Cloud’s Silver Lining
After learning how to transform his business on an IMI course, Stryve CEO Andrew Tobin has rapidly expanded the thriving tech firm, writes
Andrew Tobin appears to be permanently wearing a surprised grin as though he can hardly believe his good fortune. Five years ago, he was staring into the abyss as he found it harder and harder to win new business for his software company T2. Now Stryve, a major diversification of his original business, is set for €10m turnover this year, and Tobin would like some private equity to accelerate momentum.
A software developer by training, a few years ago Tobin (46) realised he lacked the management skills required to engineer meaningful change in his 13-year-old Carlow company that developed websites and offered other digital marketing services. So he signed up for a Diploma in Strategy and Innovation at the Irish Management Institute (IMI), in addition to an MBA course he was already pursuing.
“It was fantastic to actually see how you do strategy in a very formulaic way,” Tobin recalls. “Throwing some business models at the challenge made changing direction much easier.”
Tobin decided cyber security and private cloud computing were good sectors into which T2 could pivot. But how was he going to get into that business? “Do we look to bring those skills in-house, do we acquire a company, do we merge?” he wondered.
Tobin settled on exploring M&A possibilities, and started a conversation with VCloud.ie, a business based in Naas, Co. Kildare. “They were very good on the cloud but not so strong on sales and marketing, which was
one of our strengths,” says Tobin. “It was a match made in heaven. In 2019 we did a share solution and rebranded to Stryve.”
Based in Wexford Road Business Park in Carlow, Stryve had an initial focus on data storage, disaster recovery and cybersecurity solutions. Tobin’s early partners in the business were vCloud principals Gunter Bayer from Germany and Polish entrepreneur Anis Jendoubi.
“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.”
Stryve then developed an offering centred on private cloud, where users know where their data is stored and have access to the servers. In the early days, “it did feel as if we were pushing a bus uphill”, Tobin concedes, but business picked up following the HSE ransomware cyber attack in May 2021.
“We set up StryveCE out of Warsaw and we were fortunate to win a €250,000 contract with the Polish prison service,” says Tobin. In early 2021 Stryve acquired Atticus Creative in London (now renamed Stratticus) to launch into the UK market. “It had clients that we were able to upsell to. That worked out very well and we had quite a lot of turnover in the UK with immediate effect.”
The Stryve principals realised that a sole focus on private cloud was too narrow a market. The company decided it had to be in the public cloud market too, and did a deal with Sleepless Server Solutions, an Azure specialist in Galway. More recently, Tobin acquired US venture Futuralis, which has a focus on Amazon Web Services.
Says Tobin: “It has been an invaluable bolt-on to our portfolio, because once we are in with the customer we can discuss what data should be in public cloud and what data in private cloud. We can better explain the rationale. In addition, Futuralis has some incredible clients. We also opened up a resource centre in Morocco.”
Accounts for Stryve operating