What do you do when you realise the business you run has limited potential? Andrew Tobin, a website developer, looked around for sectors with better growth prospects than his own, and decided that cloud and cybersecurity looked promising.

Only problem? Tobin didn’t know much about the technical side of either activity. So he sought out a merger candidate, struck a deal and Stryve was born, in February 2019. Based in Wexford Road Business Park in Carlow, Stryve provides data storage, disaster recovery and cybersecurity solutions.

Tobin’s partners in the business are Gunter Bayer from Germany and Polish entrepreneur Anis Jendoubi. “I’m an avid networker and I had met the guys a few times,” Tobin explains. “They are brilliant technical people with a business called vCloud.

"I pitched the idea of marrying their technical know-how with my sales skills and they went for it. We started trading with the merged company in 2019 and nearly doubled our combined turnover in the first year by cross-selling and upselling to clients.”

In Association with

Stryve’s offering centres on so-called private cloud. They’re up against public cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and they win business on the basis of service and cost. In the ‘public cloud’, servers are housed in large data centres and users neither control nor have access to them. In a ‘private cloud’, you either own the servers or you use a private cloud provider, you know where your data is stored and you have access to the servers.

“The banner cost for public cloud is one thing, but you also need to factor in costs for ancillary requirements, such as IP addresses, cost of data transfers, failover options, back-ups etc,” says Paul Delahunty, information security officer with Stryve. “These and other costs need to be taken into account so that you are comparing like with like.

“Many public cloud providers charge what appears to be a nominal fee for accessing your data. As your data levels rise, so do the costs. Another cost that is rarely considered is the cost of extracting your data if you’re moving to another cloud platform. In addition, managing your public cloud environment requires people who know what they are doing.”

Stryve’s data centre is in Cork. Operating company Titan Technology Holdings Ltd was incorporated in October 2020, so there’s no filed accounts yet. According to Tobin, investment in the data centre has amounted to over €1m.

“We’ve leased a lot of equipment and HP has been very supportive. Through its GreenLake programme we can access cloud services and hardware on demand, using a pay-as-you-go model.

"One of the benefits of having our own data centre is that we have good margins on our hardware. That means we can be competitive on price. In addition, customers can pick up the phone and talk directly to us when they need to resolve something quickly.”

Business Pivot

Tobin (43) was a software developer before he went into business for himself in 2006. His T2 venture offered digital marketing and web design services to clients such as Keelings and Netwatch. “I could see the writing on the wall in this space – it was becoming increasingly difficult to win work,” says Tobin. “In 2016 I enrolled for an MBA with the Irish Management Institute and I started applying some of the business strategy I was learning to my business.

“When I looked at areas of strongest growth in the market, cloud and cybersecurity stood out. I weighed up my resources and capabilities, recognised the gaps and decided how to address them. The quickest way forward was through a merger.”

Stryve clients include Total Produce plc, Zevas and Maxol, as well as businesses in the pharma and financial services sectors in Ireland and abroad. In-demand services are backup for business continuity, and simple day-to-day data backup.

The company opened a sales office in Poland last August, though Tobin says Stryve also wants traction in the UK, preferably through an acquisition. Another revenue stream is outsourcing one of the firm’s cybersecurity specialists to customers for a few days a month. “Being a regional player is an advantage, as we’ve hired people who don’t want to commute to Dublin every day,” says Tobin

Stryve also sees opportunity for its backup product for Microsoft Office 365. “Our M365 Protect simplifies a traditionally time-consuming and costly process by enabling clients to log on to our web application, submit their organisation’s administration email address, pick a plan and receive confirmation that their data is secure and protected.

“This is an exciting project and it’s an area that’s going to grow. With data, it’s not good to have all your eggs in one basket. We think that M365 Protect is a project that’s going to have global appeal, as remote working continues and IT companies heavily push the Microsoft cloud environment to accommodate it.”

Tobin adds that Stryve’s turnover grew by 25% to €1.6m through 2020 and he’s targeting annual sales of €5m by 2023. “We’re still a relatively small player in the sector but we see the growth opportunities and we don’t want to miss them. We currently employ 25 people and I hope to increase this to 30 as we ramp up our sales team.”

Photo: Andrew Tobin (left) with Stryve co-founder Gunter Bayer and CISO Paul Delahunty