Out the window of Ekco’s first office in Malahide, McGovern’s, a well known North Dublin restaurant, can be seen across the street. Until the onslaught of Covid-19, chef Niall Keating could be relied on to serve delicious steaks paired with wines for dinner there. 

Just above McGovern’s is where Eoin Blacklock and his co-founder Jonathan Crowe have their second Dublin office. Until recently, the two buildings housed over 20 people building one of Ireland’s fastest-growing technology businesses, with teams in Britain and the Netherlands too. 

Already, Ekco has made nine acquisitions and won clients like the listed recruitment firm CPL, the Convention Centre Dublin and MJ Flood in Ireland, as well as international companies like Heineken, Schiphol airport and Center Parcs. 

Now Ekco’s second office is being used as a makeshift school where Blacklock’s wife has been teaching their children daily since their schools have been locked down. While we are talking on a Microsoft Teams video call, Blacklock lifts his laptop over to the window. He is hoping to spot her, but she is hard at work and doesn’t see us. 

Blacklock instead calls Crowe over from his computer where he has been tapping away in the background. “Come on, are you going to talk to Tom?” Blacklock says laughing. His relationship with Crowe has the easy familiarity of two friends who go back a long way. 

Believers in remote working

Still only in their late 30s, Blacklock and Crowe know each other from college where they both got firsts in computer science from Trinity College Dublin. They had also founded Keepitsafe, an online data backup and disaster recovery tool, which they built into a business with sales of several million. 

Nasdaq-listed J2 Global acquired this business in 2010, giving Blacklock and Crowe experience both in startups and working in a big business. 

Now the two friends have founded Ekco, a data management company, formerly called Internet Corp. The other thing they have in common is hailing from North Dublin. Blacklock grew up in Malahide, while Crowe’s family is from less than 10 kilometres away in Baldoyle. 

“We would never discriminate against people from the southside!” Blacklock laughs. “But it is important to us no one is wasting too much time commuting.” 

Ekco’s finance team is based in Naas, Co Kildare, he explains – because that is where their chief financial officer Dave O’Reilly wanted to live. O’Reilly, too, worked with Blacklock and Crowe five years earlier at J2, where he was head of finance and accounting. 

Eimear Scully, its general counsel, is based in her home near Camden Street, for similar reasons. Scully is also a J2 alumni, who joined Ekco from Groupon, where she was EMEA legal director. “We’ve always believed in remote working,” Blacklock explains. “There is no reason to be anywhere in particular anymore, even before this (Covid-19 crisis).”

Ekco
From left: Ekco’s Chief Executive Eoin Blacklock, Chief Financial Officer Dave O’Reilly, General Counsel Eimear Scully, and Chief Operations Officer Jonathan Crowe.

Crowe said that Ekco’s business was built to allow its customers work remotely. “It hasn’t been a major transition for our customers as the functionality has always been there,” he says.  

“We don’t have any issues because we have a private cloud. We buy our bandwidth wholesale from multiple different providers so it is our dedicated bandwidth (so we don’t have to worry about congestion).” 

“But I would certainly be worried if I had my data sitting on a public cloud… There are a lot of companies having issues there, but our customers will have no issues at all.”

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Eoin Blacklock and Jonathan Crowe are down-to-earth but also clearly very smart. They try to avoid jargon but it is tough when describing the world of cloud computing. 

They patiently explain to me at one stage what a petabyte is. For those wondering, it is a 1,000 terabytes (or 745 million floppy disks for those who can remember such things). Ekco’s cloud is five petabytes in size and growing. 

Often cloud providers like to keep a lid on just how big their capacity is. “It is like asking a farmer how big his or her land is, asking a cloud provider how big their cloud is!” Blacklock laughs. “But we couldn’t care less.” 

At the start of this year, Ekco started to get concerned about Covid-19. It did not predict that the virus would bring Ireland to a halt – almost nobody did – but it could see disruption spreading from China along global technology supply chains. 

“We put in a large order for additional compute (additional storage) in January as we had started to notice supply chain delays when the virus hit China,” Blacklock says.

Lead times for ordering additional storage capacity were stretching out to two months,  he adds, so Ekco decided to secure its position. “We have enough compute to cover us for organic growth and our current customers’ growth now,” he added. 

Ekco only uses solid-state drives (SSDs) – the fastest, most energy-efficient and durable – for its storage. “We bought over half a petabyte of storage – superfast storage – plus two or three terabytes of RAM (a form of computer memory),” Blacklock says. Ekco now had both the firepower and the expertise that their customers needed when workplaces suddenly shifted en masse to the home.

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The plan with Ekco when it was founded in 2017 was to acquire B2B cloud services in Europe and then upsell new services and improvements in areas like costs, metrics and automation. This is the plan both Blacklock and Crowe are executing, but it requires both M&A expertise and an ability to create a common company culture as well as the financial wherewithal to do so. 

To date, Ekco has raised €16.4 million in equity and €15 million in debt, “That €15 million of debt will go up to €25 million – maybe €30 million of debt and then do another equity round,” Blacklock says. Ulster Bank is backing the business and Ekco is in talks about bringing in a second pillar bank. “We will bring on debt but at a low leverage. We only want a leverage we feel very comfortable with,” Blacklock said.

On the equity side, Lochlann Quinn, the former deputy chairman of Glen Dimplex, Sencheer, the family investment company of the late Superquinn founder Feargal Quinn, and Pageant Holdings, the investment vehicle of the Furlong family are all investors.

“It is not in our head that the dream is to IPO. But it is an option.”

Jonathan Crowe

“Our ambitions would be a lot bigger than to be funded just by cashflow,” Blacklock says. “That would be too slow for us. In order to continue to grow at the pace we are growing and with the pipeline we currently have, we will probably do another equity round towards the end of the summer.”

Would the business ever look at the stock market? “It is one option,” Crowe replies. “It is not in our head that the dream is to IPO. But it is an option.”

Frank Murphy, the former chief financial officer of Superquinn, is chair of the business. Act venture capital managing partner John Flynn is also a director, as is Fergal Scully of Pageant. 

“Frank is a really nice guy. Very organised and on top of things,” Crowe says. “We wanted our board members to come from different areas,” Blacklock explains. “Frank Murphy is all about compliance. John is all about the technology side of the business… He always wants to know that a company we are buying makes sense. Pageant tend to be the numbers’ people, analysing the balance sheets and P&Ls.”

Blacklock and Crowe did not use titles per se when they founded the business. They were directors and that was it. “We are not into titles or hierarchy at all,” Blacklock says. “The way we operate is that everyone is empowered and we hire clever smart people who are self-motivated. That is our management style.” Blacklock is the chief executive now, and Crowe is chief operations officer because they felt they needed a more conventional structure to raise venture funding. 

Blacklock says it helped that many of his core team had already worked with each other for over ten years in various businesses, so they knew each other. Ekco gave equity to key management, he adds, giving them a sense of ownership. 

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Increased cloud spending and the rise of software-as-a-service are two of the fastest-growing and biggest trends in technology. Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are giants in the sector. But it also has tens of thousands of smaller businesses globally. Consolidating these small players into a stronger company offering a full range of services that provides local service and best-in-class expertise is a multi-billion opportunity.  Forrester, a research company, estimated in 2019 that cloud computing will be a $191 billion market by this year.

Ekco employs 98 people with about 40 in the Netherlands, 30 in Britain and 25 in Ireland. Why go to the Netherlands? “We just thought it was a cool place. They all speak perfect English. We have been in that market since 2013 now. It might just be our personalities but they are great people to work with and are really professional. There are no chats beforehand now like here – they jump right in!” Blacklock says. 

Crowe said the size and high population density of the Netherlands also suited Ekco’s model. “It is such a big market compared to Ireland, but it is small geographically. We do a lot of business face to face and offline, so that suits us.”

“Customers want their data stored in the region. They really care about data privacy. They will pay a premium for that.” Blacklock and Crowe, prior to Covid-19, brought their overseas team regularly to Ireland to train and bond. 

“I don’t know how many Jameson whiskey tours I have done at this stage,” Blacklock says. “I never noticed until the last one they have a whole section on Spanish flu.” Whiskey was believed to have medicinal value during the 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic in Ireland.  

“I had always just walked past that part,” Blacklock recalled. “I remember stopping and thinking this is interesting now – but had little idea what Covid-19 would bring to Ireland.”

Covid-19 opportunities

Covid-19 is impacting his business sector. “What you are seeing with Covid-19 is the acceleration of cloud technologies. Companies that never used video are using video now.

“You have got offices where everyone is working from home now. They are connecting into the server in their office and they are realising this isn’t working,” he adds.  

“The majority of servers are still in the office but it needs to be in the cloud. There are opportunities, certainly, coming out of this.” 

The security needs of business have also changed. “Users are moving home so they may be logging in from their own laptops, which previously weren’t authorised. It is definitely opening up more attack areas and vulnerabilities for business that need to be addressed.”

Crowe says Ekco is always looking at expansion. “We have looked at some deals in Belgium. The US is probably on our radar, towards the end of the year maybe.”

 “We are opportunistic about moving into different territories. We would do a larger-style deal if there was a platform that made sense.” Ekco is already in Germany via its Dutch partners. 

Ekco will deal with some companies directly, but it is conscious that most of its customers come through channels. For example, it works with MJ Flood, which offers complete office solutions from furniture to managed print services.

MJ Flood is a trusted business dating back to 1935, with a turnover north of €120 million. “We supply them with the cloud building blocks they need to meet the demands of the end-user customer,” Blacklock says. 

“We always need to be clear to our channel that we are not competing with them.” 

“We can offer a flexible resource which you can scale up and down. That is very difficult to do when you have your own infrastructure on site.”

Jonathan Crowe

“Typically an IT service provider packages up our products and creates a customised solution for a small business,” Crowe adds. “What we are mainly replacing is the traditional company that buys on-site hardware and pays upfront for their (software) licenses.” 

“We can offer a flexible resource which you can scale up and down. That is very difficult to do when you have your own infrastructure on site. The whole situation at the moment (where companies need to suddenly allow large numbers of people to work from home or scale up and down different divisions) is one that is really highlighting the benefits of flexible solutions.” 

Ekco contends that big companies like Amazon and Google bring customers in by offering lower prices, before gradually jacking them up. “You end up being fully locked into their platform,” Blacklock says. “It is like a drug dealer getting you hooked.” 

Ekco says it offers its clients greater flexibility as well as personal service, security and disaster recovery. Its competitors, it contends, don’t offer this full range of services either at all or as well. 

It has three divisions called protect (back-up and disaster recovery); workspace (hosted desk space and file sync) and core (its infrastructure-as-a-service arm). 

Each of these arms is targeting huge markets with considerable synergies. But where does the business ultimately want to go?

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Ekco has become a business with global ambition. Yes, its office has funky furniture and a pong table. But it has smart and determined co-founders, who are far from tech ‘bros’ or extras from the television series Silicon Valley. Blacklock and Crowe have built a business that is on the acquisition trail and competing for business with some of the biggest companies in tech. 

“For us there are going to be the KPMGs and the Deloittes of the cloud,” Blacklock explains when asked what the ultimate plan is. “The cloud is the third highest expense that every business has or will have. It is hard to get your head around how big this market is going to be.” 

“Think about what people pay in accountancy fees. It is not a whole lot but that has created the Deloittes, the KPMGs and the PwCs.”

Eoin Blacklock

“People are almost going to pay the same amount for their IT services in the cloud as they are for office rents. It is astronomically big,” he says. 

“Think about what people pay in accountancy fees. It is not a whole lot but that has created the Deloittes, the KPMGs and the PwCs. There is going to be the big five of the cloud in every market. I think we absolutely will be one of them.” 

Blacklock says the big accountancy firms’ model of having local offices is one Ekco plans to replicate. “Even though we are an online product, people still want to talk to locals. They want the team that answers the phone to know who they are and know their infrastructure inside out.” 

“They want to have that comfort that they can just lift up the phone and talk to a team they’ve been dealing with for years who can immediately provide service and fix their problems.”