“Open season to help save on IT spending” The Sunday Business Post covers Dublin software firm Openplain

As a freelance public relations adviser I often dread opening the papers on a Sunday morning. Over the years many a restful Sunday has been ruined by coverage of client that wasn’t quite to their disliking, even due to the minutest detail. However, there has been equally as many Sunday’s where I have been pepped up by good coverage for clients.

Thankfully yesterday was the latter. As well as a mention in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post  for Anthony Joyce & Co in my previous post  my client Openplain, the Dublin software company, received more deserved recognition in a great feature on them in the People In Business section, which focuses on Irish businesses that have a unique angle. In this case Openplain are the only Irish company that make software that companies can use to get a holistic view of their IT costs, thus allowing them to save a good chunk of cash on software licenses and programmes that they don’t use. This is an all too familiar occurrence in Ireland at the moment where companies weighed down by their Celtic Tiger Hangover with too many costs weighing them down from the boom.

One of these major costs are IT, with companies paying for too much software that they don’t use, which can be a very expensive mistake to make. On average Openplain can IT software costs for companies by 25%; back in Novemember they estimated that a medium sized company of 100 employees could cut €42,00 per year in software costs alone: http://www.republicpr.ie/2009/11/24/save-fortune-electricity-costs/

Yesterday’s featured focused on the good work that award-winning entrepreneurs Jon Mulligan and Damien O’Brien are doing helping Irish financial services companies cut their IT software costs. Here is a link to the article http://www.thepost.ie/peopleinbusiness/open-season-to-help-save-on-it-spending-48635.html which has also been pasted in below.

The Sunday Business Post: Open season to help save on IT spending
18 April 2010 By Dick O’Brien

As Irish businesses struggle to cope with the continuing weak economic environment, the focus for many is on cutting costs in a bid to maintain their margins.

It is a prime market for any company promising to help clients to save money. One of them, Dublin-based software firm Openplain, said it had experienced strong growth over the past 12 months.

According to Jon Mulligan, managing director of Openplain, the company specialises in analysing customers’ IT expenditure and identifying areas in which they can make savings. One of the company’s main products is Office metrics, which looks at an organisation’s entire business process, from the initiation of transactions, through back office processes and on to how a product or service is delivered.

‘‘Managers know how many transactions are being completed every day, and how long they are taking,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They can compare agents or teams, and identify inefficient work practices. That can be as simple as identifying excessive personal web browsing or discovering training requirements.”

Openplain was founded by Mulligan and technical director Damien O’Brien in 2006. The pair are both software industry veterans, having previously worked together at Baltimore Technologies.

In 2008,Openplain won the Inter Trade Ireland All-Island Seedcorn Business competition, which it followed later that year by winning first prize in the Docklands Innovation Park awards. Backers of the company include the AIB Seed Capital Fund, a number of private BES investors and Enterprise Ireland.

Mulligan said Openplain’s main focus at present was its Licence metrics software.

Managing software licences is a headache for most businesses, involving issues such as ensuring that money isn’t being spent needlessly on software which isn’t used, and avoiding penalties for running unlicensed software.

Licence metrics monitors a firm’s software usage in order to identify any licensing issues or under-utilisation. ‘‘We’ve just completed a project with a company in the financial services sector which we rolled out to 1,000 desktops,” said Mulligan.

‘‘It found that it had Microsoft Project on 450 computers, but in the previous three months it had only been used by 80 people. The company was paying subscriptions and maintenance on those subscriptions which were totally unnecessary. Another example is that it had 200 copies of Adobe Acrobat, but only had 45 people using it.”

There are about 80,000 users of Openplain’s system worldwide. Some of those are using a pared-down, free version of the software, and the challenge for the company is to persuade them to upgrade to the paid version.

‘‘Recently, through our own direct sales activity, we have been picking up a number of larger Irish clients,” said Mulligan.

‘‘They are mainly in financial services, but we would serve all markets, especially anyone doing a lot of back office processing.”

He said Open plain was already profitable and was on track to achieve a fourfold or fivefold increase in turnover this year.

Ends