Ammeon, an IT professional services company, said it is to create 100 new high-skilled jobs over the next twelve months. The company which specialises in IT-based transformation projects is expanding its DevOps and Cloud Centre of Excellence in Ireland.

Richard Bruton, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation commented: “I am delighted to be returning to Ammeon less than a year after I was here to announce the creation of 30 high-skilled jobs. After creating those additional jobs so far this year, I warmly welcome their plans to now grow their workforce by another 100.”

Ammeon in receiving undisclosed funding from the taxpayer through Enterprise Ireland toward the recruitment drive. In previous years the state agency has made payments totalling E660,000 to the company.

Fred Jones, CEO, Ammeon, commented, “This is another very significant expansion of Ammeon’s workforce and capabilities and follows the creation of 30 new jobs last November.

“On the back of continued strong growth in demand for our cutting edge services, we are growing this DevOps and Cloud Centre of Excellence in Ireland. We are looking to add 100 talented engineers and IT professionals to help us make this happen.”

In Association with

“We have built the largest indigenous team of professional service consultants focused on IT-based transformation projects and we are at the beginning of a significant international expansion.

“We enable our customers deliver their software and services in a faster, more cost effective way to their customers. We have a strong DevOps and open source culture, we use Agile methodologies and open source cloud technologies like OpenStack to help accelerate service development and delivery.”

Skills Required

Jones added that Ammeon is looking for both experienced engineers and graduates for a wide variety of high-value IT roles, with a focus on the latest cloud and DevOps skills.

Of particular interest are candidates with experience in service delivery management, project management, cloud architectures and deployment. Hiring will start immediately and full details are available on www.ammeon.com.

Ammeon said the company currently employs over 200 people, with the majority based in the company’s Dublin headquarters and a smaller number in its UK offices. Last November the company hired an additional 30 IT professionals in the areas of software development, test automation and DevOps.

The company had turnover of €8.4m in 2013 and booked an operating loss of €90,000. The number of people on the payroll in 2013 was 86, with average pay and pension remuneration coming in at €53,200. The company had a neagative net worth of €442,000 at year-end.

Ammeon was founded in 2003 by Jones, Rory MacHale (chief technical officer) and Clive Hannon (chief operating officer). The trio had previously worked together at UK-based IT firm Logica and each own around 5% of Ammeon.

Shareholders

Ammeon's main shareholders, each owning 28% stakes, include the chairman, Joe Cunningham, as well as Larry Quinn and serial technology investor Gilbert Little. Little and Quinn were the founders of Dublin telecoms software firm Aldiscon, which was acquired by Logica in 1997 for around €70m.

Clients include global network equipment providers, communication service providers across EMEA, media, transportation and government organisations.

Jones describes Ammeon as a systems integrator with a focus on mobilising services. "We work for mobile carriers and vendors. We're like a lean, mean version of what IBM would do, with a focus on mobile.

“We have a very strong in-house design capability that can build things from scratch. We handle the entire life-cycle of a service, from coming up with the idea to building it, plugging it into the client's network and turning it on."

In an interview with Business Plus in 2012, Jones remarked that a focus on quantity over quality by third level institutions is swamping the jobs market with "dumbed down" graduates.

He stated: "My worry would be that there has been a tendency in Irish universities in recent years to simply try and get everyone who comes in the door, out the door. When I graduated 20 years ago, only around 50% made it all the way through. You lost the people that weren't really interested in the course.

"These days, you have large companies in Ireland that are sucking up large amounts of graduates. The result is that a lot of dross is coming into the system. For example, the like of PwC hoovers up around 100 graduates at a time. Those graduates are not doing real innovation; they simply become a very small cog in a large machine.

"We continually bring students in on placements. We try to give them exciting and interesting work to do so that they will want to come back to us when they graduate. We focus on building graduates up, rather than expecting them to come in the door and be brilliant.

Good Attitude

“We look for good communicators with a good attitude. We don't expect them to be rocket scientists. We know we can bring them up to speed. If you look at all the large tech firms in the city, I'd bet that virtually all of them have ex-Ammeon employees on their staff.

"My senior guys are generally Irish, while my middle guys are a mix of Irish, European and Asian," he says. "There are great universities in Romania and the Czech Republic."