Broadband and hosting provider Digiweb said that 20 new jobs may be created on the back of its acquisition of Novara.
While the company would not disclose the price it paid for eight-year-old hosting firm Novara, a spokesman confirmed the deal was for a “seven figure sum”.
Interestingly, the relationship between Digiweb managing director Colm Piercy and Novara’s managing director Eoin Costello extends back to 1999 when Costello was running his family’s Dun Laoghaire jewellery shop at the time and was seeking a domain name.
Costello confirms: “The first domain I ever bought I got from Colm Piercy back in 1999, when the volume of paperwork required to get a .ie domain name was a joke.”
Costello will remain with Digiweb at least for the next six months as part of his earn-out contract with Novara’s new owners.
He said that at the end of the six months, Novara’s team will migrate out to Digiweb’s state-of-the-art data centre in Blanchardstown.
“Digiweb is probably Ireland’s oldest web hosting company, started by Colm back in 1997,” said Dan King, hosting and managed infrastructure manager with Digiweb.
After jettisoning the hosting business to focus on broadband, Digiweb re-entered the hosting market in 2006.
“We decided to use hosting in intelligent ways. Hosting is a wonderfully complementary service to offer with broadband and adds a level of stickiness to the business. We approached it in a grimly determined way by focusing on the back-end systems and adding intelligence into the billing and administration capability to be able to provide a level of service that would guarantee us extra revenue per customer.
“As a result, we’re one of the few operators in the business that can provide one bill per month for broadband and hosting,” King said.
Speaking with siliconrepublic.com, King said the purchase of Novara will not lead to any redundancies but instead will lead to job creation.
“Over the next three years we will create 20 new jobs. Within the year ahead, we will be creating up to five new jobs.”
By John Kennedy
