Intune with Technology by Todd Cardy

Despite the terrible state of the Irish economy, Intune Networks, co-founded by John Dunne, continues to be a global leader in its field, writes Todd Cardy.

 
It is a cold, wet and windy May morning in Dublin. But the poor weather is the least of John Dunne’s worries. His focus is on the commercial launch of his company’s flagship technology. After four years of development and more than a decade since co-founding the business Intune Networks, his work will be revealed to the heavyweights of the telecommunications industry at TM Forum’s Management World conference in Dublin.

 
The moment marks a significant milestone for Dunne, co-founder Tom Farrell and the entire staff of the telecoms equipment company, which in the face of two tough trading periods, along with the near collapse of the Irish economy, has managed sustained growth and secured more than €50 million in funding.

 
Dunne and Farrell, both PhD photonics graduates from University College Dublin, rejected lucrative offers from big-name American corporations to start their own company in 1999 at the age of 26. The business was based on technology that developed from the pair’s research. It started well and they quickly secured two million Irish punts to work on their first product, a calibration system for tuneable lasers. These are semiconducting pieces of material, about 1.5mm wide, that convert electricity into light that then travels down fibre. They are the basis of telecoms systems. Then in 2001, the business suffered its first setback. ‘It all crashed – no-one was buying our stuff,’ Dunne recalls sombrely. ‘Even a few years later, if you talked to a venture capitalist and mentioned the word photonics they put the phone down. They literally said things like, “Well, 70 per cent of our portfolio was wiped out by photonics and I am not mentioning you to any partners.”

 
‘Verisma’s hardware and software enables telecoms carriers to create more  efficient next-generation networks’

 
LIFE SUPPORT

 
It is at this point that Dunne turned from researcher into businessman. As chief executive of Intune he kept the company ‘alive’ by keeping the operation small and pursuing contracts for projects across Europe and the US. While working on a project for the European Space Agency, Dunne and Farrell came across a problem that they were asked to solve. The current Cisco router, developed 30 years ago, was too heavy to send into space or place inside aircraft. They were asked to develop an equivalent that was lightweight, smaller and used less power. It was this project that inspired further development.

 
In 2006 the pair built a prototype and a year later a beta version of their technology, named Verisma. The product is an optical packet switching and transport system that promises to vastly increase the efficiency of the world’s telecommunications networks. Dunne says Verisma’s hardware and software enables telecoms carriers to scale their networks cost effectively and create more efficient next-generation networks. It also promises uninterrupted, premium-quality content – something that has been unachievable before now. Target customers of the technology are telecommunications giants including O2, Vodafone and BT. ‘Today’s systems have utilisation rates of about 5 per cent of their capacity because the architecture is dated and is not designed for high download usage, such as when watching YouTube or having a group Skype call,’

 
Dunne explains. ‘With a network that’s tuneable, you can turn it from having only 5 per cent to up to 80 per cent.’ He describes the technology as similar to Frogger, the 1980s arcade game. ‘In Frogger, you have a road with lots of lanes and there are lots of vehicles in those lanes.

 
As a frog, the player’s job is to hop between the gaps in the cars to cross. We do exactly the same. ‘In the current networks, each lane is a different colour and has little bursts of light. We look at what is happening to the fibre with all the bursts and all the colours. We can then see all the gaps and tune the laser accordingly.’ Dunne says he uses this analogy to explain the complex and extremely niche technology to potential investors. It’s a process that he admits is time consuming and difficult.
 

ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH

 
 ‘What I have discovered is that when talking to investors you need to find someone who either gets it or is intellectually interested in it first,’ he says.

 
‘It could be any person in the VC firm who gets it and will actually think through what you are saying and allow you to explain it. If they then start to think about it and can recommend the company to the partners then that process is usually successful.’ And the results speak for themselves. The business has secured strong backing despite its complex technologies. Backers include Boston’s Balderton Capital, Hermann Hauser’s Amadeus and Twitter investor Spark Capital.

 
‘Investors were attracted to its strong portfolio of patents and the fact that the company owns all its intellectual property rights’.

 
‘When talking to investors, you need to find someone who either gets it or is intellectually interested in it first’