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Office solution that works for all
Sunday, February 22, 2009 By Alex Meehan
With €1 million worth of funding and a growing customer base around the world, Dublinbased software specialist Officemetrics is proving that, even in recessionary times, good ideas mean good business. The company’s main product lets employers track and analyse the day-to-day activities of their staff.

‘‘It records what employees do with their time during the day, the time they spend working with different applications, looking at websites and working on individual documents such as spreadsheets and emails,” said Jonathan Mulligan, co-founder and managing director of Officemetrics. ‘‘It also tracks work start and finish times, and even idle time when employees may be taking breaks or be in meetings.”

Mulligan established the company in 2006with co-founder Damien O’Brien. Both had worked previously with Baltimore Technologies. The idea behind the new venture was to help large companies keep track of their workforce.

‘‘At the height of things in Baltimore, there were lots of people working for managers located in different countries, or even with no line managers at all,” Mulligan said.

‘‘At one point, Damien had up to 80 people in three development teams spread across three continents reporting to him.

‘‘As a supervisor, it was very difficult to know who was performing in your team and who wasn’t, even if they happened to be sitting right beside you. Keeping track of productivity was very difficult, and this presented a problem when it came time to deal with issues like salary increases or bonuses.”

Mulligan and O’Brien began to sell their software in May 2008.Since then, their customers have increased to 50,000 in 89 countries. Thirty per cent of the company’s business is based in the US, 15 per cent in Japan and 8 per cent is split between Ireland and Brazil.

It is adding as many as 15,000 new users each month, but it isn’t all money in the bank.I ts software is delivered via the internet, using the softwareas-a-service model (SaaS) to allow customers to pay as they go.

The software is available in three versions.T here is a free version for personal use aswell as pay-for-use professional and enterprise editions, so not all users pay for access.D espite this, the company is growing rapidly.

‘‘The real driver of our growth is that we help employees to become more productive , ‘ ‘ Mulligan said.

‘‘Everybody has picked up little bad habits that eat into their time, but even a 2 per cent increase in productivity can enable a 50-person organisation to add €50,000 directly to the bottom line.”

Officemetrics secured its recent funding round from AIB’s Seed Capital Fund, Enterprise Ireland and a variety of private investors, assisted by the Dublin Business Innovation Centre (Dublin BIC).

The funding will enable the firmto develop its secure hosting infrastructure to facilitate international growth, and to kick-start its global sales channel and marketing activities.

‘‘Office metrics is a good example of the strong entrepreneurial spirit evident in Ireland today targeting international markets, and is one of a number of start-up companies backed by the AIB Seed Capital Fund over the last year,” said Alex Hobbs, fund manager of Dublin BIC. Mulligan said support provided by Dublin BIC had been invaluable in attracting funding from AIB and other investors.

‘‘We’ve been very impressed with the range of enterprise development services provided by them, from support to very useful introductions to people with expertise and finance,” he said.

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