The board of DCC was meeting in its old brown-clad headquarters on Brewery Road near a motorway in the suburbs of south Co Dublin. Kevin Melia, a former CFO of Sun Microsystems, now Oracle, was at the table with its then-chief executive Tommy Breen. It was over a decade ago, and Melia, an experienced technology executive and director, asked a simple question in his half-Irish, half-American accent: “What’s the magic of DCC?” DCC had just come through a tough couple of years. Its legendary founder Jim Flavin had left the company a few years earlier in the wake of an…

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