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Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean
Baker and Anrai O’Toole
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The company progressed from a Trinity campus
company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997
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Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG)
was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and
development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially
connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and
communicate with one another
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Their research was initially supported by
Trinity and then the EU
·
They took a brave leap from academic to the
commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking
and telecommunications embracing networks and internets
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Iona found that their customers had many systems
which they had invested heavily in and what they really needed was a solution
to tie these systems into a unified whole
·
It was Ionas mission to supply the technology
toolkits and solutions that allowed them in essence to bring these together.
This led to the company releasing Orbix
·
The amazing thing about Orbix was that it could
link systems together regardless of their operating system, legacy etc.
·
Let’s for example, look at an airline company.
Airlines rely on many systems e.g. catering, luggage offboarding, passport
control which were all presumable built as individual systems with no regard
for intra-operability. With Orbix, if the airline was running late and needed
to be diverted to a new gate, they could communicate this to all systems
despite their legacy and operating systems rather than having to update each
system individually
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The main issues Iona faced in my opinion is the
transition from campus company to a large company with over 1,000 employees in
Dublin, Boston and Perth
·
Through the course of the three case studies, we
see them transition to a company who enjoyed after work drinks in a small bar on
Baggot street to one with a culture identity crisis who had lost its “everyone knows
everyone” culture
·
We can see that they are a customer centric
organisation. The customer feedback loop is paramount to their success
·
We see employees on client site assisting in bug
fixes and patch repairs without formally documenting these to communicate with
the larger Iona organisation
·
We can see from the case study that they are
looking to leverage agile technologies and I strongly believe that deploying an
agile methodology like Scrum would be of great benefit to the company
·
Scrum would enable the company to increase
communication across the business into bugs and upcoming features / products
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