Allen provided our class with a case study on IONA Technologies:

IONA Technologies was an Irish software company, founded in 1991. Incubated and born out of the academic centre of Trinity College, Dublin, the company became a fast-growing ICT startup with headquarters in Dublin, Boston and Tokyo. Focusing on technology excellence, they specialised in distributed service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure. Their products connect systems and applications by creating a network of services without the need for a centralised server or an IT stack.

The first case study outlines the growth of a group of Academicians & Engineers doing research and development in Trinity College into a pioneer IT company in Ireland. Starting with client and developer trainings for their products, they soon realised that professional services (consulting) could become an important revenue stream. The soon served various customers in various industries with different products and consulting services. The case study highlights the challenges of rapidly growing ICT company. The professional service team, consisting of "the crème de la crème" of their engineers, together with Marketing and Sales were the only to have customer contact. The IONA engineers were fixing product bugs in the client site, resulting in a lack of knowledge transfer within the organisation. No bug tracking processes within IONA existed, increasing the challenge of delivering the quality products the clients needed and wanted.

The second case study concerns the challenges of managing the increasing workforce and complexity. Management of cost and complexity (resources) within the different team members was one of the main issues at IONA Technologies. An over commitment by the management to the clients, the increasingly difficult and complex processes, fix-quick-mentality made it increasingly difficult to maintain the quality and service standards when increased in size. The management did not execute good leadership by lacking strategic vision and goals and poor decisions on the company's investments into dated technologies when in fact they should have invested in new different solutions. They were stuck in the Innovator's Dilemma, sticking too close to the current customers, managing the existing complexity without anticipation into future products and markets. 

The overall criticism lies on their development processes having been outdated and very much like the waterfall model (Planning, Developing, Testing and QA and Launching). They actually should have embraced new more agile methodologies and frameworks like SCRUM or Extreme Programming. Of course, the application of methodologies always must suit the context and environment but given that their products were open platforms, vulnerable of the constant external  and situational changes, they should have applied a methodology allowing them for greater reactivity and responsiveness.


In the brochure of Trinity, it says that IONA was on of the top 10 companies in ICT with this highest IPO in history. It was acquired in 2008 fo $162 million.