TA team before the close of 1995. Our basic product development structure overseen by Dave was the TA team and the CIS team in early 1996 with some background work continuing on the longer-term Oasis-LAP (Life and Pensions) offering for Britannia Life. My work for the first half of 1996 was largely focussed on working with Britannia and the TA team and that team grew through the addition of Kevin Feeney, Michael Quinn and Derek McLoughlin. The CIS team gained Alan Molloy, Paul McNamara, John Brennan and Sean Hennelly. Donal McCarthy joined from the Software Vineyard as part of the sales & marketing function which previously had been Michael’s purview alone. 

We delivered a working (though imperfect) software release in mid-summer 1996 as the essential functions of a growing software company such as QA began to emerge and Britannia Life committed to co-deliver Oasis-LAP later than year which lead to the formal creation and ramp-up of the Oasis-LAP team and some time later the re-branding of the product set to Clientwise, Workwise (a workflow offering) and Lifewise. This success led to growing confidence and an influx of new talent from Irish Life, Bank of Ireland Lifetime and a variety of other technology and financial services companies.

The next hurdle to move from delivering software to one customer to becoming a product company was successfully completed through 1997 and 1998 with the sales and implementation of our Clientwise / Workwise suites to Canada Life Ireland and UK, Friends First, Reaal Verzekering, Northern Rock and Derbyshire Building Society. These products began to mature nicely through repeated implementation and another couple of key customers were found for the larger Lifewise R&D delivery which was required to deliver the long-term vision.

From 1997 with the move to a multi-customer environment I was dispatched to form the Technical Consulting team joined shortly after by Ronan Hayes with Kevin Feeney moving from the TA team which continued happily under Conor Mooney’s careful direction. We really enjoyed every minute of our work engaging with customers in pre-sales and planning the technical aspects of their implementations. As a young company with people and processes constantly evolving, we no doubt got plenty wrong but tended to maintain strong customer loyalty through good people and attitude. There is no truer cliché that ‘people buy from people’. 

As the company matured, I realised I was lucky to have made the risky move to that non-existent office in 1995 and received a material minority shareholding alongside Dave, Diarmuid, Jonathan and Richard. In addition to giving us shares, Michael put an employee share options scheme of 10% of the MSC equity in place meaning he would make 33% of the equity available to the MSC team. I’ve read a lot of books on motivation and vision and there is no doubt in my mind that Michael envisioned himself from day one at the helm of a company worth hundreds of millions, and that whatever mix of genetics, nature or nurture, grit, talent, determination people require to get there – he had it, and he believed he had it, every day.

The company began to grow its salesforce in the UK and later the Netherlands: chasing the CRM/multi-channel contact niche in Banks/Building Societies, the wider Insurance administration automation space (with backend integration) and focussed on 2 Lifewise Administration projects in Holland. Britannia sold Britannia Life in the latter part of the nineties leading to the loss of a potential reference site but continued for many years an excellent reference for the CRM implementation.

In the autumn of 1998, we moved from the Upper Mount Street premises to Lower Pembroke Street, occupying the building vacated by IONA Technologies after they moved to bigger premises after their successful 1997 NASDAQ IPO. We had decided in late 1995 to use their Orbix technology and re-sold licences for the software each time we gained a new client and we saw ourselves as a near-term IPO candidate. The new building move reinforced this confidence and our feeling of being ready for the next stage.

Michael hired Leo Corcoran to spearhead our US market entry in late 1999. After a couple of years, it became clear that a broad-based attack on CRM (where Siebel was becoming a gorilla) would make little sense. During 2000 and 2001 Michael had pursued a sale of Lifewise to the UK subsidiary of the goliath Disability Insurance (Income Protection) carrier Unum Corporation. A Unum US consultant assigned to the UK operation, Mike Smith, encouraged Unum UK to abandon an inhouse development approach and instead partner with MSC for Lifewise. However, a new CIO was appointed at Unum UK in early 2001 and he introduced a Life system from an Israeli software company who he had used at Nat West Life. Although the deal didn’t happen for MSC, the fortuitous part was that Mike Smith joined the company to help us enter the US Disability Claims sector. Mike became MSC’s US COO, Leo re-focused onto Disability Claims, and we opened an office in Portland and hired a team of Disability SME’s and software people, including Ted Nutter. Ted and Leo were later to found Claimvantage, an active competitor in the Claims sector. This strategy proved extremely successful and the company made successful sales to Fortis, CORE, Principal, Royal Bank of Canada and others under Leo’s watch in North America with many more added later.

The company completed an excellent piece of re-branding work to re-launch as FINEOS in February 2001, and in late 2001 we raised our first external funds with ABN Amro leading the fundraising at €100m valuation with a partial exit for early stage shareholders in December 2001. While it didn’t change my life overnight, it did give me some perspective and having experienced burn-out during a large implementation project in 2000 I retained my remaining shareholding and enjoyed a move out of line management to working more on the customer-facing end of sales and product management. It is a significant privilege to be able to do what you enjoy doing rather than what you ‘have to’ do. Dave left the organisation in early 2001 after driving Product Development since 1995, and Diarmuid moved on in 2002.

The company enjoyed further success in Asia-Pac with an initial sale by Michael to Comminsure in Sydney, and several marquee sales of large Government claims implementations under Joe Flynn’s watch, including the Accident Compensation Corporation of New Zealand (ACC) which saw a large group of colleagues de-camping to New Zealand and Australia into the original Paxus heartland to establish our base there. Exciting times indeed.

By mid-2006 with a young family I decided to put an end to the travel required for the work I enjoyed most in FINEOS, taking a new opportunity with a somewhat different looking Irish Life & Permanent Bancassurance organisation, ready to start a new chapter.

I travelled back to New England this summer with my own family, retracing a similar route travelled while considering that ‘big decision’ 25 years ago. I enjoyed the massive synchronicity of learning on my flight out of FINEOS’ planned (and ultimately successful) flotation on Sydney’s ASX for a massive AUD$700m, the company’s path crossing once again with that of the Paxus of its roots.

My reflection a few months on: well done Michael, well done to that early team that bootstrapped his vision into shipping software and to the team that subsequently grew the company into the mature software company it has become. It is a great success story for an Irish software company to grow a global leadership position as few such as Kindle have done before it.

For me personally the decision to take that jump was a life-changer in many positive ways. Regrets? Very few. Of course, the book-length version of the story has a lot more soap-opera elements: ups and downs, friendships lost and made, disagreements and agreements but fundamentally a lot of hard work with great success and learning along the way. As it should be in all good stories. 

As I incorrectly recall the lyrics of that REM song “Would you believe, they put a Man on the Moon?”